Publishers Are Uncertain as to the Amount of Sales Made in That Way—How the Book Business Differs from the Shoe Trade, for Example—The Problem of How to Get the Books Before the People Is at the Root of All Other Book Trade Questions—Why the Book Canvasser Is Still Necessary—A Vast Field Waiting for Development.

About the advertising of books, nobody knows anything. The most that can be said is that some publishers are making very interesting experiments. But nobody has yet worked out a single general principle that is of great value. The publishers themselves frankly confess that they do not know how to advertise books—except a few publishers who have had little experience. The fundamental difficulty of course is that hardly any two books present the same problem. Find a successful advertising plan for one book—it will not be a good plan for another. This fundamental difficulty marks the difference, for instance, between books and shoes. When a shoe merchant finds out by experiment how to describe his shoes and in what periodicals to print his description, his problem is solved. Recently several publishers discovered a successful way to advertise a novel. They tried the same plan with another novel and another. But it’s hit or miss. I, for one, would give much to know how often it has been “miss.”

The old-fashioned way was to insert a brief, simple, dignified announcement of every book, as is still done in The Spectator, of London, for example. Good; but such an announcement doesn’t go far. A very few thousand persons see it. They wait until the books are reviewed or till some friend or authority speaks about them. For this perfectly good reason some publishers do not insert many advertisements in those publications that go only to the literary class—they are to a degree superfluous. Those that are inserted are inserted to give the publishers and the books a certain “standing,” and to keep pleasant the relations between the publishers and these journals.

Then come, of course, the monthly popular magazines. They reach a very much wider class of readers, and to advertise books in them is a logical procedure. But their advertising rates are almost prohibitory. The margin of profit on books is very small. There is not money enough in the business to warrant extensive and expensive magazine advertising. The result is the publishers put their announcements of perhaps a dozen new books on a single advertising page of the magazines, and they cannot, in this restricted space, say enough about any particular book to make the advertisement effective.

Then there are the daily papers. One or two of the best dailies in every large city are used by the publishers for announcements of new books. They cannot afford more—except in the case of those novels which may reach enormous editions. Given a novel that will sell 100,000 copies or more, and you have enough possible profit to warrant a good deal of advertising. But during this calendar year only two novels (perhaps three) have new editions of more than 100,000 copies. What is a publisher to do, then, who has a novel that will sell 10,000 copies, or 20,000 copies and no more? Can he make it sell 50,000 or 100,000 by spending a large sum in advertising it? Perhaps, once in ten times, or once in twenty times; but not oftener.

Five or six publishing houses spend more than $50,000 a year, each, in advertising. Two spend a good deal more than this sum; and one is reported as saying that he spends $250,000. These are not large sums when compared with the sums spent for advertising other wares. But an advertisement of a shoe published to-day will help to sell that shoe next year. The shoemaker gets a cumulative effect. But your novel advertised to-day will be dead next year. You get no cumulative effect. When I say, therefore, that no publisher has mastered the art of advertising books, I tell the literal truth. They all run against a dead wall; and they will all tell you so in frank moments.

The study of the problem of advertising books takes one far afield. What quality in a book makes it popular anyhow? Even if you are wise enough to know that (and you are very wise if you do know that) the question arises whether advertising is necessary. There have been as many popular books sold in large editions without advertising as with it. If your book is really popular it may sell anyhow. I could make a long list of such books, and a still longer list of books that extensive advertising did not sell—books which seemed to their publishers to have the quality of great popularity.

The question carries us further back still. Let us take the analogy of the shoemaker again. He has shoe stores within reach of the whole population. There is not a village in the land where there is not a store in which shoes are sold. The manufacturers’ salesmen find this distributing machinery ready to their hands. If a man in Arkansas or in Montana or in Florida wants a pair of shoes, he is within reach of a place where he may buy them. Not so with books. There are few bookstores. Two or three per cent. of the population (perhaps less) live within convenient reach of bookshops. True, a book may be ordered by mail. But so may a pair of shoes. But this is not a good substitute for a store, where a man may see the book. The mail-order business will always be secondary to direct sales. But, since bookstores are so few, the book-distributing machinery is wholly inadequate. The publisher has no effective way yet to reach his normal public with his wares.

There is nobody to blame, perhaps. Surely, it would not be a profitable undertaking for any man or woman to buy a stock of books and to open a store in a small town. What is the remedy, then?

