You Too Can Help Write a Book

The old way of publishing books was to take a chance. More than one important U.S. novelist brought his publisher nothing but deficits with his first and second books (among others: Sherwood Anderson's Windy McPherson's Son, Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time). Wouldn't it be wonderful, though, if you didn't have to take such chances? That was the line a man named Albert E. Sindlinger peddled to publishers. He had been a vice president of the Gallup poll organization and he thought he knew a little something about what the public wants. Every book a bestseller: why not?

Sindlinger's technique (what pollsters call "pretesting audience reaction") isn't new, but some of his refinements are. At his New Entertainment Workshop on a farm in Hopewell, N.J., a staff boils down the author's manuscript to a one-hour reading which is then recorded. The records are played in various cities and towns to hand-picked groups who first munch refreshments, and then all sit down together to hear the boiled-down book read, and record their impressions throughout (from "superior" to "bad") on an electronic gadget called Teldox. When it's all over, a composite graph indicates the weak spots in the story and the author is called in to make repairs. Whatever survives these sievings through the mass mind, Sindlinger says, is a story that's sure to sell.

Sindlinger's Workshop insists on buying a "piece" of each book it researches. Sindlinger has tested and bought in on half a dozen Broadway shows (Burlesque, Brigadoon, Lady Windermere's Fan) and has found at least three publishers willing to discard their taste and editorial judgment for the promise of a relatively sure thing. Workshop sometimes shares the advertising costs, sometimes helps finance the entire publication.

One of the first Workshop guinea-pigs was Sterling North, who is probably the most widely syndicated of all U.S. book reviewers (24 newspapers). Five years ago he had written a pallid little juvenile called Midnight and Jeremiah, which Walt Disney was interested in screening. North rewrote the story into a screen version for Disney and a novel (So Dear to My Heart) for Doubleday. Disney had the story tested by Sindlinger and North obligingly made the Workshop-indicated alterations (which he says were minor). Since then the book has sold 25,000 copies. North was "genuinely converted," he said. "People who scoff at poll-taking . . . are scoffing at democracy. . . . It is a humbling but enlightening experience. . . . I can think of several opinionated American authors who might benefit by the experience."

Sindlinger is also helping to finance a movie version of Barry Benefield's Eddie and The Archangel Mike, a so-so seller in 1943. Workshop research indicated that what the book really needed was a new title. Sindlinger's Workshop thought up one that had almost everything in it: Texas, Heaven and Brooklyn.

Sindlinger, not content with mass testing, is also experimenting with mass writing by "established writers." One such established writer is Professor James (The Struggle for The World) Burnham of New York University. His first screen play is being "developed by Mr. Burnham and the editorial staff" of the Workshop, with the help of what Sterling North calls the "collective wisdom of the American people."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.