Part 24

_Ainslee’s_ publishes yearly a total of approximately a hundred and twenty short stories (from 5,000 to 8,000 words in length), twelve novelettes (from 20,000 to 30,000) and, in monthly installments, about four serials (from 50,000 to 70,000). And, to cull this relatively small amount of fiction, innumerable manuscripts are painstakingly gone over. At a rough estimate, erring on the side of too few rather than too many, ten thousand manuscripts are submitted yearly from various sources for consideration by _Ainslee’s Magazine_. Of these, eight thousand, I should say, are absolutely unsuited to publication anywhere, while the remaining number are perhaps creditable enough, but have been sent by their authors or the authors’ agents to the wrong magazine--which brings me to the registering of a simple, but curiously disregarded, bit of advice to those whose goal is writing for magazine publication. _Study the magazine to which you contemplate submitting material._ After all, each issue of a magazine, whatsoever its character, represents the nearest approach to their ideal for the publication, which the editors have been able, at the time to achieve, and should therefore constitute a fairly good working pattern for those whose stuff is to be “aimed at” that magazine. A rejection slip from a given publication is just as apt to mean that the story, albeit distinctive, does not fit the special needs of the magazine as to indicate total unfittedness for publication anywhere.

_Ainslee’s Magazine_ aims to be a high-class, clean, distinctive fiction magazine. It has no room for, nor time for, the frankly salacious, or “sexy.” It is looking always for the proverbial good story, well told. That story may move around any clean, healthy, up-to-date theme, but it should have in it, preferably, woman and love interest. The people of the story should be human, not wooden. They should talk like you and I talk, not like Maria Edgeworth’s people “conversed.” And the tale itself must be colorful. If a story is to have any holding quality whatever, it must transfer its readers to the scene of the action. And to do this, the thing must have in it real atmosphere. Plot basis, then, along with good characterization, atmosphere, and love and woman interest are essentials for the typical _Ainslee’s_ story.

We like to think that stories in _Ainslee’s Magazine_, though varied in character, are uniformly good. We hesitate, therefore, to talk of “better and best.” But, by way of illustration of the points we have sought to make, we call attention to Marie Van Vorst’s “The Week-End Guest” in the December issue of _Ainslee’s_--a good story on all counts, and well suited to _Ainslee’s_.

HELEN L. LIEDER.

_Ainslee’s Magazine._ STREET & SMITH CORPORATION, Seventh Avenue and Fifteenth Street, New York City.

COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE

The first essential for editing a popular magazine for Americans is that the editor be a sane, normal, every-day American. No mystical genius is required.

He is merchandising a commodity to the American public. If his taste is the taste of the average American, and he puts within the covers of a magazine stories which he has enjoyed reading, other Americans of similar taste in reading will buy his magazine in quantities sufficient to make it a success.

At least, that is the theory I have followed. I know quite well that I am no genius, yet I have seen magazines grow under my direction. And I have no rule for buying a story except that it must be sufficiently interesting and sufficiently well told to interest me.

All sorts of stories interest me. Some time ago, for the satisfaction of a friend of mine, I named the ten short stories which I had liked best of all those I had published. It was interesting even to me to see how they varied. The ten stories were: BACK PAY by Fannie Hurst; HASSAYAMPA JIM by Peter B. Kyne; KAZAN by James Oliver Curwood; THE STORY I CAN’T WRITE by Rupert Hughes; THE LAST ADVENTURE by Frank R. Adams; BOSTON BLACKIE’S MARY by Jack Boyle; THE JUGGLER by Arthur Springer; THE SNIDE by Harris Merton Lyon; THE GHOST’S STORY by Basil King; THE DUMMY CHUCKER by Arthur Somers Roche. That’s about as catholic a list as I can imagine.

“Back Pay,” “The Snide” and “The Last Adventure” might be classified as “sex” stories, although I dislike that term. “The Story I Can’t Write” was a trick story; “Boston Blackie’s Mary” was a prison story; “Hassayampa Jim” was a Western story; “The Dummy Chucker” was an O’Henry-ish bit of writing; “Kazan” was a dog story; “The Ghost’s Story” was a story of the supernatural (it was the story from which Mr. King later built his photoplay “Earthbound”); “The Juggler” was a character study with an extraordinary twist in the ending.

No two of these stories in any way resembled each other. I suppose that’s because I believe in variety, not because of any rule that variety makes a good magazine, but because my taste in reading varies. I am likely this evening to read Cellini for relaxation; tomorrow evening to read Mark Twain, the following evening to read De Maupassant. I like each one of them while I am reading him, but I don’t want too much of any one of them.

That probably is true of the average reader of American magazines. He has his favorite authors but he doesn’t want too much of any of them. I think Peter B. Kyne, James Oliver Curwood, Fannie Hurst, Ben Ames Williams, and Frank R. Adams are doing the best work of any magazine writers of to-day, but I feel quite sure that a magazine filled with their work and only their work, month after month, would become a bore.

Each one of these writers is a friend of mine; yet, I am quite sure, neither they nor I would enjoy talking together every evening for a year. I find that I am the average American in virtually everything; that I like what he likes without stopping to find out why; and I believe, too, that there is no reading too good for the American public--that there is nothing real and worth while that is “over his head.”

RAY LONG.

_Cosmopolitan._ _Good Housekeeping._ _Harper’s Bazar._ _Hearst’s Magazine._ 119 West 40th Street, New York City.

THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN

The _Country Gentleman_ addresses a class of readers whose interests are keyed to country life and the industry of agriculture. This field is big enough to include more than half of the nation’s population. Our editorial problem is not one of tying in narrowly to scientific discussions of only the growing phases of farming but ranges throughout the innumerable business and social problems of the American country-side. It is our aim to discuss everything that should help to broaden the farmer’s vision of his own problems and also of all interrelated problems that help to make him a vital factor as a citizen of the United States.

In presenting fiction, we aim, so far as possible, to confine the themes to country life and the open spaces of the world outdoors. We eschew jazzily up-to-date urbanized fiction, sex novels, the eternal triangle and the purely psychologic story. Naturally we will always give a preference to fiction related to farming by first-class writers who are thoroughly familiar with farming.

It is our feeling that the American farmer is interested in everything that has any contact with country life. Hunting and fishing and outdoor adventure are his life-long sports. He has a deep and genuine affection for animals that serve him. He manifests a very live interest in stories that deal with his marketing problems, and his ever-pressing problem of financing his business. He has an alert interest in his schools, his newspapers, in local, state and national government. He enjoys character studies and has a vastly sharper sense of humor than he is commonly credited with. Likewise he is a shrewd critic and quickly resents the sort of attempted slurs that are so frequently made upon rural folk by those who are wholly ignorant of farming.

We feel justified in being guided by several successful experiments we have made with our fiction. We persuaded Mr. Freeman Tilden, who is a farmer himself and thoroughly familiar with all phases of agriculture, to create a character in Old Man Crabtree who might be defined as “a Wallingford baiter.” Mr. Crabtree is a shrewd retired country banker. His experience had taught him all the tricks of “high finance” and he was always on the lookout for the specialists in shoddy and sham when they came to town. In the climax the skinners were invariably neatly flayed by Old Man Crabtree. These stories of Mr. Tilden were real and drew in a continuous flow of favorable comment.

Zane Grey has always been able to strike a responsive chord with the lovers of outdoor life, of whom the American farmer is undoubtedly in the majority. They like his descriptions of the frontier as it was in the 70’s and they seem to be keen for his vigorous characters, notwithstanding how strenuous.

We like good dog stories of the sort Albert Payson Terhune has been writing for us. And we like small town stories when they are as good as those Tom P. Morgan is writing; but then, Tom Morgan lived these stories for fifty years before he began to write them.

