story, _Freckles_, approaches a 100 per cent. sale but with far too
much retardation.
3
How has the 100 per cent. sale for the Harold Bell Wright books been
brought within hailing distance?
Before us lies a circular which must have been mailed to most
booksellers in the United States early in the spring of 1919. It is
headed: “First Publicity Advertisement of Our $100,000 Campaign.”
Below this legend is an advertisement of _The Re-Creation of Brian
Kent_. Below that is a statement that the advertisement will appear,
simultaneously with the book’s publication, in “magazines and national
and religious weeklies having millions upon millions of circulation.
In addition to this our newspaper advertising will cover all of the
larger cities of the United States.” Then follows a list of “magazines,
national and religious weeklies covered by our signed advertising
contracts.”
There are 132 of them. The range is from the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the
_New Republic_ to _Vanity Fair_ and _Town Topics_ in one slant; from
_System_ and _Physical Culture_ to _Zion’s Herald_ and the _Catholic
News_; from _Life_ to _Needlecraft_; from the _Photoplay World_ to the
_Girl’s Companion_; from the _Outlook_ to the _Lookout_--and to and
fro and back and forth in a web covering all America between the two
Portlands.
There are about 140,000,000 persons in the United States and Great
Britain together. Over 100,000,000 of them, we are told, have read a
Harold Bell Wright book or seen a Harold Bell Wright movie.
The secret of the sale of Mr. Wright’s books, so far as the external
factor is concerned, resides in the fact that his stories have been
brought to the attention of thousands upon thousands who, from one
year’s end to the other, never have a new book of fiction thrust upon
their attention by advertising or by sight of the book itself.
4
We speak of the “external factor.” There is an external factor quite
as much as an internal factor in the success of every best seller of
whatever sort. The tendency of everybody who gives any attention to the
subject, but particularly the book publisher, is to study the internal
factor almost to the exclusion of the other. What, you naturally ask
yourself, are the qualities in this book that have made it sell so
remarkably?
The internal factor is important. Its importance, doubtless, cannot be
overrated. But it is not the whole affair. Before we go further let us
lay down some general principles that are not often formulated clearly
enough even in the minds of those to whom they import most.
1. The internal factor--certain qualities of the book
itself--predetermines its possible audience.
2. The external factor--the extent to which it is brought to public
attention, the manner in which it is presented to the public, the
ubiquity of copies for sale--determines its actual audience.
3. The internal factor can make a best seller of a book with almost no
help from the external factor, but cannot give it a 100 per cent. sale.
4. The external factor cannot make a big seller where the internal
factor is not of the right sort; but it can always give a 100 per cent.
sale.
5. The internal factor is only partly in the publisher’s control; the
external factor is entirely controllable by the publisher.
There are two secrets of the best seller. One resides in the book
itself, the other rests in the manner of its exploitation. One is
inherent, the other is circumstantial. One is partly controllable by
the publisher, the other is wholly so. Since a book possessing certain
qualities in a sufficient degree will sell heavily anyway, it is
human nature to hunt ceaselessly for this thing which will triumph
over every sort of handicap and obstacle. But it is a lazy way to do.
It is not good business. It cannot, ultimately, pay. The successful
book publisher of the future is going to be the publisher who works
for a 100 per cent. sale on all his books. When he gets a book with
an internal factor which would make it a best seller anyway, it will
simply mean that he will have to exert himself markedly less to get
a 100 per cent. result. He will have such best sellers and will make
large sums of money with them, but they will be incidents and not
epochal events; for practically all his books will be good sellers.
5
Before we go on to a discussion of the internal factor of the
best seller we want to stress once more, and constructively and
suggestively, the postnatal attention it should receive. The first
year and the second summer are fatal to far too many books as well as
humans. And this is true despite the differences between the two. If
100,000 copies represent the 100 per cent. sale of a given volume you
may declare that it makes no difference whether that sale is attained
in six months or six years. From the business standpoint of a quick
turnover six months is a dozen times better, you may argue; and if
interest on invested money be thought of as compounding, the apparent
difference in favor of the six-months’ sale is still more striking.
This would perhaps be true if the author’s next book could invariably
be ready at the end of the six-months’ period. Other ifs will occur to
those with some knowledge of the publishing business and a moderate
capacity for reflection.
Most books are wrongly advertised and inadequately advertised, and
rather frequently advertised in the wrong places.
Of the current methods of advertising new fiction only one is
unexceptionably good. This is the advertising which arrests the
reader’s attention and baits his interest by a few vivid sentences
outlining the crisis of the story, the dilemma that confronts the
hero or heroine, the problem of whether the hero or heroine acted
rightly; or paints in a few swift strokes some exciting episode of
the action--ending with a question that will stick in the reader’s
mind. Such an advertisement should always have a drawing or other
illustration if possible. It should be displayed in a generous space
and should be placed broadcast but with much discrimination as to where
it is to appear.
