By Francis W. Halsey.
The position of literary adviser to a publishing house differs in its
duties, according as the adviser may be employed in a house highly
organized, or in one that is not. When the organization is such that
the duties in the various departments are not well differentiated, the
adviser's work will be likely to involve many things that properly
belong to the manufacturing and advertising departments. These
conditions, however, if they exist at all, will be found in the
smaller houses, or in houses which, as to personnel, are undergoing
reorganization; they are, and ought to be, exceptional.
The adviser's actual duties should pertain almost exclusively to the
manuscripts, and to the relations of the house with those who produce
them. In this way, the adviser acts as an intermediary between the
publisher and the author. This relation seems, on the surface, to be
somewhat delicate, and it usually is confidential, but most men find
the occupation an agreeable one. Authors as a class, so far from being
an irritable race, will usually be found, at least in their relations
to publishers, not only interesting men and women, but candid and
reasonable human beings. Probably the most delightful rewards of the
literary adviser's calling come from the opportunities it gives him to
extend his friendships among charming people.
Any house which is large enough to employ a literary adviser will
probably receive, in the course of a year, at least one thousand
unsolicited manuscripts, which will come from every part of the
country. They will naturally be of widely varying degrees of
excellence; quite two-thirds of them will be fiction, and a
considerable number will bear convincing evidence of having already
been for some time in search of a publisher. Testimony from various
houses has at different times been given as to the percentage of
volunteered manuscripts which eventually find acceptance. It does not
materially vary, being from one to two per cent. Some years ago, in
order to test this estimate, I went carefully over the unsolicited
manuscripts which had reached a large publishing house during a period
of several months, and found that exactly one and one-half per cent of
them had been published.
This small showing should not imply that the remaining ninety-eight or
ninety-nine per cent could in fairness be called worthless. With
occasional exceptions, rejected manuscripts have been prepared with
considerable intelligence; knowledge of themes is shown in them;
there is some real literary skill in evidence, and particular care has
been taken to secure legibility, about nine-tenths of them being in
typewritten form. What they lack is certain other qualities more vital
in the formation of a judgment as to their availability. In the case
of fiction, they lack novelty of treatment, or for some other reason
fail to be interesting, and in general there has not been infused into
them the real breath of life. When they deal with serious subjects,
they often cover ground which has been better covered before, or they
attempt to achieve the not-worth-while, or the impossible.
There is always a small number of manuscripts against which no other
objection can be raised than that it would be impossible to secure
from the public an adequate return in sales for the expenditure
necessary in the manufacture and distribution of the books. One of the
pathetic sides of the publishing business is the fact that manuscripts
of this kind cannot oftener, in this day and generation, secure the
amount of attention they deserve from the reading public. When a sale
of one or two thousand copies would be necessary to make good the cost
of publication, the publisher is confronted with the fact that he
could not secure a sale exceeding five hundred. Indeed, when one
considers the almost certain fate that awaits them, pathos of the most
genuine kind is closely associated with volunteered manuscripts--those,
I mean, which come from new writers. Hardly any form of endeavor to
which educated minds devote themselves should more often awaken
sympathetic feeling. Those who produce them almost always have their
rewards far to seek, and seeking will not find them, and yet they
"wrought in sad sincerity."
The public is familiar with stories of successful books which, in the
course of their peregrinations, were several times rejected by
publishers. This, doubtless, has been the experience of all authors
who have made notable successes with first books, and it doubtless
always will be the experience of new authors. But along with this we
must set down the further, but consoling fact, that probably no
meritorious manuscript, possessing the possibilities of a great sale,
ever yet failed ultimately to find a publisher. The best proof of this
seems to be the absence of any notable instance of a book which, after
being rejected by all the regular houses, finally was brought out
privately, or at the author's expense, and then made a hit.
It is a common impression that manuscripts are not carefully read in
publishing houses. Again and again has this fiction been exploded by
houses whose word should be accepted as final, but it now and then
lifts up its head as if untouched before. Of course there are
manuscripts which no one ever reads completely through from beginning
to end, chapter by chapter, and page by page, simply because it has
been found not to be necessary to do so. Every conscientious reader,
however,--and most readers known to me have been nothing if not
conscientious,--reads at least far enough into a manuscript to learn
if there be anything in it that in the least degree is promising. He
understands full well the danger of overlooking a meritorious work,
and experience has taught him to be careful. Moreover, he is usually
fired with the worthy ambition to make a discovery; but he acts
according to his light only, and hence makes mistakes. The conditions
in which his work is done, however, preclude the possibility of
careless reading.
