Literature and Life | Page 7

in England so much exceeding
that of any English periodical that the simultaneous publication can no
longer be arranged for from this side, though I believe it is still done
here from the other side.
VI.
I think this is the case of authorship as it now stands with regard to the

magazines. I am not sure that the case is in every way improved for
young authors. The magazines all maintain a staff for the careful
examination of manuscripts, but as most of the material they print has
been engaged, the number of volunteer contributions that they can use
is very small; one of the greatest of them, I know, does not use fifty in
the course of a year. The new writer, then, must be very good to be
accepted, and when accepted he may wait long before he is printed.
The pressure is so great in these avenues to the public favor that one,
two, three years, are no uncommon periods of delay. If the young writer
has not the patience for this, or has a soul above cooling his heels in the
courts of fame, or must do his best to earn something at once, the book
is his immediate hope. How slight a hope the book is I have tried to
hint already, but if a book is vulgar enough in sentiment, and crude
enough in taste, and flashy enough in incident, or, better or worse still,
if it is a bit hot in the mouth, and promises impropriety if not indecency,
there is a very fair chance of its success; I do not mean success with a
self-respecting publisher, but with the public, which does not
personally put its name to it, and is not openly smirched by it. I will not
talk of that kind of book, however, but of the book which the young
author has written out of an unspoiled heart and an untainted mind,
such as most young men and women write; and I will suppose that it
has found a publisher. It is human nature, as competition has deformed
human nature, for the publisher to wish the author to take all the risks,
and he possibly proposes that the author shall publish it at his own
expense, and let him have a percentage of the retail price for managing
it. If not that, he proposes that the author shall pay for the stereotype
plates, and take fifteen per cent. of the price of the book; or if this will
not go, if the author cannot, rather than will not, do it (he is commonly
only too glad to do any thing he can), then the publisher offers him ten
per cent. of the retail price after the first thousand copies have been
sold. But if he fully believes in the book, he will give ten per cent. from
the first copy sold, and pay all the costs of publication himself. The
book is to be retailed for a dollar and a half, and the publisher is not
displeased with a new book that sells fifteen hundred copies. Whether
the author has as much reason to be pleased is a question, but if the
book does not sell more he has only himself to blame, and had better
pocket in silence the two hundred and twenty-five dollars he gets for it,

and bless his publisher, and try to find work somewhere at five dollars
a week. The publisher has not made any more, if quite as much as the
author, and until a book has sold two thousand copies the division is
fair enough. After that, the heavier expenses of manufacturing have
been defrayed and the book goes on advertising itself; there is merely
the cost of paper, printing, binding, and marketing to be met, and the
arrangement becomes fairer and fairer for the publisher. The author has
no right to complain of this, in the case of his first book, which he is
only too grateful to get accepted at all. If it succeeds, he has himself to
blame for making the same arrangement for his second or third; it is his
fault, or else it is his necessity, which is practically the same thing. It
will be business for the publisher to take advantage of his necessity
quite the same as if it were his fault; but I do not say that he will always
do so; I believe he will very often not do so.
At one time there seemed a probability of the enlargement of the
author's gains by subscription publication, and one very well-known
American author prospered fabulously in that way. The percentage
offered by the subscription houses was only about half as much as that
paid by the trade, but the sales were so much greater