A kind of advertisement somewhat allied to this, but not in use at
all despite its assured selling power would consist of the simple
reproduction of a photographed page of the book. The Detroit _News_
has used such reproduced pages so effectively as illustrations that
it seems strange no publisher (so far as we know) has followed suit.
Striking pages, and pages containing not merely objective thrill but
the flavor which makes the fascination of a particular book, can be
found in most novels. The Detroit _News_ selected a page of the highest
effectiveness from so subtle a romance as Joseph Conrad’s _The Arrow of
Gold_. This manner of advertising, telling from its complete restraint,
is applicable to non-fiction. A page of a book of essays by Samuel
Crothers would have to be poorly taken not to disclose, in its several
hundred words, the charm and fun of his observations. Publishers of
encyclopædias have long employed this “page-from-the-book” method of
advertisement with the best results.
The ordinary advertisement of a book, making a few flat assertions
of the book’s extraordinary merit, has become pretty hopelessly
conventionalized. The punch is gone from it, we rather fear forever.
In all conscience, it is psychologically defective in that it tries
to coerce attention and credence instead of trying to attract,
fascinate or arouse the beholder. The advertiser is not different,
essentially, from the public speaker. The public speaker who aims to
compel attention by mere thundering or by extraordinary assertions has
no chance against the speaker who amuses, interests, or agreeably
piques his audience, who stirs his auditors’ curiosity or kindles their
collective imagination.
There is too little personality in the advertising of books, and when
we say personality we mean, in most cases, the author’s personality.
The bald and unconvincing recital of the opinion of the _Westminster
Gazette_, that this is a book every Anglo-American should read, is as
nothing compared with a few dozen words that could have been written
of, or by, no man on earth except H. G. Wells.
The internal factor of H. G. Wells’s novel _The Undying Fire_ is so big
that it constitutes a sort of a least common multiple of the hopes,
doubts and fears of hundreds of thousands of humans. A 100 per cent.
sale of the book, under existing merchandising conditions, would be
400,000 copies, at the very least. It ought to be advertised in every
national and religious weekly of 10,000 circulation or over in the
United States, and in every periodical of that circulation reaching a
rural audience. And it ought to be advertised, essentially, in this
manner:
SHALL MAN CURSE GOD AND DIE?
_No! Job Answered_
NO! H. G. WELLS TELLS STRICKEN EUROPE
_Read His New Short Novel, “The Undying Fire,”
in Which He Holds Out the Hope that Men
May Yet Unite to Organize the World and
Save Mankind from Extinction_
Such an appeal to the hope, the aspiration, the unconquerable idealism
of men everywhere, to the social instinct which has its roots in
thousands of years of human history, cannot fail.
6
Books are wrongly advertised, as we have said, and they are
inadequately advertised, by which we mean in too few places; and
perhaps “insufficiently advertised” had been a more accurate phrase.
It is correct and essential to advertise books in periodicals appealing
wholly or partly to book readers. It is just as essential to recruit
readers.
Book readers can be recruited just as magazine readers are recruited.
The most important way of getting magazine readers is still the
subscription agent. Every community of any size in these United States
should have in it a man or woman of at least high school education and
alert enthusiasm selling books of all the publishers. Where there is
a good bookstore such an agent is unnecessary or may be found in the
owner of the store or an employee thereof. Most communities cannot
support a store given over entirely to bookselling. In them let there
be agents giving their whole time or their spare time and operating
with practically no overhead expense. Where the agents receive salaries
these must be paid jointly by all the publishers whose books they
handle. This should naturally be done through a central bureau or
selling agency. Efficient agencies already exist.
The “book agent” is a classical joke. He is a classical joke because he
peddled one book, and the wrong sort of a book, from door to door. You
must equip him with fifty books, new and alluring, of all publishers;
and arm him with sheets and circulars describing enticingly a hundred
others. He must know individuals and their tastes and must have one or
more of the best book reviewing periodicals in the country. He must
have catalogues and news notes and special offers to put over. If he
gives you all his time he must have assurance of a living, especially
until he has a good start or exhibits his incapacity for pioneering. He
must have an incentive above and beyond any salary that may be paid him.
But the consideration of details in this place is impossible. The
structural outline and much adaptable detail is already in highly
successful use by periodicals of many sorts. In fundamentals it
requires no profounder skill than that of the clever copyist.
7
We charged in the third count of our indictment that books are rather
frequently advertised in the wrong places. We had in mind the principle
that for every book considerable enough to get itself published by a
publisher of standing there is, somewhere, a particular audience; just
as there is a certain body of readers for every news item of enough
moment to get printed in a daily newspaper. A juster way of expressing
the trouble would be this: Books are rather frequently not advertised
in the right places.
