To sell a novel that has the mysterious quality of popularity in it is not difficult. Properly launched, it sells itself. To sell a novel that lacks the inherent quality of popularity--that is almost impossible. Apparently it has sometimes been done, but nobody can be sure whether the result after all was due to the book or to the salesman. Every publisher has proved, over and over again, to his disgust, that he cannot make the people buy a novel that they do not want; and when a novel appears (no better novel) that they do want, the novel-readers find it out by some free-masonry and would buy it if the publishers tried to prevent them.
Nobody has discovered a rule--to say nothing of a principle--whereby the popularity of a novel by a new writer may be determined. If it be a really great, strong book, of course it is easy to understand that it will sell; but whether it will sell 10,000 copies or 100,000 nobody knows. If it be a slapdash dime-novel, full of action, it is easy to guess that it will sell; but whether 5,000 or 500,000 nobody knows. Sometimes a book of the sheerest commonplace happens to hit the public mood at the happy angle and sells beyond all expectation. The truth is, every new novel by an unknown writer presents a problem peculiar to itself; and in advertising it and offering it for sale, every book’s peculiar problem must be studied by itself.
The whole question is a subtle social one. Who could have foretold popularity for “pigs in clover,” rather than for some other silly puzzle; or for ping-pong; or for women’s hats of a certain grotesque construction? The popular whim about novels is like the whims for these things. And a popular novel passes as quickly as any other fashion. The story has been many times told of the sudden falling off of the demand for “Trilby”--so sudden that the publishers had a large number of copies left on hand which could not be sold at all except as waste paper. Every publisher is afraid to publish very large editions of any very popular novel; for they have all had an experience parallel to this experience with “Trilby.”
But other kinds of books are less capricious than novels; and the business of the publisher has been reduced more nearly to a science in dealing with books of information. Several publishers, for example, have series of little books made of selections from English and American classics. Many of them have sold well; but some of them have sold by the million and others just as good and just as attractive have stopped at the ten-thousand limit or at a lower limit. The difference is with the skill with which they were put on the market. Sometimes an ingenious “scheme” will sell information books in great numbers; and it often happens that the worst of three or four books on the same subject and published for the same price, becomes far better known than the other better books.