The World of Chance by William Dean Howells

Ray would have liked to go again that day, and give Mr. Brandreth his / new address in person; but he was afraid it would seem too eager, and / would have a bad effect on the fortunes of his book. He mastered himself / so far that even the next day he did not go, but sent it in a note. Then / he was sorry he had done this, for it might look a little too / indifferent; that is, he feigned that it might have this effect; but / what he really regretted was that it cut him off from going to see Mr. / Brandreth as soon as he would have liked. It would be absurd to run to / him directly after writing. He languished several days in the heroic / resolution not to go near Chapley & Co. until a proper time had passed; / then he took to walking up and down Broadway, remote from their place at / first, and afterwards nearer, till it came to his pacing slowly past / their door, and stopping at their window, in the hope that one or other / of the partners would happen upon him in some of their comings or / goings. But they never did, and he had a faint, heart-sick feeling of / disappointment, such as he used to have when he hung about the premises / of his first love in much the same fashion and to much the same effect.

He cajoled himself by feigning interviews, now with Mr. Chapley and now / with Mr. Brandreth; the publishers accepted his manuscript with / transport, and offered him incredible terms. The good old man's voice / shook with emotion in hailing Ray as the heir of Hawthorne; Mr. / Brandreth had him up to dinner, and presented him to his wife and baby; / he named the baby for them jointly. As nothing of this kind really / happened, Ray's time passed rather forlornly. Without being the richer / for it, he won the bets he made himself, every morning, that he should / not get a letter that day from Chapley & Co., asking to see him at once, / or from Mr. Brandreth hoping for the pleasure of his company upon this / social occasion or that. He found that he had built some hopes upon Mr. / Brandreth's hospitable regrets; and as he did not know how long it must / be after a happiness of the kind Mrs. Brandreth had conferred upon her / husband before her house could be set in order for company, he was / perhaps too impatient. But he did not suffer himself to be censorious; / he was duly grateful to Mr. Brandreth for his regrets; he had not / expected them; but for them he would not have expected anything.

He did what he could to pass the time by visiting other publishers with / Mr. Brandreth's card. He perceived sometimes, or fancied that he / perceived, a shadow of anxiety in the gentlemen who received him so / kindly, but it vanished, if it ever existed, when he put himself frankly / on the journalistic ground, and satisfied them that he had no manuscript / lurking about him. Then he found some of them willing to drop into chat / about the trade, and try to forecast its nearer future, if not to / philosophize its conditions. They appeared to think these were all / right; and it did not strike Ray as amiss that a work of literary art / should be regarded simply as a merchantable or unmerchantable commodity, / or as a pawn in a game, a counter that stood for a certain money value, / a risk which the player took, a wager that he made.

"You know it's really that," one publisher explained to Ray. "_No_ one / can tell whether a book will succeed or not; no one knows what makes a / book succeed. We have published things that I've liked and respected / thoroughly, and that I've taken a personal pride and pleasure in / pushing. They've been well received and intelligently praised by the / best critics from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and cultivated people / have talked about them everywhere; and they haven't sold fifteen hundred / copies. Then we've tried trash -- decent trash, of course; we always / remember the cheek of the Young Person -- and we've all believed that we / had something that would hit the popular mood, and would leap into the / tens of thousands; and it's dropped dead from the press. Other works of / art and other pieces of trash succeed for no better reason than some / fail. You can't tell anything about it. If I were to trust my own / observation, I should say it was _luck_, pure and simple, and mostly bad / luck. Ten books fail, and twenty books barely pay, where one succeeds. / Nobody can say why. Can't I send you some of our new books? " He had a / number of them on a table near him, and he talked them over with Ray, / while a clerk did them up; and he would not let Ray trouble himself to / carry them away with him. They were everywhere lavish of their / publications with him, and he had so many new books and advance sheets / given him that if he had been going to write his letters for the _Echo_ / about literature alone, he would have had material for many weeks ahead.