But there is a still more important reason why you should not rush into producing your act yourself.  Producing is a specialized business, requiring wide experience and exact knowledge.  Besides, it is one of the most expensive pastimes in the world.  Without a most comprehensive experience and peculiar abilities, failure is sure.  Do not attempt private production even if you are offered the services of a performer or a producer in whom you have absolute faith.  Remember, if they thought your act was really worth while they would be anxious to reap the profits for themselves.

4.  Selling an Act to a Producer

While any performer who owns his act is a producer in the sense that he “produces” his act, there are men who make a business of buying manuscripts, engaging people, and producing many acts in which they do not themselves play.  Producers who may own a dozen acts of all different kinds would seem to offer to the writer for vaudeville an ideal market.  How, then, is the writer to get in touch with them?

(a) Selling through a Play broker is a method that is precisely the same as though you consigned a bill of goods to a commission agent, and paid him for disposing of it.  The play broker reads your manuscript and engages to try to dispose of it for you, or returns it as not likely to fit in with the particular line of business of which he makes a specialty.  If your act is really good and yet the broker is able to make some suggestions that will improve it, he is likely to offer such suggestions, purely in the hope of earning a commission, and in this way he may prove of distinct value as a critic.  In any event, if he accepts a manuscript to sell for you, he will offer it in the quarters he thinks most likely to produce it and will attend to all the business incidental to the making of the contract.

For this service the broker charges a ten per cent commission.  This commission is paid either on the price of outright sale, or on the royalty account.  If the act is sold on royalty, he will collect the customary advance and also the weekly payments.  After deducting his commission, he will remit the balance to you.

On the last page of this chapter you will find a partial list of well-known play brokers.  Although I do not know of any who deal exclusively in vaudeville material, any one of the agents who handles long plays is glad to handle an exceptionally fine playlet.

(b) Seeking a personal interview with a producer is usually productive of one result:  The office-boy says, “Leave your manuscript, and he’ll read it and let you know.”  Anxious as he is to secure good material, a man who is busily engaged in producing vaudeville acts has little time to spend on granting personal interviews.  And there is another reason—­he fears you will try to read your act to him.  A personal reading by the author is either a most distressing affair, because