The great majority of our contributors have specialized in some agricultural pursuit. Many of them are living on their farms and conducting them as successful business enterprises. We number among our most valued contributors the heads of leading agricultural colleges, federal and state government experts, graduates of agricultural colleges who are now devoting all their time to writing, county agricultural agents, engineers who are specializing in agricultural mechanics and so on. Among them are such well-known men as Eugene Davenport, Dean of the Illinois College of Agriculture, Herbert Quick, until recently a member of the Federal Farm Loan Board, Frank A. Waugh, Professor of Horticulture, Massachusetts College of Agriculture, E. V. Wilcox and J. Sidney Cates, for many years employed as farm management experts by the United States Department of Agriculture, and P. S. Lovejoy, Professor of Forestry, University of Michigan.

Such writers as I have described above supply the bulk of the contents of _The Country Gentleman_ and consequently to preserve a balanced ration, as a livestock feeder would say, we try our utmost to obtain the sort of fiction that will round out the ensemble.

BARTON W. CURRIE.

_The Country Gentleman._ CURTIS PUBLISHING CO., Independence Square, Philadelphia, Pa.

THE DELINEATOR

We _Delineator_ editors think that we know a good story when we see it; _vide_ the magazine. Yet no issue of the magazine, and perhaps no six issues, contain all the types of good stories that we like.

The average intelligent American woman or girl, in the home or in business, is the person we have chiefly in mind when choosing stories. The above-the-average woman, of course, is not forgotten.

Nor do we exclude any special type of story. We prefer stories that will interest everyone--men, women and high-brows--but we want stories for women first. Other things being equal, the hero should be a woman. We think we have no prejudices and we certainly have no rules.

JAMES E. TOWER.

_The Delineator._ THE BUTTERICK PUBLISHING CO., Spring and Macdougal Streets, New York City.

THE DESIGNER

Both Arthur Tomalin, the editor, and Emily R. Burt, his assistant, felt hesitant to express their ideas on what constituted a good and therefore a desirable story for _The Designer_. They both made much of the fact that a story to appeal to women readers should mirror life as it is, and as it daily affects the great body of both men and women who are seeking to weather its problems and complexities. Sympathy and understanding are perhaps the two qualities upon which they put greatest stress.

_The Designer._ THE BUTTERICK PUBLISHING CO. 12 Vandam Street, New York City.

THE DIAL

I do not believe it is possible to formulate any laws in accordance with which one can judge the merit of fiction any more than it is possible to formulate such laws for the judgment of any other æsthetic object. In deciding whether or not we accept for publication in _The Dial_ a story submitted to us we are guided almost wholly by the intensity of the impression made upon us by that story. Of course the means by which the author attains this intensity are very varied and of course each manner of attack presupposes its own technique. However, it would be inappropriate for me in this letter to endeavour to sketch out my personal opinion of what would be the technique of any particular type of story.

But of course all stories, whatever their character, depend in part for their intensity upon the delicacy of the writer’s perception of verbal values as well as upon the delicacy of his perception of character and environment. And of course prose rhythms are quite as important as those in verse.

Perhaps I might add that my personal feeling is that dialogue is much over-done in American fiction of to-day and that the best writers depend upon it merely to relieve pure narrative.

I regard fiction as quite as pure an art as poetry or as music and therefore give no preference to one story because it delineates real life rather than Ultima Thule.

I am sorry I am not able to go into the subject more thoroughly and more satisfactorily.

SCOFIELD THAYER.

_The Dial._ 152 West 13th Street, New York City.

DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE

_Detective Story Magazine_ is a weekly publication. It is therefore a large market, and is constantly in need of short stories of 2,500 to 6,000 or 7,000 words, novelettes of 12,000 or 15,000, and novels of 25,000 words. Serials should run from 36,000 to 100,000 words in length, and break up approximately in about 12,000 word installments.

