The Same Continued

( Originally Published 1944 )

I take no pains, yet all my nets are spread

YOU BEGIN to fire people. Your editor was a good man, very expert, worried himself almost to death trying to swing it for you, and he did indeed swing it. Now you're in a position to swing him. Because the tone of the magazine has been set, its mold is cast, its direction fixed. It's a household- and family-magazine, very suitable for doctors' and dentists' waiting-rooms, and a natural for news stand distribution because of the cover style and the contents. These contents have had enough time to be standardized and formularized and even you can tell at a mere hasty reading of the opening and closing couple of paragraphs whether a story is the sort of provender that has previously been purveyed with much success and, therefore, should be purveyed again. The Book-Review Depart ment (in the hope of publishers' advertising), and the Record-Release Department (Victor Records and Columbia Records and the big local music shops are now being high pressured to buy space), and the Home-Cooking Department (national food brands simply can't afford to stay out of any established medium), and the Home Medical-Adviser Department (Band-Aids, Ex-Lax, Bayer's Aspirin, Alka-Seltzer), and the For Women Only Page, are, along with the others, all now just a monthly routine that can be intelligently maintained by a fifty- or sixty-dollar-a-week robot.

Your high-paid advertising manager also goes right out. He did a sterling job those first six months, but you don't need him a moment longer. He had two secretaries and a filing clerk. You keep the better of the two secretaries, promote her to another five bucks a week and a Title perhaps even the title he had (the guy you're now throwing out on his ear) Advertising Manager. The filing clerk female who was getting a stipend of such microscopic dimensions that spare-time-flesh-and-fancy barter had been her only solution to her many problems is paid off without notice or, alternatively, is promoted also at so much for so little you might as well have two secretaries.

The Circulation Manager is fired or not fired ac-cording to whether or not he was getting too much. In those far-off days (six or twelve months ago) when you needed people desperately no figure was too high for a good man. But now the job is done, and these monthly chores too have been standardized and formulated to the point where a lower-priced slavey will serve as well. Besides, you figure, it looks as if I've already sucked him dry of any idea worth a damn he ever had. May as well get a fresh angle and a new approach for my money.

All around, within the confines of your four walls, you mow them down with a two-ton scythe that has a razor-edge blade, and finish up with the very highest-quality team of people that you will continue to be in need of at the very lowest-level salaries you are any longer in need of paying them.

In your editorial column now appears the startling announcement that California Homes and Gardens, beginning with this issue, solicits the submission of all and every variety of photography suitable for its pages, which will be PAID FOR on acceptance.

Twenty thousand readers blink, rub their eyes, and read it again. The half-dozen writers' monthlies head-line the news and flash it out from coast to coast so that their fifty thousand devoted fans might see, believe, and inwardly digest this remarkable windfall.

Telegrams speed out from the Editorial Offices of these writers' magazines demanding' "market news" about this amazing new West-Coast publication. What are its requirements in fiction and non-fiction? Length for stories, and how many do they print per issue? Do they want gags, and what about non-photographic illustrations? And about their articles, feature or otherwise any special length or slant? What about payment? One cent a word, two cents a word, THREE CENTS A WORD? Payment on acceptance or on publication? And so it goes.

Very friendly, very grateful, very cooperative re-plies come back with the most encouraging information. YES, California Homes and Gardens is urgently in need of six stories for every issue, one short-short of 800 words exactly which faces the Letters to the Editor Page each issue, and one I zoo-word short-short for the kiss-off, the new feature inaugurated with such signal success in their March issue (which please refer to),. Writers, however, need not pay too much attention to these mechanical requirements provided their submissions are neither longer nor shorter than these two extremes, as sometimes they blow up the 800 word shorts to the 1200-word length, and sometimes they squeeze the 1200-woders down to the 800 size. The editor regrets that this exceptionally popular department has had comparatively so little attention from the country's writers so far. The other four stories vary in length, usually, from 2000 to 4000 words, with an occasional exception being made in favor of some-thing longer, if, in the editor's opinion, the story merits the extra space.

The nature of California Homes and Gardens' Reader-Interest may, the editor suggests, best be comprehended by a study of the pages of the magazine itself.

Similar indications are given regarding the non-fiction features but, with a pleasing frankness, the monthly departments are stated to be taboo to the all-too-willing free-lance world as they are all "staff compiled." Special accent, however, is placed on the editor's continuous and growing need of good photography. It is particularly pointed out that this photography is in no sense confined to California-contributors, but that all photography of interesting home interiors, with special accent on beautiful kitchens and bathrooms; and all photography of unusual gardens, garden-appliances, gadgets, and what not, will be carefully considered and generously paid for. Although no serials have yet been published this is a near-future possibility that is now being given serious attention.

Now you are all set. Every word of this is relayed to the fifty thousand avid aspirants, who without a moment's delay enlist themselves in your service and work and sweat for you night and day.

Imagine now certainly not less than ten or twenty thousand men and women scattered over all 48 States writing short stories for you of, say, an average length of 3000 words. This, in aggregate, is some thirty to forty-five, possibly sixty, million words that are being poured out in your behalf, and, so far, it HASN'T COST YOU ONE NICKEL. At the same time not less than two or three thousand, perhaps as many as five thousand, camera shutters are clicking, hundreds of miles of film being exposed, developed, and printed, also in your behalf, and this too, so far, HASN'T COST YOU ONE NICKEL.

It will cost you some nickels, of course. But how few, how very very few compared to the value of what you buy. For the total word length you buy each month, probably at the rate of one cent and two cents a word, with a few big names thrown in at five or ten cents a word, will not equal one per cent of the word length that has been submitted to you for your patient consideration, free of cost or obligation, from which, in terms of a gorgeous garden that has been. planted for your delectation, you will admire, and need, and therefore choose, but a half-dozen roses.

And all the rest has gone to waste, returned to the thousands of suckers who sent it in at their own expense, and now get it back at their own expense.

What a rich man you are with a staff like this to be measured in the tens of thousands, all sweating out their guts for you, hounding their wives and mistresses and lovers to death for you for novel situations, new endings, and previously-unexploited angles. And nary a one of them on your payroll!

Here is a fact: every year the Saturday Evening Post receives (and "peruses") over 8o,000 unsolicited stories. Break it down to weeks that's 1600 a week. On the basis of a five-day week it's 333 a day. Some staff they need to "read" them! And yet whatever this staff costs them it's dirt cheap compared to the wealth of material they have freely at their disposal to select each week the half-dozen or so they may be short of out of the welter of 1600 that has come in to them in the last five days.

You write. You fret the marrow out of yourself thinking up something, anything, that you can fan out to a thousand or five thousand words. You work like hell to slant it for a given medium but with your eye on the thought that maybe it won't go over there just now, so you'd better keep a half-hundred other outlets in mind as you write it so that in case it does come back (it probably will) you'll be able to send it out on the rounds.