People have quixotic ways of seeking out the hard things in life—climbing Mount McKinley; pointing tiny boats through the high seas; getting married; commuting. Some special souls in search of a really refined form of self-punishment even begin to write. Each year only about 130 of them endure to achieve contracts from hardback publishing companies and so acquire the dubious title of "first novelists." And that is often only the beginning of their troubles.
This year, as usual, a handful of first novels arrived with the built-in interest that accompanies works by writers well established in other genres: Playwright William Inge's Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, the late John Gunther's Indian Sign, Poet James Dickey's Deliverance (TIME, April 20). A few more deal with a subject successfully chosen to titillate advance publicity. Felice Gordon, for instance, in The Pleasure Principle looks into the bed and bored accommodations of a beautiful and renowned American widow now wed to a Greek shipping magnate. Attractive Lois Gould, widow of a New York newspaperman, has created that city's most piquant putative roman a clef in years by writing her first novel about the wife of a New York art director who discovers that most of her girl friends loved her dying husband both too wisely and too well.
What happens to the rest of the crop has stirred David Segal, a New York editor who spends much of his time on first novelists, to suggest that publishers should invent a new word. "In the case of first novels," Segal says, "what happens shouldn't be called publishing. 'Privishing' would be a better way to put it." Some books are sent to reviewers without even the vital publication-date information or a glossy photograph of the author, which definitely increases the chance of a review in smaller papers. Jacket copy can be cretinous. The blurbs from other writers are often elliptical and overblown ("Not since Dostoevsky . . ."), demolishing what credibility they might normally possess. The authors' capsule biographies still tend to suggest that to become a novelist, a boy should first try life as a carpenter, cook, salesman and merchant seaman. Advertising budgets range from minuscule to nonexistent. Many publishers, in fact, will not advertise a first novel at all unless sales justify it on a percentage basis—a neat way to ensure there will be no sales to base percentages on.
These perennial problems are not the result of a conspiracy to suppress talent but of commercial realities. Statistically, there can be few less promising enterprises than a serious new first novel. By dint of great care and devotion —especially to getting convincing jacket blurbs from established writers—some publishers do make a little money on serious first novels. But even when properly handled, the average sale of a remarkably skillful book is not likely to run over 6.000 hardback copies. The best guess at an average is 3,500, with more than half of that sale coming from public libraries around the country.