The clues to the right places must be sought in the book itself and its
authorship, always; and they are innumerable. As no two books are alike
the best thing to do will be to take a specific example. Harry Lauder’s
_A Minstrel in France_ will serve.
The first and most obvious thing to do is to advertise it in every
vaudeville theatre in America. Wherever the programme includes motion
pictures flash the advertisement on the screen with a fifteen second
movie of Lauder himself. Posters and circulars in the lobby must serve
if there are no screen pictures.
The next and almost equally obvious thing is to have Lauder make a
phonograph record of some particularly effective passage in the book,
marketing the record in the usual way, at a popular price. Newspaper
and magazine advertising must be used heavily and must be distributed
on the basis of circulation almost entirely.
8
The external factor in the success of the best seller is so undeveloped
and so rich in possibilities that one takes leave of it with regret;
but we must go on to some consideration of the internal factor that
makes for big sales--the quality or qualities in the book itself.
Without going into a long and elaborate investigation of best-seller
books, sifting and reasoning until we reach rock bottom, we had better
put down a few dogmas. These, then, are the essentials of best-selling
fiction so far as our observation and intellect has carried us:
1. A good story; which means, as a rule, plenty of surface action
but always means a crisis in the affairs of one or two most-likable
characters, a crisis that is _satisfactorily_ solved.
Mark the italicized word. Not a “happy ending” in the twisted sense in
which that phrase is used. Always a happy ending in the sense in which
we say, “That was a happy word”--meaning a fit word, the “mot juste”
of the French. Always a fitting ending, not always a “happy ending” in
the sense of a pleasant ending. The ending of _Mr. Britling Sees It
Through_ is not pleasant, but fitting and, to the majority of readers,
uplifting, ennobling, fine.
2. Depths below the surface action for those who care to plumb them.
No piece of fiction can sell largely unless it has a region of
philosophy, moral ideas--whatever you will to call it--for those who
crave and must have that mental immersion. The reader must not be led
beyond his depth but he must be able to go into deep water and swim as
far as his strength will carry him if he so desires.
3. The ethical, social and moral implications of the surface action
must, in the end, accord with the instinctive desires of mankind. This
is nothing like as fearful as it sounds, thus abstractly stated. The
instinctive desires of men are pretty well known. Any psychologist can
tell you what they are. They are few, primitive and simple. They have
nothing to do with man’s reason except that man, from birth to death,
employs his reason in achieving the satisfaction of these instincts.
The two oldest and most firmly implanted are the instinct for
self-preservation and the instinct to perpetuate the race. The social
instinct, much younger than either, is yet thousands upon thousands of
years old and quite as ineradicable.
Because it violates the self-preservative instinct no story of suicide
can have a wide human audience unless, in the words of Dick at the
close of Masefield’s _Lost Endeavour_, we are filled with the feeling
that “life goes on.” The act of destruction must be, however blindly,
an act of immolation on the altar of the race. Such is the feeling we
get in reading Jack London’s largely autobiographical _Martin Eden_;
and, in a much more striking instance, the terrible act that closed
the life of the heroine in Tolstoy’s _Anna Karenina_ falls well before
the end of the book. In _Anna Karenina_, as in _War and Peace_, the
Russian novelist conveys to every reader an invincible conviction of
the unbreakable continuity of the life of the race. The last words of
_Anna Karenina_ are not those which describe Anna’s death under the car
wheels but the infinitely hopeful words of Levin:
“I shall continue to be vexed with Ivan the coach-man, and get into
useless discussions, and express my thoughts blunderingly. I shall
always be blaming my wife for what annoys me, and repenting at once. I
shall always feel a certain barrier between the Holy of Holies of my
inmost soul, and the souls of others, even my wife’s. I shall continue
to pray without being able to explain to myself why. But my whole life,
every moment of my life, independently of whatever may happen to me,
will be, not meaningless as before, but full of the deep meaning which
I shall have the power to impress upon it.”
9
It is because they appeal so strongly and simply and directly to our
instinctive desires that the stories of Jack London are so popular; it
is their perfect appeal to our social instinct that makes the tales of
O. Henry sell thousands of copies month after month. Not even Dickens
transcended O. Henry in the perfection of this appeal; and O. Henry set
the right value on Dickens as at least one of his stories shows.
Civilization and education refine man’s instinctive desires, modify the
paths they take, but do not weaken them perceptibly from generation to
generation except in a few individual cases. Read the second chapter
of Harold Bell Wright’s _The Shepherd of the Hills_ and observe the
tremendous call to the instinct of race perpetuation, prefaced by a
character’s comment on the careless breeding of man as contrasted
with man’s careful breeding of animals. And if you think the appeal
is crude, be very sure of this: The crudity is in yourself, in the
instinct that you are not accustomed to have set vibrating with such
healthy vigor.
