The word “royalty” has a fine sound. It is a purple word and opens vistas to the outsider of luxury and ease. Yet in its literary application it is the biggest humbug and liar of a word that ever masqueraded for what it is not. There are plenty of “royalties” that will not pay the third-class return fare between London and Penzance. A great personal friend of mine, a man of culture and real love of human event, wrote his first novel three years ago. He had something definite to say, knew how to say it, and had a first-rate plot. For months and months I saw him toiling lovingly at his novel. When it was written he found a publisher willing to produce it, and it duly appeared. In almost every case the reviews were extremely laudatory. Papers of position and weight praised it unreservedly, to all appearances the book was a definite success--a minor success, no doubt, but a success. From first to last his earnings realized five pounds, and neither he nor I have reason to believe that his publisher cheated him in the matter of sales. Here is the written testimony of what I say, given by an author who died after producing four or five really excellent and successful novels. “Take, then, an unusually lucky instance, literally a novel whose success is extraordinary, a novel which has sold 2500 copies. I repeat that this is an extraordinary success. Not one book out of fifteen will do as well. But let us consider it. The author has worked upon it for--at the very least--six months. It is published. Twenty-five hundred copies are sold. Then the sale stops. And by the word stop one means cessation in the completest sense of the word. There are people--I know plenty of them--who suppose that when a book is spoken of as having stopped selling, a generality is intended, that merely a falling off of the initial demand has occurred. Error. When a book--a novel--stops selling, it stops with a definiteness of an engine when the fire goes out. It stops with a suddenness that is appalling, and thereafter not a copy, not one single, solitary copy is sold. And do not for an instant suppose that ever after the interest may be revived. A dead book can no more be resuscitated than a dead dog.