The first book of essays of an American writer sold 6,000 copies within six months of its publication. This upset most precedents of the bookselling trade. The author’s royalties may have been $1,125. A few hundred dollars should be added to represent money received for the casual publication of the essays in magazines before their appearance in the book. Of course the volume did not stop selling at the end of six months. Compare these figures, however, with the income of one of the most popular American novelists. A single check for $75,000. Total payments, over a period of fifteen years, of $750,000 to $1,000,000. Yet it is doubtful if the books of this novelist reached more than 65 per cent. of their possible audience. It is a moderate estimate, in our opinion, that most books intended for the “general reader,” whether fiction or not, do not reach more than one-quarter of the whole body of readers each might attain. With the proper machinery of publicity and merchandising book sales in the United States could be quadrupled. We share this opinion with Harry Blackman Sell of the Chicago _Daily News_ and were interested to find it independently confirmed by James H. Collins who, writing in the _Saturday Evening Post_ of May 3, 1919, under the heading _When Merchandise Sells Itself_, said: “Book publishing is one industry that suffers for lack of retail outlets. Even the popular novel sells in numbers far below the real buying power of this nation of readers, because perhaps 25 per cent. of the public can examine it and buy it at the city bookstores, while it is never seen by the rest of the public. “For lack of quantity production based on wide retail distribution the novel sells for a dollar and a half. “But for a dollar you can buy a satisfactory watch. “That is made possible by quantity production. Quantity production of dollar watches is based on their sale in 50,000 miscellaneous shops, through the standard stock and the teaching of modern mercantile methods. Book publishers have made experiments with the dollar novel, but it sold just about the same number of copies as the $1.50 novel, because only about so many fiction buyers were reached through the bookstores. Now the standard-stock idea is being applied to books, with assortments of 50 or 100 proved titles carried by the druggist and stationer.” 2 Speaking rather offhandedly, we are of opinion that not more than two living American writers of fiction have achieved anything like a 100 per cent. sale of their books. These are Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton-Porter. I am indebted to Mr. Frank K. Reilly, president of the Reilly & Lee Company, Chicago, selling agents for the original editions of all Mr. Wright’s books, for the following figures: