THE "BEST SELLER."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 1514, 9 November 1912, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE "BEST SELLER."

An" anonymous American writer has been confessing how he came to write " best sellers" (says an English paper). He tells lis a great deal about himself that might be interesting if lie had told us who ho was, but he ends by keeping profoundly secret what many of his fellow-craftsmen would like to know —how to do likewise. He tells us that lie pa.-sed through all the various grades of journalism, wrote librettos tor. comic operas, and at last, venturing upon novel-writing, made success enough by a first book to convince himself that fiction was his metier, and has stuck to it ever since. When he has written a story "lie goes over all the ground with his publisher, is careful in the selection of an illustrator, and although himself preferring August or September as the month for publication, meekly leaves the final decision on that point to the publisher. When he passes through a town he visits the bookseller?, mentions his name, talks shop and puts on no ■" side" whatever, and, on the whole, does so well that he finds it. necessary to Write only one book a year, and spends his spare time in trotting the globe from China to Peru. All of which, tor those who like this sort of thing, is the very sort of thing they will like, but we are left in the dark as to the writer's formula.

That he has a formula there can be little doubt. and ho may have several. Novelists who. like the writer in question, look upon their craft simply as a means of making money are not of the sort who accumulate material because of its inherent interest to themselves and then apply artistic* expedients in order to set it forth to the best advantage. They have a perfectly clear idea of the particular section of the public in which they are appealing, diagnose its preferences, and then set themselves to give it what it wants in what quantity and quality they can. One of the simplest and most profitable ot formulas would seem to he that of the writer who frankly recognises that the great body of novel readers are women, and especially young women, and lavs Ills count upon that fact. In such a, case it is desirable that the central figure should be a heroine. She need not be beautiful if she has an " undefinable charm," she had better be in noor circumstances, and the more she rises above the commonplace the more difficult does the reader find it to put herself in her place. She must have more admirers than one. There may be humble ones to whom sue will be very gracious and generous when ultimataly she has married someone else and is rich. _ Then there stall be two admirers, serious rivals of each other, both equally worthy and equally wealthy', and if ono has a title and an ancestry that goes back to the Norman Conquest, so much the better. The latter contingency indeed throws upon the novelists t'l.i task of describing scenes in high life, of which he may be profoundly ignorant, but then his reader is as ignorant as himself. Moreover, any approximation to reality in characters belonging to that sphere might be a cruel disillusion; they arc all conventionalised in previous works of fiction of this class, and must conform to type. The essential thing is that there should be two types—one of the haughty aristocrat who stickles upon his birth "and state, and is all indignation that his kinsman should wed a girl whose blood i* by a shade or two, of a paler blue than his own, and the other a ladv, as much ait aristocrat as any of them, 'but who has had experience, and knows that the qualities that others plume themselves upon are shadows, not substantial things. It is the latter who takes a fancy to the heroine and helps her over many o- stil n on that journey that ends with lovers meeting before the altar.