But now the machinery for publicity is put in action. Sly little literary notes about the book and the author begin to appear in the newspapers. These, too, have come from the publisher. From whom else, pray, could they come? But they mean that the publisher has to maintain a literary bureau. The man who writes these news notes and the advertisements of the book and other things about it is a man of skill, if he do his work well; and he, too, costs the publisher a good salary. When he begins to put forth advertising--how much shall he spend on this new novel by an unknown writer? How much shall you risk at Monte Carlo? Your upright man will risk nothing at Monte Carlo. I have sometimes thought that your upright publisher, if there be one, would risk nothing in advertising a new book by an unknown writer, until the book began itself to show some vitality in the market.
But--to go back--as soon as the book is ready, review copies, of course, are sent to the newspapers and the literary journals (to appear a little later in the second-hand book-shops for sale at reduced prices.) All this activity requires clerks, typewriters, bookkeepers, postage-money--a large office, in fact. There are many posters, circulars--there is as much machinery required to sell a book as to sell a piano or an automobile.
From the starting-point, where the book was an ill-written manuscript, to the delivery of it to the bookseller, the publisher has less than 50 cents a copy to pay for this whole journey and to save something for profit if he can. Therefore I say that publishers who do succeed are among the most astute managers of industry.
Lest I seem to “boast rather than to confess,” I come back to the starting-point, which was this--that the publishers’ calling is not a very profitable one; not a profitable one at all except in fair weather and with a good skipper.
The truth is, publishing is too important a profession and our publishing houses are too important as institutions to be at the mercy of present conditions. The making of schoolbooks and the vending of standard old books in sets, which are useful vocations, but are not publishing proper, are now done best by firms and companies that do nothing else. Hence publishing proper--the bringing out of new books--must find a safer basis than the present conventional profit. It will find this safer basis in two ways.