"Traditional" Publishing?
The first American (self-published) authors
Today would be a *great* day to sample some of the Belt Publishing offerings in our online store. As attentive readers of this newsletter know, November and December are, for presses as for most places in this country that sell things, make or break time. Help us start the month strong! Maybe you want to become a sponsor of Belt, or pick up a bundle of Chicago books (or a bundle of Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis ones—what a gift), or if you are sick of books (because let’s be real) a tarot deck.
Today, we use the term “traditional” publishing to refer to a model in which a company wholesales books they have paid to produce. That is, a “traditional” publisher pays the author, and pays for editing, design, and marketing of a book; in turn, authors receive a royalty (sometimes part of that royalty comes in the form of an advance upon royalties). This terms is used to distinguish some companies from others that ask authors to pay for some or all parts of producing a book. Common “non-traditional” publishing models today are self-publishing, hybrid publishing, a variation on an older vanity press model.
But “traditional publishing” is not very traditional. It may describe the way many publishers operated in the 20th century, but go back further and you will find all sorts of different types of publishing that, although old, are not “traditional” as we use the term now. They were common, and many of the most famous American authors used them.
Let’s rewind to the early 19th century, and let’s look at a person some consider the first “professional” American author: James Fenimore Cooper.
Cooper is not necessarily the figure who deserves this “first” accolade; some might argue Susanna Rowson should be so called; others would point to Washington Irving. But of the sake of argument—that is, for me to make this “traditional is not traditional” one, let’s look at Cooper.
”A more complete extrovert has never been known in American letters,” writes the unparalleled William Charvat on Cooper. During Cooper’s thirty-some year career, he wrote thirty-some novels, and a few dozen other books to boot. In the beginning, he had to pay publishers to publish his novels. At the time, Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book (1819) was highly popular—perhaps the first “native” American fiction to do well stateside. Irving also paid to have the book printed himself—well, more accurately, he asked a wealthy friend to do so. He sold 5,000 copies, and made $9,000, “more than any British writer had ever gotten for a work of fiction except for Sir Walter Scott.”1
Irving inspired Cooper to follow the same model when it was time for him to publish his novel, The Spy, in 1820. The publisher Charles Wiley (last name sound familiar?) was distributing the novel; it did very well. So Wiley offered Cooper $2500 for his next novel, but Cooper turned him down. When Wiley offered him $5,000 for the book after that, he said yes. That novel, Lionel Lincoln, sold poorly, and Wiley lost money on it. Cooper then offered his subsequent novel to Carey &Lea and asked for the same $5,000, despite the low sales of this last book. That novel was The Last of the Mohicans, and Carey & Lea paid him that, despite it not making financial sense given Cooper’s most recent track record. Mohicans became a hit, though, and that meant Cooper could command $5,000 per novel for the rest of his very long career, despite most of those novels selling progressively fewer copies, year over year.
Cooper was, then, able to make a good living from writing and selling fiction, again, arguably the first American to do so. His Trollope-ian habits kept the books coming. He never revised—sometimes the first drafts were just sent to the printer—and his manuscripts were riddled with errors. He would charge his publishers if they wanted revisions of his previously published words, “five pounds worth or fifty pounds worth,” depending on how much editing he did.
But during those decades of intense productivity, the financial model he used to publish books—paying up front in exchange for a larger cut of sales—changed to something closer to what we now call “traditional” publishing, and the economy fluctuated during those years as well, leading to a depreciation of book prices. Thus his income as a writer did not grow as his career and sales did. Here’s a fascinating paragraph especially for my friends inside publishing, or who like numbers:
During the first two decades his profits on early sales of his novels was sometimes as high as forty-five percent of the retail price -- a profit never equalled by any other American author from that day to the present. The explanation of this high return is complicated, but the answer lies partly (and paradoxically enough) in the immature state of the publishing business in the 1820's and partly in the fact that Carey & Lea carried Cooper as a kind of loss-leader. But his rate of profit slipped in the 1830's, and in the 1840's he had to be content with a mere twenty percent. Put the decline of retail prices and of royalty rates together and the result is this: In 1826 The Last of the Mohicans sold for two dollars, sales were 5,750, Cooper's profit was forty-three percent, and his total take was $5,000. Sixteen years later, in 1842, the newly published The Wing-and-Wing sold for fifty cents, sales were 12,500, the royalty was twenty percent, and his profit was $1,187.50. Thus, though the sales of the later book were more than twice that of the earlier, his returns were less than one fourth.
Maybe Cooper should have stuck with “non-traditional” publishing?
This model was the norm and not the exception in the first half of the nineteenth century, and for a while afterwards as well. Emerson had to pay to have his Essays printed, as did Cooper and Irving. Charles Brockden Brown’s first novel was published by a bookseller, not a “traditional” publisher. And, as I’ve written about before, Phillis Wheatley and may others got their start with subscription publishing, which is basically a Kickstarter/crowdfunding model. I, as a “traditional publisher” as the term is used today, would love to play around more with these “nontraditional” models for publishing used by the first Americans to produce books. And anyone who gestures to some hierarchy of prestige to discriminate between different pathways to the market should check their history. It has not traditionally been done that way, after all.
I’m teaching my next online class in January to help those interested in writing non-fiction with their ideas and proposals. Check it out! Tell your friends!
James Green, “The Book Trades in the New Nation,” A History of the Book in America Volume II.
This was a fantastic read today. Thank you so much.
Useful Thank you. Thoughts on KDP?