ould 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
failure. A plan generally approved of is to sell your entire copyright
in your book for a very small sum. You want the ready money, and perhaps
you are not very hopeful. But, when your book is in all men's hands,
when you are daily reviled by the small fry of paragraphers, when the
publisher is clearing a thousand a year by it, while you only got a
hundred down, then you will thank me, and will acknowledge that, in spite
of apparent success, you are a failure after all. There are publishers,
however, so inconsiderate that they will not leave you even this
consolation. Finding that the book they bought cheap is really valuable,
they will insist on sharing the profits with the author, or on making him
great presents of money to which he has no legal claim. Some persons,
some authors, cannot fail if they would, so wayward is fortune, and such
a Quixotic idea of honesty have some middlemen of literature. But, of
course, you _may_ light on a publisher who will not give you _more_ than
you covenante