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 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 thing. It will be business for the publisher to
take advantage of his necessity quite the same as if it were his fault;
but I do not say that he will always do so; I believe he will very
often not do so.

At one time there seemed a probability of the enlargement of the
author's gains by subscription publication, and one very well-known
American author prospered fabulously in that way. The percentage
offe