A Charge Fairly Met and Its Truths Admitted—Many Features of the Business in Which a Low Tone Prevails—The Literary Solicitor an Abhorrent Creature—On the Whole, However, Commercial Degradation Prevails Less with Publishers Than in Many Other Callings—The Confidence Authors Have in Them Is Their Best Asset.

Authorship and publishing—the whole business of producing contemporaneous literature—has for the moment a decided commercial squint. It would be wrong to say, as one sometimes hears it said, that it has been degraded; for it has probably not suffered as nearly a complete commercialization as the law has suffered, for instance. But that fine indifference to commercial results which was once supposed to be characteristic of the great publishers does not exist today. Perhaps it never existed except in memoirs and literary journals! But there was a less obvious effort to make money in the days of the first successful American publishing houses than there is now.

The old publishing houses put forth schoolbooks; and many a dignified literary venture was “financed” by money made from the sale of textbooks and subscription books. But now the greater part of the money made from these two special departments is made by houses that publish nothing else. The making of schoolbooks and the making of subscription books have been specialized, and almost separated from general publishing. Two great textbook houses have made large incomes; and they publish nothing but schoolbooks. These profits, which were once at the service of literature, are now withdrawn from it. The “general” publisher has to make all his profits on his “general” books. The necessity is the heavier on him, therefore, to make every book pay. This is one reason why the general publisher has to watch his ledger closely.

Another reason for greater emphasis on the financial side of literary production is the enormously increased expense of conducting a general publishing house. The mere manufacture of books is perhaps a trifle cheaper than it used to be, but every other item of expense has been increased enormously within a generation. It costs more to sell books than it ever cost before. Advertising rates have been doubled or trebled, and more advertising must be done. Even a small general publishing house must spend as much as $30,000 or $50,000 a year in general advertising. There are many houses that each spend a great deal more than this every year.

The author, too, it must be remembered, has become commercial. He demands and he receives a larger share of the gross receipts from his book than authors ever dreamed of receiving in the days of the old-time publisher. All the other expenses of selling books have increased. There was a time when publishing houses needed no travelling salesmen. Now every house of any importance has at least two. They go everywhere, with “dummies” and prospectuses of books long before they are ready for the market. Other items of “general expense” besides advertising and salesmen and ever-increasing rent, are the ever-growing demands of the trade for posters and circulars; correspondence grows more and more; more and more are special “window displays” required, for which the publisher pays. All the while, too, books are sold on long time. As a rule they are not paid for by many dealers till six months after they are manufactured. All these modern commercial methods have added to the publisher’s expense or risk; and for these reasons his business has become more like any other manufacturing business than it once seemed to be—perhaps more than it once was. Of course there are publishers—there always were such—who look only to their ledgers as a measure of their success. These are they who have really demoralized the profession, and the whole publishing craft has suffered by their methods.

It was once a matter of honor that one publisher should respect the relation established between another publisher and a writer, as a physician respects the relation established between another physician and a patient. Three or four of the best publishing houses still live and work by this code. And they have the respect of all the book world. Authors and readers, who do not know definitely why they hold them in esteem, discern a high sense of honor and conduct in them. Character makes its way from any man who has it down a long line—everybody who touches a sterling character comes at last to feel it both in conduct and in product. The very best traditions of publishing are yet a part of the practice of the best American publishing houses, which are conducted by men of real character.

But there are others—others who keep “literary drummers,” men who go to see popular writers and solicit books. The authors of very popular books themselves also—some of them at least—put themselves up at auction, going from publisher to publisher or threatening to go. This is demoralization and commercialization with a vengeance. But it is the sin of the authors.

As a rule, this method has not succeeded; or it has not succeeded long. There are two men in the United States who have gone about making commercial calls on practically every man and woman who has ever written a successful book; and they are not well thought of by most of the writers whom they see. Every other publisher hears of their journeyings and of their “drumming.” Sometimes they have secured immediate commercial results, but as a rule they have lost more than they have gained. The permanent success of every publishing house is built on the confidence and the esteem of those who write books. When a house forfeits that, it begins to lose. Its very foundations begin to become insecure.

Commercial as this generation of writers may be, almost every writer of books has an ambition to win literary esteem. They want dignity. They seek reputation on as high a level as possible. “The trouble with the whole business” (I quote from a letter from a successful novelist) “is that novel-writing has become so very common. ‘Common’ is the word. It is no longer distinguished. What I want is distinction. Money I must have—some money at least; but I want also to be distinguished.” That is a frank confession that almost every writer makes sooner or later.

