(4 of 10)
Despite these cumbersome methods and precarious economies, this is an era of unprecedented affluence for writers. A sale of 5,000 hard-cover copies at $5.95 will net the author only $2,975, at the royalty rate of 10% ; the percentage rises with book sales. This is not a great deal for a year or two of work. But paperback income—of which the author's share is 50% or more—can often amount to $20,000 even for a modest seller. And with successful books and name authors, five and six figures are common. Author James Jones got $800,000 against the paperback sales of three of his novels—none of them written at the time. Fawcett advanced Irving Wallace $325,000 after looking at his two-page outline of The Man.
Some bookmen feel that all that lettuce is not good for writers—besides being a lot of trouble for publishers. "Novelists are subsidized," says President Edward E. Booher of McGraw-Hill. "My trade editors have to run around constantly just to keep up with the big writers—getting big movie deals, big paperback deals. We pay them big money, and then we don't know whether their books are going to sell."
Hard to Turn Down. "Every publisher," says Bennett Cerf, "thinks of himself as an idealist, although the idealism is in the back of his head." Cerf tries to fulfill his idealistic responsibility "by publishing poetry, belles-lettres, and first novels you know won't sell a copy. We do two or three of those a year." Nevertheless, Cerf concedes that "it's awfully hard to turn down a book that's going to make money. If I thought nobody else was going to publish it, it wouldn't matter. But the thought that if I don't, somebody else will—I can't stand that. Besides, the real excitement is having somebody new come along, helping him get famous and watching him move to Hollywood and start calling me a son of a bitch."
A persistent snow of manuscripts descends on Random House's midtown Manhattan headquarters—one wing of a Florentine stone mansion, shared with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. The manuscripts usually come from agents—grey cartons from William Morris, orange from Curtis Brown. It is here that the vagaries of book publishing can get stickier than a freshly glued spine at a book bindery. Established authors are apt to be stubborn, demanding, supersensitive, uneven in their production, and extremely difficult to hold on to. For example, Cerf did not want to publish Author Robert Crichton's second book, Rascal and the Road; he was convinced that it would not sell. Crichton insisted. Cerf published it, and sure enough, the book failed. Convinced that Random House had not done right by him—every author chronically suspects that his publisher doesn't spend enough money advertising his book—Crichton took his next novel to Simon & Schuster. The Secret of Santa Vittoria flipped right onto the bestseller list, is No. 1 this week.
On the other hand, Cerf was so positive that Stanley Wolpert's Nine Hours to Rama, a novel based on the assassination of Gandhi, would be a 1962 winner that he boosted the ad budget from $10,000 to nearly $30,000. It sold a disappointing 12,000 copies.
Adjust the Buttons. One of Cerf's big assets is a group