It must not be deduced that only detective stories are needed for this publication. When one speaks of a detective story we think of a narrative which begins with the murder of somebody, the police being called in, and then the efforts of the police or the efforts of some wise investigator of crime to solve the mystery of who killed the deceased. Of course, this story with variations--if it is well done--is always acceptable. While we are dealing with it we might say that, in general, such stories are divided into two types, one in which the method is the predominating theme, and the other in which the motive is played up prominently. The first type of story suggests the puzzle. There is always a type of mind which revels in puzzles. A person mysteriously disappears from a room, and after wading through 60,000 or 70,000 words, mostly questions and answers, we learn that the method of removing the body was through, we will say, the fireplace, which was on hinges. Of course, this is the easiest type of detective story to write, and, as is quite obvious, it is written backwards. We mean by that, an author first evolves an ingenious method of killing some one, or of removing some one, and then builds about this a story, leaving the disclosure of the method of killing or removal to the end of the story. We think a far better way to do this story, and a way that interests more people, is to have the motive the predominating feature. The method by which, we will say, a young woman disappears, either through her own efforts or through the efforts of others, is interesting enough in its way, but that which interests the public generally, and her friends in particular, is not how she disappeared, so much as why she disappeared.

Now to take up the other types of stories that _Detective Story Magazine_ is interested in: We are glad to consider any story into which crime enters. When one stops to consider a moment, one must realize how important a feature crime is in the life of every person. In using the word crime, we mean deception in any form. All persons constantly resort to some types of deception. Thus the crime story, so called, lends itself to an infinite variety of situations from the Atlantic to the Pacific. For instance, in almost every family there is the urge for money, in many for the bare necessities of life, while in others simply for more luxury. Thus hundreds of thousands of persons are being sorely tempted every day to deceive. The stories of their temptations cannot help, if well told, but be interesting. Above all things in a detective story or a crime story, the narrative must get on, move along. While character work is much desired, it is demanded that this type of story have suspense and be written in such a way that one is urged on from page to page to see what is going to happen next. While this can be accomplished without dramatic situations and unexpected happenings occurring every so often, it is usually found necessary to resort to these methods for keeping up interest. Authors must not fall into the common mistake, however, of feeling that when we say a story should get on we simply mean that there should be action, physical movement in it. Running up and down stairs alone does not make for excitement, but very often does make for confusion. Also, saying that people are excited or nervous or in fear does not interest the reader very much. The author must show by the actions of his characters that they are excited or frightened. A crime story, then, is one which gets on, has plenty of strong situations, and in which the motive, conflict, is the dominating feature. It is, perhaps, needless to add that in a crime story the author must be fair to his readers--that is, he must not explain the mystery by introducing a reason for the commission of the crime of which the reader has not been made aware.

F. E. BLACKWELL.

_Detective Story Magazine._ STREET AND SMITH, 79 Seventh Avenue, New York City.

EVERYBODY’S MAGAZINE

That word “Everybody’s” is the watchword of _Everybody’s_ fiction. And what it means is simply that in choosing stories the editors of _Everybody’s_ bear in mind an audience of “regular folks,” with a large variety of tastes and with tastes for different things at different times. We are not thinking specifically of business men. Nor specifically of professional men. Nor of women merely as club members. Nor of women merely as housewives. We are thinking of the splendid average of folks, with normal human interests and normal human emotions. And we take stories with a view to offering in each number a well-balanced ration of these interests and emotions, stories of love, adventure, business, sentiment, children, humor, sport; of city and country; of rich and poor.

The only types of stories that are barred are those that lack wide contact with the average human experience--that depict fantastic or morbid or unreal motives or isolated emotional reactions. This does not necessarily bar an occasional use of morbid experience, soundly based--such as “The Wrists on the Door,” by Horace Fish, a horror story, strange and fantastic in atmosphere, with a big truth at the bottom of it.

