Selling Books.

As the mass market for books continued to grow in the second decade of the twentieth century, old-fashioned publishers lamented that the quality of the writing and the paper on which it was printed were both declining. Literary merit certainly brought some books to light, but salability became the paramount concern for the modernizing publishing business. To fill an established marketing niche, publishers went to established writers with plans and formulas for projected books rather than waiting to choose among completed manuscripts. The biggest problem facing the industry was distribution. Even the biggest houses employed no more than four salesmen, with territories such as all the major cities east of the Mississippi, or the entire South, or, in one busy fellow's case, New England, part of the Midwest, and the Pacific Coast. In 1914 there were 3,501 bookstores in the country...