It is doubtless true--indeed, I believe the records of every
publishing house in the country will sustain this statement--that
while no house has failed at some time in its career to reject at
least one manuscript that was afterwards a highly successful book,
mistakes of this kind have been extremely few; whereas the mistakes
made by the same houses in accepting manuscripts that were afterward
found to be unprofitable have been numerous. A further fact, which is
seldom borne in mind, although it ought always to be remembered in any
discussion of literary success, is that highly successful books
usually bring to their publishers as much surprise as they do to any
one else. This is distinctly true of novels by new writers, whose
"big-sellers" have seldom or never been anticipated. It is well known
in the trade that at least two, and probably a half-dozen, books
highly successful during the past ten years, and all the works of new
writers, were sent to press for the first edition, with a printing
order for only two thousand copies.
The public has gotten very much into the habit of judging the fortunes
of a publishing house by the successful fiction which it puts forth,
and this is also true of many men in the trade, whose means of knowing
better ought to be ample. Probably the literary gossip prevalent in
newspapers and periodicals is largely responsible for this habit. The
facts are, however, that, from these books alone, no publishing house
in this country is, or could be, well sustained. Unless there be in
the background some other publishing enterprise that is producing
constant revenue from year to year, mere fiction will accomplish
little to make or save the publisher. The real sources of stability
lie elsewhere, far beyond the ken of the superficial observer, and
they are very commonly overlooked. In one instance, this mainstay is
religious books; in another a cyclopaedia; in another medical books, or
educational; in another a dictionary; in another a periodical; and
fortunate the house that has not one, but two or three, such sources
of prosperity.
It might be set down as an axiomatic statement that no large
publishing house in this country could possibly live exclusively from
what are known as miscellaneous books, by which is meant current
fiction and other ephemeral publications. The worst thing about such
books is that they create no assets; their life is short, and once it
is ended, the plates have value only as old metal. A house, therefore,
in publishing this class of books finds that each season it must begin
all over again the work of creating business for itself. Books of the
more substantial kind, however, whether they be religious,
educational, scientific, medical, or in other senses books of
reference, do not perish with the passing of a season. Once the right
kinds have been found, they are good for at least ten years, and not
infrequently for a generation.
But this is wandering somewhat away from the subject of the literary
adviser. His duties primarily are to preserve and to create good-will
from authors toward the house which employs him, for that good-will is
an asset of the first importance to a publishing house. Other kinds of
good-will at the same time are essential to its fortunes,--notably the
good-will of the bookseller and that of the book buyer,--but behind
these, and primarily as the source of these, lies the good-will of the
author. Houses now known to be the most prosperous in this country
possess this good-will in abundance. So, too, the houses which are
destined to much longer life are those which, by all legitimate
means, shall seek to preserve and increase that good-will. Equally
true is it, that the houses which in future shall fail will be those
which do not cultivate and cherish the good-will of authors as the
most valuable asset they can ever hope to possess.
It is because of this possession that a publisher gets an author's
book. It was by this means that he got the books he already has, and
by this will he get those which will make him successful in the
future. His books being good, it is through them that the bookseller's
good-will is acquired, and through them also that the publisher will
secure the good-will of the book buyer. No wiser words on this subject
have been uttered in our generation than those which may be found,
here and there, in "A Publisher's Confession," which I hope was
written, as reputed, by Walter H. Page, for it is certainly sound
enough and sane enough to be his:--
"The successful publisher sustains a relation to the
successful author that is not easily transferable. It is a
personal relation. A great corporation cannot take a real
publisher's place in his attitude to the author he serves."
"Every great publishing house has been built on the strong
friendships between writers and publishers. There is in
fact, no other sound basis to build on; for the publisher
cannot do his highest duty to any author whose work he does
not appreciate and with whom he is not in sympathy. Now,
when a man has an appreciation of your work, and sympathy
for it, he wins you. This is the simplest of all
psychological laws,--the simplest of all laws of friendship,
and one of the soundest."
"Mere printers and salesmen have not often built publishing
houses. For publishing houses have this distinction over
most other commercial institutions--they rest on the
friendship of the most interesting persons in the world, the
writers of good books."
"And--in all the noisy babble of commercialism--the writers
of our own generation who are worth most on a publisher's
list respond to the true publishing personality as readily
as writers did before the day of commercial methods. All the
changes that have come into the profession have not, after
all, changed its real character, as it is practised on its
higher levels. And this rule will hold true--that no
publishing house can win and keep a place on the highest
level that does not have at least one man who possesses this
true publishing personality."
These are golden words. Men who knew them as self-evident truths laid
the foundations, and in a few instances reared the superstructures, of
the most famous publishing houses known to modern literature. Let us
in part call the roll, restricting it to the dead: James T. Fields,
the first Charles Scribner, George P. Putnam, Fletcher Harper, William
H. Appleton, Daniel Macmillan, and the second John Murray. These men
were more than publishers, adding as they did to that vocation the
duties of the literary adviser, and becoming the ablest of their kind.
Well may the literary adviser of our day, who is seldom himself a
publisher, read the story of their lives and take heart from it in the
discharge of his own duties.