Now, when a publishing house forfeits distinction it, too, becomes common, and loses its chance to confer a certain degree of distinction. And literary “drummers” have this effect—authors who can confer distinction shun their houses. The literary solicitor, therefore, can work only on a low level; and the houses that use him are in danger of sinking to a low level.

The truth is, it is a personal service that the publisher does for the author, almost as personal a service as the physician does for his patient or the lawyer for his client. It is not merely a commercial service. Every great publisher knows this and almost all successful authors find it out, if they do not know it at first. The ideal relation between publisher and author requires this personal service. It even requires enthusiastic service. “Do you thoroughly believe in this book? and do you believe in me?” these are the very proper questions that every earnest writer consciously or unconsciously puts to his publisher. Even the man who writes the advertisements of books must believe in them. Else his advertisements will not ring true. The salesmen must believe what they say. The booksellers and the public will soon discover whether they believe it. They catch the note of sincerity—the public is won; the author succeeds. Or they catch the note of insincerity and the book lags.

This is the whole story of good publishing. Good books to begin with, then a personal sincerity on the part of the publisher. And there is no lasting substitute for these things.

The essential weakness in most of even the best publishing houses of our day is the lack of personal literary help to authors by the owners of the publishing houses themselves. Almost every writer wishes to consult somebody. If they do not wish advice, they at least wish sympathy. Every book is talked over with somebody. Now, when a publishing house has a head—an owner—who will read every important manuscript, and freely and frankly talk or write about it, and can give sympathetic suggestions, that is the sort of publishing house that will win and hold the confidence of the best writers. From one point of view the publisher is a manufacturer and salesman. From another point of view he is the personal friend and sympathetic adviser of authors—a man who has a knowledge of literature and whose judgment is worth having. A publisher who lacks the ability to do this high and intimate service may indeed succeed for a time as a mere manufacturer and seller of books; but he can add little to the best literary impulses or tendencies of his time; nor is he likely to attract the best writers.

And—in all the noisy rattle 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 in the profession, therefore, 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.

There is much less reason to fear the commercial degradation of many other callings than the publishers’.

A louder complaint of commercialism has been provoked by the unseemly advertising of novels than by any other modern method of publishers. Now this is a curious and interesting thing. A man or woman writes a story (let us call it a story, though it be a mild mush of mustard, warranted to redden the faded cheeks of sickly sentimentality) which, for some reason that nobody can explain, has the same possibilities of popularity as Salvation Soap. A saponaceous publisher puts it out; he advertises it in his soapy way; people buy it—sometimes two hundred or three hundred thousand of them.

Behold! a new way has been found to write books that sell, and a new way to sell them. Hundreds of writers try the easy trick. Dozens of minor publishers see their way to fortune. But the trick cannot be imitated, and the way to fortune remains closed. It is only now and then that a novel has a big “run” by this method. The public does not see the hundreds of failures. It sees only the occasional accidental success.

There is no science, no art, no literature in the business. It is like writing popular songs: One “rag-time” tune will make its way in a month from one end of the country to the other. A hundred tune-makers try their hands at the trick—not one of their tunes goes. The same tune-maker who “scored a success” often fails the next time. There is, I think, not a single soap-novelist who has put forth a subsequent novel of as great popularity as his “record-breaker,” and several publishing houses have failed through unsuccessful efforts at the brass-band method.

This is not publishing. It is not even commercialism. It is a form of gambling. A successful advertising “dodge” makes a biscuit popular, or a whiskey, or a shoe, or a cigarette, or anything. Why not a book, then? This would be all that need be said about it but for the “literary” journals. They forthwith fall to gossiping, and keep up a chatter about “great sellers,” and bewail commercialism in literature, until we all begin to believe that the whole business of book-writing and book-publishing has been degraded. Did it ever occur to you that in the “good old days” of publishing there were no magazines that retailed the commercial and personal gossip of the craft?

As nearly as I can make out the publishing houses in the United States that are conducted as dignified institutions are conducted with as little degrading commercialism as the old houses whose history has become a part of English literature, and I believe that they are conducted with more ability. Certainly not one of them has made a colossal fortune. Certainly not one of them ever failed to recognize or to encourage a high literary purpose if it were sanely directed. Every one of them every year invests in books and authors that they know cannot yield a direct or immediate profit, and they make these investments because they feel ennobled by trying to do a service to literature.

The great difficulty is to recognize literature when it first comes in at the door, for one quality of literature is that it is not likely even to know itself. The one thing that is certain is that the critical crew and the academic faculty are sure not to recognize it at first sight. To know its royal qualities at once under strange and new garments—that is to be a great publisher, and the glory of that achievement is as great as it ever was.