young author has written out of an unspoiled heart and an untainted mind,
such as most young men and women write; and I will suppose that it has
found a publisher. It is human nature, as competition has deformed human
nature, for the publisher to wish the author to take all the risks, and
he possibly proposes that the author shall publish it at his own expense,
and let him have a percentage of the retail price for managing it. If
not that, he proposes that the author shall pay for the stereotype
plates, and take fifteen per cent. of the price of the book; or if this
will not go, if the author cannot, rather than will not, do it (he is
commonly only too glad to do any thing he can), then the publisher offers
him ten per cent. of the retail price after the first thousand copies
have been sold. But if he fully believes in the book, he will give ten
per cent. from the first copy sold, and pay all the costs of publication
himself. The book is to be retailed for a dollar and a half, and the
publisher is not displeased with a new book that sells fifteen hundred
copies. Whether the author has as much reason to be pleased is a
question, but if the book does not sell more he has only himself to
blame, and had better pocket in silence the two hundred and twenty-five
dollars he gets for it, and bless his publisher, and try to find work
somewhere at five dollars a week. The publisher has not made any more,
if quite as much as the author, and until a book has sold two thousand
copies the division is fair enough. After that, the heavier expenses of
manufacturing have been defrayed and the book goes on advertising itself;
there is merely the cost of paper, printing, binding, and marketing to be
met, and the arrangement becomes fairer and fairer for the publisher.
The author has no right to complain of this, in the case of his first
book, which he is only too grateful to get accepted at all. If it
succeeds, he has himself to blame for making the same arrangement for his
second or third; it is his fault, or else it is his necessity, which is
practically the same thing. It will be business for the publisher to