Sutherland 1976

Sutherland, John A. Victorian Novelists and Publishers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Print.

Intro

• 1: Even where they did not directly interfere in the novelist's life, the composition of his fiction or the form of his literary vehicle, the publisher's skills were often as instrumental to success as anything the author might contribute.
• 5 Louis James in his Fiction for the Working Man lists ninety publishers of penny-installment fiction between 1830 and 1850, which at a conservative estimate means that for every producer above the literary threshold there were ten beneath it.
• 6: Many of the great novels of the period which appear to be the unaided product of creative genius were often, as I set out to show, the outcome of collaboration, compromise or commission. Works like Henry Esmond, Middlemarch or Framley Parsonage cannot be fully appreciated unless we see them as partnership productions.

Ch. 1: Novel Publishing 1830-1870

• 11 In this damped-down world of publishing, competition between the major houses was kept to an acceptable minimum by a comfortable degree of cooperation, especially on remaindering and price maintenance.
• Prices were high, exorbitantly so. In the 1790s, the cost of novels, which had been falling throughout the century, steadied at about 3s. a volume. With the universal price and tax rises brought about by the Napoleonic wars it rose sharply again until by the 1820s it had attained the half-guinea per volume mark, where it stuck. The post-war supply of fiction, like corn, was thus stabilized by expense, taxation, and shortage - but books provoked no repeal lobby to agitate for the cheapening of an inessential to life.
• 13 In fact the three-decker would seem to have been less a pre-industrial anachronism than the very embodiment of the present age. As Lytton Strachey said of the heroic couplet and the Augustans, the three-volume novel was the Victorians' "criticism of life," massive, expensive, moral and enduring. As the century progressed it was common to compare it not with old fashioned stage coaches but the other grand durables of the British Empire - the Queen, the Constitution, and the Navy.
• [chain of supply] Retailing at a notional 31s. 6d. the novel would be sold to booksellers with a normal trade allowance of 25 per cent, a reduction of some 8s. on the sale price fixed by the publisher. The order for the book would go into a running account on which settlement was made half-yearly, in June and December. If the account were settled by cash within a month a further discount of 2.5% of the gross sum was allowed, bringing the price down another 9.5d., roughly. As a further bonus to entice his customer the publisher would often offer his book to be 'subscribed' among the trade. They would have an early copy to sample and would be given the day, even the hour of publication. In addition they might subscribe at a pre-publication rate of 13 for the price of 12 or, more usually, 25 for 24. This brings the minimum price of our hypothetical novel down another 11d. If the house were one of those which held trade sales yet another deduction might be made. So far this gives the publisher a lowest return of about a guinea [i.e., 21s.] on his three-decker.
• 15 Why then was the three volume, 31s. 6d. novel persisted with? The simple answer is that it was demanded by the circulating libraries, famously Mudie's. But this is too simple an explanation. For one thing the three-decker had been riding high for thirty years before Mudie ever became a major buyer. For another, although Mudie would help explain the retention of the 3-volume system...price maintenance at an exact 31s. 6d. is not to be explained by the libraries.... The three-decker seems to have been kept going all those years for the dullest of literary reasons - because it was commercially safe. The English publisher, as the Westminster noted (disapprovingly) in 1852, "finds it easier and more profitable to sell 500 copies of a work and a guinea and a half per copy, than 5,000 at half a crown, or 50,000 at a shilling.
  • cross-reference with Roberts 2006 on Mudie's
• 16: [other side of the commercial safety coin] Publishers were encouraged to take risks because the three-volume system had a kind of built in-insurance against loss. [Gives example of Mrs Oliphant's Zaidee]