The Selling of US Grant II
Bill Long 1/29/06
The Book Canvassers Take Over
Friedman tells us that Grant's book was put out in two volumes of 600 octavo pages each. Books sold by traveling book salesmen in the period were at least 600 pages per volume. Twain's company, Webster & Co. began to solicit subscriptions for the Personal Memoirs in Spring 1885, though publicationn, of course, would not happen until after Grant's death (It was published in December 1885). The book was sold almost completely by subscription--a point which requires us to take a detour into the world of book promotion in the 1880s.
Book Canvassers
After the Civil War the nation's booksellers found a ready market in the hinterlands (i.e., outside of the major--about 7--cities) for books. They discovered that prospective buyers, mostly farmers and residents of small towns, wanted substantial books and that the most effective way to get books to these people was to deliver them in person. Bookstores there were in America, but they were confined to the large cities. Thus, for the millions of people living in the country, the booksellers created the idea of a book subscription (you would order one) through an agent or canvasser who would come to your door to sell you the book. Twain's firm didn't actually publish the book until it had a certain number of subscriptions (such as 50,000 or so for Huckleberry Finn), so the work of the canvassers was of great importance for the success of the book. Even if the book had already been published (which is how many firms worked), the canvasser would only have excerpts from the book for prospective customers to read--no doubt the "juiciest" parts of the narrative. For example, in the early 20th century canvassers were out trying to sell books about the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley. They would bring along a print or two which showed the bullet holes in McKinley's body or a descriptive narrative of how he was shot, as a "come-on" for the prospective buyers.
Whenever you had book canvassers, however, you had to have sales pitches and products to show to prospective buyers, along with advice to the salesmen on how to deal with any situation with which they were likely to be confronted. Friedman goes into some detail about the advice to salesmen (never let go of the book, but turn the pages for the buyer; when leaving the home, never turn your back on a customer, but retreat with a kind of side-ways walk, smiling and waving as you go). The manuals imagined exchanges with potential customers:
"Customer: 'I bought some worthless book once, and was completely sold.' Agent: 'Yes, that was poor affair. No Agent of good sense and good principle ever could handle that book. That is one of the kinds of books we are crowding out of the market..." (Friedman, p. 41).
The Book Canvasser and the Grant Personal Memoirs
Webster & Co. began taking subscription orders for the two-volume Personal Memoirs in March 1885. They employed 16 general agents and around 10,000 canvassers, 200 of whom worked in New York and Brooklyn alone. An insight into the marketing strategy of Mark Twain emerges from a letter he wrote:
"Canvassers must be given streets or portions of streets in New York--all outlying districts to be canvassed first--then the cream of the city to be given to the canvassers who have done the best" (cited in Friedman, p. 45).
The canvassers then fanned out across the nation, securing orders from all. Of course sales in the South were rather slow, but in the rest of the country there was an astonishing response. All knew that Grant was, figuratively speaking, on his deathbed (even as he worked in pain to compose the memoirs), and when news broke late in July that Grant had died, the rush for his memoirs was intense. Twain instructed his nephew Webster to hire veterans as canvassers and encourage them to wear their Grand Army of the Republic badges, which would make it harder for prospective customers to turn them down (it would be like telling a firefighter who came to your door in the wake of 9/11 that you didn't want to contribute for families of lost NYC firefighters).
Twain even went to far as to have his firm publish a 37-page manual for canvassers on how to promote General Grant's Personal Memoirs (which only covered his family history, service in the Mexican War of 1845 and the Civil War). For example, the canvasser was supposed to begin with the following line: "I called to give you an opportunity to see General Grant's book...." You can tell that sales would be huge.
Actual Sales and Financial Arrangements
On publication day late in 1885, agents had 200,000 copies available to them. 19,000 alone were shipped to San Francisco, with 60,000 to Chicago (for service to the Midwest), 40,000 to New England and 50,000 to Pennsylvania and Delaware. By 1886 the sale of Grant's memoirs, Friedman tells us, reached 325,000 in the United States. Within a year of her husband's death, Julia Grant received a check for $200,000 (worth $4 million today) from Webster & Co. The family eventually received more than $420,000 as their share of the book's royalties.
Through this experience book publishers and their canvassers saw that the sky was the limit if you had the right book, the right author and the right timing. All had come together perfectly in the case of President/General/cancer sufferer Grant. I am sure that Twain and his nephew would be glad to mourn some other deaths soon thereafter.
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