10
All this deals with broadest fundamentals. But they are what the
publisher, judging his manuscript, must fathom. They are deeper down
than the sales manager need go, or the bookseller; deeper than the
critic need ordinarily descend in his examination into the book’s
qualities.
Ordinarily it will be enough for the purpose to analyze a story along
the lines of human instinct as it has been modified by our society
and our surroundings and conventionalized by habit. The publishers
of Eleanor H. Porter’s novel _Oh, Money! Money!_ were not only
wholly correct but quite sufficiently acute in their six reasons for
predicting--on the character of the story alone--a big sale.
The first of these was that the yarn dealt with the getting and
spending of money, “the most interesting subject in the world,”
asserted the publishers--and while society continues to be organized
on its present basis their assertion is, as regards great masses of
mankind, a demonstrable fact.
The second reason was allied to the first; the story would “set every
reader thinking how _he_ would spend the money.” And the third: it
was a Cinderella story, giving the reader “the joy of watching a
girl who has never been fairly treated come out on top in spite of
all odds.” This is a powerful appeal to the modified instinct of
self-preservation. The fourth reason--“the scene is laid in a little
village and the whole book is a gem of country life and shrewd Yankee
philosophy”--answers to the social hunger in the human heart. Fifth:
“A charming love theme with a happy ending.” Sixth: “The story teaches
an unobtrusive lesson ... that happiness must come from within, and
that money cannot buy it.” To go behind such reasons is, for most
minds, not to clarify but to confuse. Folks feel these things and care
nothing about the source of the river of feeling.
11
With the non-fictional book the internal factor making for large sales
is as diverse as the kinds of non-fictional volumes. A textbook on a
hitherto untreated subject of sudden interest to many thousands of
readers has every prospect of a large sale; but this is not the kind
of internal factor that a publisher is likely to err in judging! Any
alert business man acquiring correct information will profit by such an
opportunity.
But there is a book called _In Tune with the Infinite_, the work of
a man named Ralph Waldo Trine, which has sold, at this writing, some
530,000 copies, having been translated into eighteen languages. A man
has been discovered sitting on the banks of the Yukon reading it; it
has been observed in shops and little railway stations in Burmah and
Ceylon. This is what is called, not at all badly, an “inspirational
book.” Don’t you think a publisher might well have erred in judging
that manuscript?
Mr. Trine’s booklet, _The Greatest Thing Ever Known_, has sold 160,000
copies; his book _What All the World’s A-Seeking_, is in its 138,000th.
It will not do to overlook the attractiveness of these titles. What,
most people will want to know, is “the greatest thing ever known”? And
it is human to suppose that what you are seeking is what all the world
is after, and to want to read a book that holds out an implied promise
to help you get it.
The tremendous internal factor of these books of Mr. Trine’s is that
they articulate simple (but often beautiful) ideas that lie in the
minds of hundreds of thousands of men and women, ideas unformulated and
by the hundred thousand unutterable. For any man who can say the thing
that is everywhere felt, the audience is limitless.
In autobiography a truly big sale is not possible unless the narrative
has the fundamental qualities we have designated as necessary in the
fictional best seller. All the popular autobiographies are stories
that appeal powerfully to our instinctive desires and this is the
fact with such diverse revelations as those of Benjamin Franklin and
Benvenuto Cellini, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Henry Adams. The sum of
the instinctive desires is always overwhelmingly in favor of normal
human existences. For this reason the predetermined audience of Mr.
Tarkington’s _Conquest of Canaan_ is many times greater than that of
Mr. Dreiser’s _Sister Carrie_. A moment’s reflection will show that
this is inevitable, since these instinctive desires of ours are so many
resistless forces exerted simultaneously on us and combining, in a
period of years, to make a single resultant force impelling us to lead
normal, sane, “healthy” and wholesome lives. On such lives, lived by
the vast majority of men and women everywhere, the security of every
form of human society depends; indeed, the continued existence of man
on the face of the earth is dependent upon them.
You may say that Rousseau, Cellini, Marie Bashkirtseff, even Franklin
and Henry Adams, led existences far from normal. The answer is that
we accept the stories of their lives in fact where we (or most of us)
would never accept them in fiction. We know that these lives were
lived; and the very circumstance that they were abnormal lives makes
us more eager to know about and understand them. What most of us care
for most is such a recital as Hamlin Garland’s _A Son of the Middle
Border_. The secret of the influence of the life of Abraham Lincoln
upon the American mind and the secret of the appeal made by Theodore
Roosevelt, the man, to his countrymen in general during his lifetime
is actually one and the same--the triumph of normal lives, lived
normally, lived up to the hilt, and overshadowing almost everything
else contemporary with them. Such men vindicate common lives, however
humbly lived. We see, as in an apocalyptic vision, what any one of us
may become; and in so far as any one of us has become so great we all
of us share in his greatness.
12