offered to the beginner. Ask, and learn.

* * * * *

But though I admit that money has been lost, I do not think the losses
have been heavy. After all, no idolized author and no diabolic agent can
force a publisher to pay more than he really wants to pay. And no diabolic
agent, having once bitten a publisher, can persuade that publisher to hold
out his generous hand to be bitten again. These are truisms. Lastly, I am
quite sure that, out of books, a great deal more money has been made by
publishers than by authors, and that this will always be so. The
threatened crisis in publishing has nothing to do with the prices paid to
authors, which on the whole are now fairly just (very different from what
they were twenty years ago, when authors had to accept whatever was
condescendingly offered to them). And if a crisis does come, the people to
suffer will happily be those who can best afford to suffer.




THE NOVEL OF THE SEASON

[_11 July '08_]

The publishing season--the bad publishing season--is now practically over,
and publishers may go away for their holidays comforted by the fact that
they will not begin to lose money again till the autumn. It only remains
to be decided which is the novel of the season. Those interested in the
question may expect it to be decided at any moment, either in the _British
Weekly_ or the _Sphere_. I take up these journals with a thrill of