contributes to the end which you have steadily in view.

I do not think it is necessary to warn young lady novelists, who possess
beauty, wealth, and titles, against asking Reviewers to dine, and
treating them as kindly, almost, as the Fairy Paribanou treated Prince
Ahmed. They only act thus, I fear, in Mr. William Black's novels.

Much may be done by re-writing your book on the proof sheets, correcting
everything there which you should have corrected in manuscript. This is
an expensive process, and will greatly diminish your pecuniary gains, or
rather will add to your publisher's bill, for the odds are that you will
have to publish at your own expense. By the way, an author can make
almost a certainty of disastrous failure, by carrying to some small
obscure publisher a work which has been rejected by the best people in
the trade. Their rejections all but demonstrate that your book is
worthless. If you think you are likely to make a good thing by employing
an obscure publisher, with little or no capital, then, as some one in
Thucydides remarks, congratulating you on your simplicity, I do not envy
your want of common sense. Be very careful to enter into a perfectly
preposterous agreement. For example, accept "half profits," but forget
to observe that before these are reckoned, it is distinctly stated in
your "agreement" that the publisher is to pay _himself_ some twenty per
cent. on the price of each copy sold before you get your share.

Here is "another way," as the cookery books have it. In your gratitude
to your first publisher, covenant with him to let him have all the cheap
editions of all your novels for the next five years, at his own terms.
If, in spite of the advice I have given you, you somehow manage to
succeed, to become wildly popular, you will still have reserved to
yourself, by this ingenious clause, a chance of ineffable pecuniary