You followed the same line of argumentation.  You showed that there was nothing imaginative about your work.  You could give a warranty deed for every fact which you put on the market.  I was so pleased with your method that I bought a job lot of your books, so that I could see for myself how you conducted your business.  Will you allow me, as one in the same line, to indulge in a little criticism?  I am afraid that you are making the same mistake I made when I first went into real estate.  I was so possessed with the idea of the value of land that I became “land poor.”  It strikes me that a novelist may become reality poor in the same way; that is, by investing in a great many realities that are not worth what he pays for them.

You see, there is a fact which we do not mention in our circulars.  There is a great deal of land lying out of doors. Some land is in great demand, and the real trick is to find out what that land is.  You can’t go out on the plains of Wyoming and give an acre of land the same value which an acre has in the Wall Street district.  I speak from experience, having tried to convince the public that if the acres are real, the values I suggested must be real also.  People wouldn’t believe me, and I lost money.

And the same thing is true about improvements.  They must be related to the market value of the land on which they are placed.  A forty-story building at Goshenville Corners would be a mistake.  There is no call for it.

This is the mistake which I fear you have been making.  Your novel is a carefully prepared structure, and must have cost a great deal, but it is built on ground which is not worth enough to justify the investment.  It has not what we call “site value.”  You yourself declare that you have no particular interest in the characters you describe at such length.  All that you have to say for them is that they are real.  It is as if I were to put up an expensive apartment-house on a vacant lot I have at North Ovid.  North Ovid is real, and so would be the apartment-house; but what of it?

There are ninety millions of people in this country, all with characters which might be carefully studied, if we had time.  But we haven’t the time.  So we have to choose our intimates.  We prefer to know those who seem to us most worth knowing.  You should remember that the novelist has no monopoly on realism.  The newspapers are full of all sorts of realities.  The historian is a keen competitor.

Do you know that when I went to the bookstore to get your works I fell in with a book on Garibaldi by a man named Trevelyan.  When I got home I sat down with it and couldn’t let it go.  Garibaldi was all the time doing things, which you never allow your characters to do because you think they would not be real.  He was acting in the most romantic and heroic manner possible.  And his Thousand trooped after him as gayly as if they were in a melodrama.  And yet I understand that Garibaldi was a real person, and that his exploits can be authenticated.