PUBLISHING: How To Sell a Novel

What makes a best-seller sell—its own worth or somebody else's salesmanship?

Last week E. P. Button & Co., Inc. hoped that it had the answer. Last year it received a manuscript from tall, red-blonde, good-looking Nancy Bruff, 29, wife of Manhattan investment broker Edwin Thurston Clarke. Titled The Manatee, it was a tale of the life and loves of a whaler. Immediately Button's sensed another Forever Amber.

Button's has already spent $20,000, expect to spend at least $40,000 by Christmas for advertising. The ads featured the well-endowed author and the well-endowed ship's figurehead printed on the book's dust jacket. (The New York Times balked on one ad until one sixty-fourth of an inch was erased from the figurehead's bosom.)

Author Bruff had written, and failed to publish, six previous novels. She had put her husband to sleep reading them to him. But she had kept him wide awake with The Manatee. An acquaintance made a businesslike suggestion: hire a press agent to sell the Bruff product in a businesslike way. Her husband approved. She hired Hollywood's Russell Birdwell for $50,000 for two years. Chief theme of his publicity: Miss Bruff, a free and gifted soul, had escaped or been expelled from almost every school she had attended.

Last week The Manatee was published. The critics fell on it like harpooners. Groaned the N.Y. Times: "All the faults of the born non-storyteller are here in heaping measure. . . ." Said the N.Y. Sun: ". . . no order, no command over her material, no style . . . Miss Bruff has run away from too many schools."

Nothing daunted, Button's & Birdwell went on sending out movie-like Bruff art (see cut) and Bruff blurbs. Last week, the results began to come in. One week after publication, The Manatee had sold 52,000 copies. (Author Bruff's cut: $24,000.) The Manatee had also been accepted for the Armed Services Edition. Both Button's and Nancy Bruff were already well on their way to getting their investment back—and then some. Even book reviewers began to see things in a new light. Said the persnickety New Yorker: "... a first novel by a writer of unmistakable talent."