By F. N. DOUBLEDAY OTWITHSTANDING its drawbacks, I still believe that the publishing of books and magazines offers a good chance for young men of imagination, ambition, and cleverness, and it is even fair to presume that the difficulties and troubles of publishing are in many respects more interesting than an equal number of trials in some other business. As far as our experiences go, the young graduate who starts out to decide upon a career seems to be fascinated with the idea that in that it touches the literary side it must, therefore, be delightful -the literary aspect appealing to the imagination and the commercial to the practical. In the successful working out of the problem we find that the imagination is quite as necessary to the business side, and that the ability to see visions and to work to the actual realization of them is the only thing that really counts. Books must not only be secured and printed, but a market must be discovered for them, and the ingenuity with which the readers are found is the final test. The dignified day when the publisher sat in his office and decided from the manuscripts submitted which he should publish, and then sent the newly made book to the booksellers with the idea that they would do the rest, 1 From "" Careers for the Coming Men." Copyright, 1904, by the Saalfield Publishing Company. passed away before this century was begun. If good books come to him and an eager public demands them and buys them through their own gracious good will, so much the better, and he may indeed be thankful; but if he waits for these conditions, he starves by the wayside. Perhaps the publishing business is changing (most things are) and the young men who can adapt themselves to the conditions that are coming and so be a little in advance of these changes and in line with them will reap an abundant success. In a broad way it is true that the market for good books and magazines is larger than ever and rapidly growing; for a good many years traditions in publishing have counted perhaps most of all, and the average youngster has a hard time with traditions. But traditions go for less nowadays, and probably all publishers realize that there remain to be invented a good many ways of bringing the book and the reader together. How to sell the book the single volume; novel, history, biography, or what not — to any really large proportion of the people who would buy if they knew of its existence is what the publisher wants to know. Books sold by subscription are more fortunate in this respect, since they do find a much larger proportion of the readers who really want and need a set of volumes - and a good many who do not. To come to the present-day conditions, one may consider that a publishing house, to exert any lasting force, will have four well-defined fields of activity: First The general or miscellaneous book publishing. Fourth-Educational or text-book publishing. There are, it seems to me, more drawbacks to the first class than any of the other branches. One is that the publisher of miscellaneous books must practically recreate his business every year. The profits (and fortunately, also, the losses) are most variable-a popular novel may sell 100,000 copies this year, and hardly more than a thousand or so next year. This is a vital trouble; the expenses are regular- each success leaves a train of new ones — and the sales or profits are irregular. Each book is a small or large speculation, as the case may be, and the residuum of books left at the end of the year which can be counted on for regular sale year after year is pitifully small. The merciful feature is that a novel which once gets the public's good will sells vastly more than in the old days, and is therefore more profitable, even considering the increased first expense of getting the public to know that it exists. The obvious need, one would say, then, is to get those books of actual and acknowledged merit which will last, but it is not only difficult to get many such books, but the expense of making them, and telling the public of them, often takes a year, or several years, perhaps, to recoup the first investment. Meantime, the expense goes on at the rate fixed by the novel, that sells by the fifty thousands, we will say. All this can be remedied by getting for more serious work the sales secured for novels of temporary popularity. No doubt it can be done, but who will do it? Another thing the coming publisher will do is to invent books which the public really wants, or thinks it wants, and he will manage to create the book to fit a need which only this imagination can foresee or guess at. It has often been said that authors are as difficult to deal with as artists or musicians, but experience leads me to believe that the writers of books are no harder to do business with than the people who set the type and print the books or the booksellers who sell them. An author's book is his baby -"the child of his brain," I believe the correct phrase is. Can it be considered strange that he looks with dread upon the critic who wishes to chop out sections and passages of his pages, or remake what he has worked out with care and labor? One might as well expect a mother to have her baby improved by reducing the number of its fingers or reshaping its ears. The surprising thing is that so often is the publisher's opinion sought for and his advice accepted so readily. It takes tact to deal with writers, but no more than it does to deal with any other person of spirit - a lawyer or doctor, let us say, or a trained nurse. I fancy that it is the notion of having relations with distinguished authors which makes publishing appear attractive to the youngster choosing a career, but let him not forget that the pleasure and satisfaction of the relationship rest upon a quid pro quo- that the publisher must do his part with skill and ability to keep the connection profitable to both. Many times his best is not good enough; but, then, his conscience need not trouble him, and he can let it go at that. The subscription work has the great advantage of dealing with the buyer direct. The number of customers, and therefore the opportunities, are greatly increased. It would take pages of this book even to mention the schemes which one must invent and are still to be invented to work out this to its full field of usefulness. Happily, as a branch of the business which has always been more or less looked down upon, it is making its way up rapidly. In the old days a book which cost fifty cents, and a worthless one at that, was forced upon an unwilling buyer for ten times that sum by the sheer force of the ferocious and untamed energy of a book agent. This old type of agent was a terror to the customer and to the publisher, and he robbed both the buyer and the seller with a high hand. His modern prototype scorns to sell by the aid of the hard-luck story, and he leaves his customer with some remnant of self-respect, so that he may again sell the same man. Uncle Sam, also, has intervened, and probably half of the subscription books distributed now are sold by mail, and the very best books are brought into homes on the so-called instalment plan. How great this business is in the aggregate it is impossible to say, but it is known that about half a million. sets of the Encyclopædia Britannica have been sold in this country - a book made primarily for the purposes of a people living three thousand miles away. This gives some indication of the possibilities. They have only been touched. Surely the books and the personnel will improve and buyers will multiply many fold. Then we come to magazine publishing. A great publishing house needs at least one magazine - a half-dozen would be better if they might all have separate fields and the force could be gathered to run them all at a high level of efficiency. Sir William Harmsworth publishes forty or more in England, and all with success. The strong features of the magazine published in association with the books is too obvious to talk about, but even as a separate business it has many advantages over book publishing. For one thing, it has a more continuous life; once begun, with a fair share of success it is built up year after year on a solid foundation. The publisher has here also the pleasure of dealing directly with his customers, whom, if he is clever, he will interest as his friends both among his subscribers and his advertisers. His chances, too, are many sided and touch many departments,-the suggestion |