The simple truth is, here is one of the problems of distribution that have not yet been solved. There are throughout the land another one hundred thousand persons who would buy any novel of which one hundred thousand have been sold, if they could see the book and hear about it—if it were intelligently kept for sale where they would see it. This is a self-evident proposition. But nobody has yet found a way thus to distribute a book. And (this is the point) until better distributing machinery is organized, it will not pay publishers to advertise with as prodigal a hand as shoemakers and soapmakers use in making their wares known.

It is this lack of proper distributing machinery that has made possible the career of the book-agent. There are no shoe peddlers. Almost all the publishing houses—all the important houses—employ book peddlers. The business is generally regarded as a—nuisance, to say the most for it. But, from the publisher’s point of view, it is a necessity. And this is the crude way whereby it is sought to remedy the radical deficiency of proper distributing machinery. Of course, the book-agent method has its obvious disadvantages. It is not a dignified occupation, as most agents practise it. The most dignified members of the community, therefore, do not take it up. In every case it is not even the trustworthy members of the community that take it up. Again, the agent must be paid; and this is a very costly method (to the purchaser) of buying books. The purchaser pays half his money for the books; the other half for being persuaded to buy them.

And (to take a broad, economic view of the subject) the book peddler surely cannot be considered the final solution of the problem of a proper distribution of books. At some time in the future, when the country is three or four times as densely settled as it now is, there will be book stores in all towns. There may still be need for the persuasiveness of the agent, for some of the most successful of them now do their best work in cities within sight of good book shops. But the point is, few book-agents sell new books, and few of them sell single books: they usually sell books in sets. The problem, therefore, of the proper distribution of the four or five really good books that my publishing house has put out this fall still remains unsolved and, though I advertised them in all magazines and newspapers, I should not effectively reach the attention of one-fifth or one-tenth of the possible buyers of them. I should simply spend in advertising the profit that I may make on the copies that I sell with a reasonable publicity through the regular channels. I do insert advertisements of them for three or four reasons—with the hope of helping their sales; to keep the public informed of the activity of our publishing house; to please the press; and—to please the authors of the books. But I know very well that I am working (as every publisher is working) in a business that has not yet been developed, that is behind the economic organization of other kinds of manufacturing and selling, that awaits proper organization.

Figure it out yourself. Here is a book of which eighty thousand copies have been sold through “the trade;” that is, through the book stores. Our salesmen have visited every important bookseller from Portland, Me., to Portland, Ore., and from Duluth to New Orleans. We have spent quite a handsome sum in advertising it. Four-fifths of these eighty thousand copies were sold in a few months after its publication. The booksellers said that they could sell many more if we would advertise it more. We did so. By this time our salesmen were making another trip. No, they would not buy more, thank you; it is a little slow now. The second effort at advertising did not cause it to “move” in the market. The demand is slow yet. In other words, the demand for it that could be supplied by the existing book stores was practically exhausted. Our second advertising effort was a waste of money. We have frankly to confess that we do not know how to sell more copies of this book until the time comes when it may be put into a “set” and sold by book agents. This is the same as to say that, the few existing book stores utilized, there is no organized machinery for finding more buyers except the book agent.

Yet it is obvious that a wholesome book (as this is) which eighty thousand persons have bought would please eighty thousand other persons of like minds and taste if we had any way to find these second eighty thousand persons. They exist, of course. But they live out of easy reach of the book stores. The book agents will find them several years hence.

I have (I think) shown why there can never be a publishers’ trust, or “combine,” because the relation of the publisher and the author is a personal relation as intimate and personal as the relation of a physician to his patient or of a lawyer and his client. But, after a book has been sold and has become a commodity, the problem is a different one. The booksellers have perceived this; and they have made ineffective efforts to “combine.” They have failed because they have not made plans to widen the existing market. An organization of those that exist is not enough. The real problem is to extend their area, to find book-buyers whom they do not now reach.

Perhaps all this is very dull—this trade talk. But a publisher who is worthy of his calling regards himself as an educator of the public; and he has trade reasons and higher reasons as well for wishing to reach as many buyers of his good books as he possibly can. He knows (and you know, if you know the American people) that the masses even of intelligent folk have yet hardly fairly begun to buy books. Go where you will among the people and you will find few books—pitifully few. We are just coming into a period when book-buying is even beginning to become general. The publishers of a generation hence will sell perhaps ten times as many good books as are sold now—surely, if they find in their day distributing machinery even half adequate.