Much may be done by re-writing your book on the proof sheets, correcting everything there which you should have corrected in manuscript.  This is an expensive process, and will greatly diminish your pecuniary gains, or rather will add to your publisher’s bill, for the odds are that you will have to publish at your own expense.  By the way, an author can make almost a certainty of disastrous failure, by carrying to some small obscure publisher a work which has been rejected by the best people in the trade.  Their rejections all but demonstrate that your book is worthless.  If you think you are likely to make a good thing by employing an obscure publisher, with little or no capital, then, as some one in Thucydides remarks, congratulating you on your simplicity, I do not envy your want of common sense.  Be very careful to enter into a perfectly preposterous agreement.  For example, accept “half profits,” but forget to observe that before these are reckoned, it is distinctly stated in your “agreement” that the publisher is to pay himself some twenty per cent. on the price of each copy sold before you get your share.

Here is “another way,” as the cookery books have it.  In your gratitude to your first publisher, covenant with him to let him have all the cheap editions of all your novels for the next five years, at his own terms.  If, in spite of the advice I have given you, you somehow manage to succeed, to become wildly popular, you will still have reserved to yourself, by this ingenious clause, a chance of ineffable pecuniary failure.  A plan generally approved of is to sell your entire copyright in your book for a very small sum.  You want the ready money, and perhaps you are not very hopeful.  But, when your book is in all men’s hands, when you are daily reviled by the small fry of paragraphers, when the publisher is clearing a thousand a year by it, while you only got a hundred down, then you will thank me, and will acknowledge that, in spite of apparent success, you are a failure after all.  There are publishers, however, so inconsiderate that they will not leave you even this consolation.  Finding that the book they bought cheap is really valuable, they will insist on sharing the profits with the author, or on making him great presents of money to which he has no legal claim.  Some persons, some authors, cannot fail if they would, so wayward is fortune, and such a Quixotic idea of honesty have some middlemen of literature.  But, of course, you may light on a publisher who will not give you more than you covenanted for, and then you can go about denouncing the whole profession as a congregation of robbers and clerks of St. Nicholas.