The Montgomery advertiser., 1901-12-13

Nothing is there which does not sell
 which has not proved to be in the strug-
 gle for bargains the fittest for puylng.
 Remember. too, that the vass s,,,u suDscrp xaars ago sold gilded emptiness, Is now carrylns
 to the buyer sets and sets of standard novels, so that a half dozen. all shapeiy'
 will be dsputing the std at adroit Shce postal cards" what sell book nowadays, we are told but advertisements. By them, says MT Williams, a book of a certain average popular quality can be forced on the
 public "as certainly as .cohjurer de- cides what card In the pack you are 10 draw"
 Given a certain amount of advertis- ing in the papers. and the great depart ment stores must buy certain numper of new novel, graduated to the pur-
 licity purchased in the papers. sure 10 Book advertising was once decorous semi-annual display In certain papers, assumed to reach the reading public.
 Today the reading public Is everybody as much as it is for a patent medicine. At least eight patent medicine firms year ly spend about $5OO,000 each in advertis- ing. Book publicity has not reached this level, but 1t Is moving along this line. At its birth, new fiction must shine in full-robed advertisements if 1t Is to raise flood tide. The unvarying success or an Indianapolis hrm-good as it's novels have been from the popular viewpoint. | has been due quite as much to its skill in advertising as in its prescience in se- lecting its fiction. I have known the | new work of an author who had won
 but 2 moderate vogue to the e, swept ,esal inoG o9 | thousands by the ingenious device of sending out 250,000 little enticing flyers, stamped with feur de lis, which spoke | its praise to the legion customers of a | Hoe c0rtafy The best-selling novels In America, this | writer reminds us. are American in char acter. They have no touch or any other
 method in fiction. He believes that , the ie | wants, has ceased reading extensively new foreign books.
 The new foreign novel once cast a long shadow in which the American au- | thor chilled and grew stunted. The eight or ten novels this year reaching the larg, l est circulation are all by Americans and young Americans at that. The first sign
 of serious fission between the tastes or | Beth Book missed the sale here 1t had | In England. 'Babs the Impossible in
 which Mrs. Grand continues to air the intellectual underwear of the immature girl or woman with the reckless disre- gard of @ village street on Monday | washday. has made no perceptible im-
 presslon; In like way; the Crisis has
 English fiction sales here are large
 enough to make them desired of English
 authors, but they make no impression , On the other hand, the foreign novel (and by this MT. Williams means the non | English) fills place in American criti- cal literature which. in his judgment. 1t
 has not hitherto had in popular ae,is reading. fa | year but few hundreds of a book"
 The growing note of popular A, American CT an
 ton. What the public wants is crowded
 incident, chapters of continuous .rs. dia.
 mere novel of social incident has al.
 most ceased" Another characteristic of
 the American novels most in demand
 he finds to be their falling into sec tions" He says that classes have be- gun to make their claims"
 More and more, and most of all in the
 past year, the American novel addresses itself to a region, a state, a community
 and within its appointed lgeographica limits the essential solidarity of Ameri- can life is instinctively recognized. This
 Is as true of A Daughter of France. by Miss Mary Catherine Crowley, dealing
 with early Detroit, or Lazarre,' by Mrs
 Mary Hartwell Catherwood.