results. The first person to show the effect of my sudden leap into
notoriety was my wife. She assured me that as a well-known author
I must pay some heed to appearances. I must no longer lodge in a
third-class apartment-house without hall-boys or elevators. When my
fellow celebrities sought me out to offer me congratulations upon my
masterpiece, they must find me in a suitable environment. We must have
an apartment fitting for an author already notable and soon to take a
well-deserved place among the foremost writers of the day; an apartment
which should be expensive without being pretentious, furnished in
such a fashion that any one could discern at a glance the touch of
the man of taste and refinement, the natural aristocrat, the man of
temperament; in a word, the artist. Having settled the question of the
apartment, she next turned her attention to my wardrobe, which was,
I confess, sadly in need of attention. I must no longer go about in
ready-made clothing. I must patronize a fashionable tailor, I must
dress for dinner, I must buy me a soft hat with a bow at the back. I
must cease my writing of lurid short stories and hair-raising serials;
to do pot-boilers for cheap monthlies and weeklies was beneath the
dignity of an author of recognized standing. You may well believe that
this unaccustomed notoriety was not without its effect upon me, but I
was not so carried away by it as was my optimistic mate. I hung back a
little; I protested.
“It is all very well, my dear,” said I, “to talk so glibly of giving up
my short stories and my serials, but we must consider that they have
been, and still are, my chief if not my only source of revenue. They
are nothing to be proud of, I admit. They are cheap, shoddy, stupid and
entirely unworthy of the pen that wrote _The Pin-headed Girl_. But, my
dear, they _pay_.”
“That,” said my wife, “is a consideration which had some weight before
the publication of your novel, but an author so well known as you now
are can certainly have no need to depend upon such puerile compositions
for his income.”
I thereupon called her attention to the fact that my contract with
the publishers called for a semi-annual accounting and settlement,
and that under this agreement, no matter how much money might be due
me, I could not hope to collect any of it until six months after the
date of publication. To which she replied, truthfully enough, that it
would be easy for me to obtain anything we might want on credit. The
upshot of it was, Sir, that I yielded to her persuasion and began to
live in a manner which was little short of princely as compared with
our previous hand-to-mouth existence. I stopped writing pot-boilers and
set to work upon my second novel which I named, very aptly as I then
thought, _Out of the Woods_. Where my first novel had been three years
in the making, my second was finished in five months, for I now had
plenty of time at my disposal, and I sent it off confidently enough to
Buckram and Sons, and with it, a letter in which I made it clear that I
would expect a larger share of the profits upon my second story than I
had been content to accept in the case of _The Pin-headed Girl_. For,
as I pointed out to them, whereas the author of _The Pin-headed Girl_
had been an unknown scribbler, the author of _Out of the Woods_ was a
well-known novelist who possessed the _name_ which had been wanting in
the first instance.
You can, perhaps, fancy my surprise and consternation when I received
a letter from Buckram and Sons enclosing their statement of the sales
of _The Pin-headed Girl_ and a check for seventy-two dollars and fifty
cents in full payment of all royalties to date. _In spite of the money
expended in advertising, the sale of the book had not exceeded five
hundred copies._ The letter further stated that Messrs. Buckram and
Sons regretted to inform me that they were returning the manuscript of
_Out of the Woods_, as they could not consider publishing another of my
books upon the heels of such a failure as _The Pin-headed Girl_.
This sudden collapse of my castles in Spain left me completely
demoralized, but it had no such effect upon my wife. She was astonished
at the failure of the book, but she held firmly to her position that
whatever the fate of the book might be, the fact remained that I was
now a celebrated man. I could not be blamed, she argued, because the
book had proved a failure. It was my part of the business to write the
book, it was the publisher’s part to sell it. I had performed my part,
but Buckram and Sons had most lamentably failed to perform theirs.
If they could not sell a book which had been so well advertised as
_The Pin-headed Girl_, that simply went to show that they had a very
poor selling organization, and the very fact that they had spent so
much money in advertising a book which afterward proved a failure,
was in itself a proof that they were no business men. In short, the
only thing for me to do was to find a new publisher for _Out of the
Woods_; preferably some energetic young man who would not only make a
success of the second book, but who would realize something from the
advertising expended upon the first.
This unanswerable argument encouraged me a little and I submitted the
second book to Franklin Format who, although a young man and a new
man to the business, already had several “best sellers” to his credit.
A few days later he sent for me and when I was seated in his office,
he told me that he had read my manuscript with interest and had found
it most entertaining, but before making me any offer, he would like
to know if the book had been submitted to my regular publishers. His
was a young house, he said, and he could not afford to antagonize so
influential a firm as Buckram and Sons by stealing away one of its
authors. I replied that the book had been offered to them but that they
had refused to publish it. He raised his eyebrows at this and asked
the reason for their refusal. In my innocence I answered truthfully
that Buckram and Sons did not want my second book because they had been
unable to sell my first. On hearing this he remarked sympathetically
that it had been a very bad season for novels and that several on his
own list had fallen quite flat. Indeed, his own losses had been so
great that he had been looking about for some author with a “selling
name” to help him out of his difficulties. Under the circumstances,
however, it would be rank folly, not only upon his part, but upon mine,
to issue another novel bearing my name at a time when the memory of my
first ill-starred book was still fresh in the minds of the booksellers;
for while the public might know nothing of the failure, the booksellers
would most certainly recall it upon seeing my name on a wrapper, and
without orders from the booksellers one might as well burn a book in
manuscript as to let it die more expensively in covers. The best thing
for me to do would be to wait a year or two until the memory of _The
Pin-headed Girl_ had completely faded from their minds. In two years’
time it would certainly be as completely forgotten as if it had never
been written, and I then might venture, with some hope of success, upon
another novel.
And there, Sir, the matter rests. In some mysterious way the word has
been passed around among the publishers that _The Pin-headed Girl_ was
a disastrous investment and not one of them will touch _Out of the
Woods_. My wife threatens to leave me if I abandon novel-writing and
go back to my pot-boilers; she says she could not bear the disgrace of
acknowledged failure and that I must maintain my present position as a
celebrated author at all hazards. I have applied to several editors of
my acquaintance for editorial positions and they have all replied that
they had nothing to offer me which would be worth my consideration or
worthy of my talents. My first novel has left me with a reputation,
a two-years lease of an expensive apartment, a load of debts, an
angry wife, a scrap-book filled with favorable reviews, an unsalable
manuscript and a prospect of bankruptcy.
This, Sir, is the true story of a writer who achieved his ambition of
becoming a well-known novelist. If any reader of your journal, now
engaged in hack-writing and enjoying comfortable obscurity, cherishes
an ambition like mine, let him be warned by my example, lest through
the blighting touch of the publicity agent he be forced, as I am, to
choose between beginning life anew under an assumed name or slowly
starving to death in the midst of luxury.
I am, sir,
HACKETT A. LONG.
* * * * * *
Transcriber’s note:
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unpaired quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unpaired.
Page 1: Transcriber removed redundant book title.
Page 27: The chapter title was printed as “A PURITIAN IN BOHEMIA,”
but was changed here to “A PURITAN IN BOHEMIA,” as that matches the
spelling in the Table of Contents and in other uses of the word
elsewhere in the book.
Page 173: The chapter title was printed as “THE ABUSES OF ADVERSISY,”
but was changed here to “THE ABUSES OF ADVERSITY,” as that matches
the spelling in the Table of Contents and in other uses of the word
elsewhere in the book.