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.

   The ways of failure are infinite, and of course are not nearly exhausted. One good plan is never to be yourself when you write, to put in nothing of your own temperament, manner, character—or to have none, which does as well. Another favourite method is to offer the wrong kind of article, to send 

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