It is our guess that the largest group of people reads for sheer entertainment, and with two motives--unconscious, perhaps; either to gain a heightened sense of their own situations, their own personalities through reading stories of their own sort of life; or to be transported by reading as by magic from their own environment into another world. And we have a notion that, as the worry and perplexity of life increase, the eagerness to _gain escape_ through reading increases too. That is why _Everybody’s_ has stressed stories of adventurous action--such as Charles Saxby’s “In Camera,” Clarence B. Kelland’s “Cheese in the Trap,” David Churchill’s “Igor’s Trail,” Edison Marshall’s “The Elephant Remembers.” That is the reason for an intensification of the search for humor--for Dorothy De Jagers’ cheerful New York stories and for Samuel Hopkins Adams’ “Cab Sir?” reprinted in this volume as a story on which _Everybody’s_ readers expressed themselves with cordial approval.

At the same time--paradoxical as it may seem--_Everybody’s_ has not barred war stories. We do not believe it is possible to ask real writers to shut the doors on the most tremendous experience of their lives--and still do their best work. We hold a high standard for war stories, but the story itself is the test and such a piece of work as James Hopper’s “The Scoop of Charles Hamilton Potts” goes over as easily as a love idyll.

As for length, there is no rigid requirement. Short stories are preferred, in order to make possible the maximum of variety in each number, but ten thousand words won’t kill a story of our sort that is worth--ten thousand words.

Cleanness is a requisite--cleanness without priggishness or sentimental dishonesty; open-eyed wholesomeness that strengthens one’s faith in human nature.

VIRGINIA RODERICK.

_Everybody’s Magazine._ Spring and Macdougal Streets, New York City.

FARM AND FIRESIDE

We want good fiction for _Farm and Fireside_, and we will pay good money for it. The only kind we don’t want is the extreme stuff--sexy-pink-tea and blood-and-thunder. We don’t demand a farm setting. Aside from that, we have no specifications. Just one request:

If you are not interested in selling your best stories to a publication that is made for men and women who farm, please do not waste your postage and our time.

As to length--3,000 to 5,000 words for short stories, and up to 10,000 for two-part, and 15,000 for three-part serials.

We pay on acceptance, price to fit quality; no limit.

Address Editor, _Farm and Fireside_, 381 Fourth Avenue, New York City.

GEORGE MARTIN.

_Farm and Fireside._ THE CROWELL PUBLISHING CO., 381 Fourth Avenue, New York City.

THE FORUM

_The Forum_ is not publishing fiction. My own personal view, however, is that a serious magazine should print some fiction, and in the course of time _The Forum_ will.

If I should be the one selecting the fiction by that time, I would look for intelligence and imagination.

GEORGE HENRY PAYNE.

_The Forum._ 118 East 28th Street, New York City.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE

_Harper’s Magazine_ is constantly seeking the work of new writers, and it probably publishes more stories by hitherto unknown writers than any other fiction periodical of reputable standing.

_Harper’s Magazine_ has no editorial prejudices, and does not ask its contributors to make their work conform to any fixed or arbitrary specifications. There is no such thing as a “Harper type” of story. Any story is acceptable which in dignity of conception and quality of workmanship has real value, provided it is also interesting.

Stories of a youthful turn, with a glimmer of humor, are particularly desired. Three thousand to seven thousand words is the preferred length.

LEE FOSTER HARTMAN.

_Harper’s Magazine._ Franklin Square, New York City.

JUDGE

_Judge’s_ need is for honest-to-goodness humor, the short story (under a thousand words) that forces a healthy chuckle, the poem that tickles the fancy and stirs the risibles (whatever they are) and the good old-fashioned joke with a modern setting and a sophisticated idea. Clean fun, smart fun, spontaneous fun expressed in any literary form will be acceptable and paid for generously.

_Judge’s_ circulation is booming; that is happening only because this magazine is human, modern, entertaining, American and very often genuinely humorous.

PERRITON MAXWELL.

_Judge._ 225 Fifth Avenue, New York City.

LESLIE’S