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 anything 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 very well pleased with a new book that sells fifteen hundred
copies. Whether the author has as much reason to be so 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