"You Too Can Write"

As countless aspiring authors have learned, writing a book is seldom half the battle. The real trick is to get it published. Of the thousands of unsolicited manuscripts mailed to U.S. publishing houses each year, only a tiny percentage ever get into type. One house recently looked back over its records, found that in eight years it had received 16,000 such manuscripts, published just three.

What does the rejected author do when his manuscript thuds back to him? He still has two classic choices: 1) writing it over again, and better; 2) locking the whole thing away in his attic trunk. Nowadays a lot of would-be authors are making a third choice: they sign a contract with a publisher who specializes in would-be authors. For a few hundred dollars (and up), anybody, if he shops far enough, can have the thrill of seeing his stuff in print. He may not get much for his money --often not more than a stack of cheaply printed, poorly bound books dumped on his doorstep. His disappointment may be keen if the come-on has convinced him that his book is going to sell. But at least he is in print.

2,000 for $2,000. The you-pay-and-we-publish companies speak of their work as "cooperative" or "subsidy" publishing; the rest of the book trade bluntly calls it the "vanity" business. Today there are at least 25 such outfits in the U.S., and business is brisk. In 1946 the leading 20 published less than 200 titles; last year they brought out 500.

The most active of all is Exposition Press, a Manhattan publishing house which issued 203 books last year, ranked sixth among U.S. publishers in number of new titles. None of its books sold widely, but Exposition's authors got a better shake than the history of vanity publishing gave them a right to expect.

President and sparkplug of Exposition is Edward Uhlan, a 39-year-old immigrant's son who graduated from Manhattan's tough Hell's Kitchen, but not from high school. His 16 years in vanity publishing have taught him that the business can be both legitimate and profitable. Exposition gives its writers a contract whose terms are frank and clear, sends out review copies and news releases, tries, like all publishers, to build publicity and promotional hocus-pocus (autographing parties, press interviews, radio appearances, etc.). For about $2,000, Exposition will give an author some 2,000 copies of a fairly well printed book, try to sell it to bookstores and to lists of friends and prospects supplied by the author.

In Hardy's Steps. Exposition rejects more books than it prints, especially shuns the work of bigots and cranks, and avoids promising too much. But its advertising is nonetheless plainly designed to arouse ambition in amateurish writing breasts.

A reply to an Exposition ad brings a circular that reminds the writer: "Until you are a published author, you will never be regarded as an author." It points out, quite rightly, that ordinary publishers are looking only for sure things, that an unknown beginner has a slim chance. Besides, the vanity author joins the select list of great writers "who had enough faith in their own work to subsidize its publication," e.g., Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, John Masefield, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edgar Rice Burroughs. (The predominance of poets in the list of examples is no accident; 35% of Exposition's output last year was poetry.) Happy customers and favorable reviews are quoted, successful promotions of the firm's books are played up. By pamphlet's end, a writer hungry for the heady sight of print is very apt to start wondering where he can borrow the cash to pay for the first installment.

A lot of them do borrow it. They offer to mortgage their houses and sell their cars. One earnest hopeful offered a 150-acre New Mexico ranch in trade. Another awaits a pending alimony settlement to finance her literary fling. But wherever the money comes from, it is a rare writer whose book sells well enough to make it back.

A second edition (which Exposition publishes at its own risk) is rarer still. Says Publisher Uhlan: "Our authors must be prepared psychologically and financially to lose money. Other houses may promise riches. We never promise riches. We just offer immortality!" Immortality is the one thing that no book thus far published by Exposition is apt to achieve. Though house editors and freelance polishers work over the sometimes "shapeless" manuscripts that come in, many of them still emerge as embarrassingly bad books and most of them might better have been carried to the attic.

If the Price Is Right. Regular publishers say privately that what is least admirable about their vanity cousins is the false encouragement and heady praise some of them hand out to inept writers. They are probably right, but it is also true that most of the well established publishers do a bit of vanity publishing themselves--if the book is not too embarrassingly bad, and if the price is right.

Once in a rare while a vanity writer does hit a small piece of jackpot. Vantage, another Manhattan outfit, sees great possibilities in McDill McCown Gassman's Daddy Was an Undertaker, which is to be published next week. So far, reports Vantage, it has advance orders for 5,000 copies. Vantage has ordered a first printing of 10,000, talks happily of a potential market for Mrs. Gassman's memoirs of maybe 25,000. Among Vantage's promotional plans for the book is an autographing party for Author Gassman in the Jennings Funeral Home, in Rome, Ga., Author Gassman's home town.

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