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April 12, 2006

Nancy Drew's Father - Part 4

Through the first years of the century, Stratemeyer and his publishers engaged in an epic publicity effort that included buying up lists of children's names and addresses, circulating a catalogue of books, and seizing every chance to cross-promote his books. Each series volume, for instance, contained a paragraph plugging the volume preceding it and the volume to come, known as the "throw-ahead." The sheer number of books that Stratemeyer produced meant that he had more leverage with publishers (he worked with several, and would move from one to another when dissatisfied) than the average author, and could better orchestrate his distribution efforts among their salesmen. He pushed cost-averse publishers to invest in a higher number of illustrations per book, and in better covers. And he kept looking for ways to expand his readership. In 1910, the formation of the Boy Scouts of America meant an open line to Stratemeyer's core audience. Immediately, he began a series about Boy Scouts, to the dismay of Scoutmasters, who complained, according to the Fortune reporter, that boys were turning up their noses at "mundane" tasks like tracking woodchucks.

None of Stratemeyer's innovations would have mattered had he not known what kids wanted to read about - "that touch in them that gets boys." The Stratemeyer fifty-center was an adventure story aimed at children between the ages of ten and sixteen; it assumed that kids, like adults, were captivated by technology of the twentieth century, and generally, tried to keep up with trends in adult fiction. Stratemeyer had, in his own prankish way, the muscle memory of children's enthusiasm for novelty. "The trouble is that very few adults get next to the heart of a boy when choosing something for him to read," he wrote in a letter to a publisher in 1901. "A wide awake lad has no patience with that which is namby-pamby, or with that which he puts down as a "study book" in disguise. He demands real flesh and blood hereos who do something."

Stratemeyer's heroes - among them the Motor Boys, the Outdoor Girls (the first girls' series, Dorothy Dale, was introduced in 1908), the Motion Picture Chums, Tom Swift, and the Bobbsey Twins - dashed about in six-cylinder racing cars or jets or balloons. "Swift by name and swift by nature" was Tom Swift's motto. Most strikingly, Stratemeyer abandoned the model of self-improvement that informed both Alger's and Patten's best-sellers. His children were already perfect - solidly middle-class "Ubermenschen", as one syndicate partner later termed them. "Manly" and "wide awake," they succeeded at whatever they turned their hand to and enjoyed utter freedom (in contrast to "firmly guarded" nineteenth-century types), typically exposing the schemes of ne'er-do-wells hoping to siphon away the fortune of an innocent orphan. Stratemeyer understood that twentieth-century children wanted a fantasy posing as reality. As Patten aptly put it, the new model was a story about "the boy that every kid would like to be. Not, mind you, the boy that every kid ought to be. That was the Horatio Alger idea."

Stratemeyer was a micromanager. During the syndicate's golden years, Stratemeyer, who lived in Newark with his wife and two daughters, would arrive in his Manhatten office at nine every morning, dictate two chapters, and then fire off a series of letters to publishers. No detail was too minor to escape his attention; once, while preoccupiedwith an important business deal, he noticed that a publisher had sent him a cover on which a Japanese life preserver bore an English name printed in tiny type, and immediately sent of a letter requiring a correction. He repeatedly accused his publishers of laziness and indifference to the success of his books, yet he had that particular gift for caustic woundedness that made other people want to do more for him. At the end of the most cutting of letters, he would sign his name in a spidery fashion, as if to suggest that his naive enthusiasm had been dealt a great blow. In an early letter to W.F. Gregory, an editor at Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, he practiced this to great effect:

Dear Mr. Gregory,
I received yesterday the package of books and have looked the two volumes over with interest. I think "The Fort in the Wilderness" is exceedingly good . . . I wish I could say as much for "Dave Porter" but I cannot. To me the pictures are poor and will do the book more harm than good. Every one of them lacks life and action. The race on the ice is tame and the knock-down blow in the gym simply awful. And what life is there in the automobile scene? I suggested lots of good things - the feast, the "rough house", the boys on the run-away trolley, the serio-comic initiations, etc. but none were used. Some day when I feel rich I am going to ask you to put in two or three new pictures at my expense.

We don't know if Stratemeyer ever felt rich, but certainly by 1920 he was rich. His books were sold in the tens of millions of copies. His writers were still struggling to make a living - they knew that the syndicate could dispose of them at any time - but he was enjoying the fruits that came to the chairman of any successful company.

To Be Continued

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April 08, 2006

Nancy Drew's Father - Part 3

In 1906, Stratemeyer had his first big idea. The Rover Boys had sold tens of thousands of copies, but Stratemeyer had hopes for more. He went to a publishing firm with a radical proposal: his new series, "The Motor Boys" (the Rover Boys with more speed), would cost fifty cents but, with its cloth hardbound covers, look like it cost twice as much. The "fifty-center" would bridge the gap between the nineteenth century's moralistic tradition and the dime novel's frontier adventures. Because the fifty-center was a hardback, unlike the dime novel, it seemed respectable to parents. And it was within range of a boy's allowance, or his wheedling skills.

At first, the publishers worried about the scant profit margin - probably three to five cents per book. But Stratemeyer thought that the books would make up in volume for the diminished profit margin per unit. He was right. The Motor Boys series quickly became "the biggest and best selling series for boys ever published," according to a publisher's blurb. When Stratemeyer repackaged the Rover Boys series in the same format, it, too, grew into a bona-fide phenomenom, selling more than six million copies by 1920. Years after Stratemeyer's death, boys were still writing to say things like "I think you write the best books ever. You know how ro put that touch in them that gets boys . . . I will always try to imitate the Rovers as much as I can."

The fifty-cent books had an advantage over their more expensive, single-volume counter parts: you could release a "breeder" set of three at once - a strategy that Stratemeyer had pioneered with the Rover Boys - to test the waters, and if the set did well, you had immediately generated an audience for the sequels. Sequels to one-off books, in contrast, tended to sell relatively poorly. By the time a fifty-cent series reached ten volumes, it was considered successful; it had captured enough faithful readers to bring in good money for writer and publisher alike.

Stratemeyer could not keep up with the demand for his stories. This prompted his second big idea: he would form a literary syndicate, which would produce books assembly-line style. From his days of working at Good News, he was acquainted with the best juvenile writers, and knew that "any one of them could have built up a 70,000-word novel from a comma, if required," as one such writer put it. By the time the Stratemeyer Syndicate was incorporated, in 1910, he was putting out ten or so juvenile series by a dozen writers under pseudonyms, and had more series in development.

Stratemeyer would come up with a three-page plot for each book, describing locale, characters, time frame, and basic story outline. He mailed this to a writer, who for a fee ranging from fifty dollars to two hundred and fifty dollars, would write the things up and - slam-bang!- send it back within a month. Stratemeyer checked the manuscripts for discrepancies, made sure that each book had exactly fifty jokes, and cut or expanded as needed. (Each series had a uniform length: the standard was twenty-five chapters.) He replaced the verb "said" with "exclaimed," "cried," "chorused," and so forth, and made sure that cliffhangers punctuated the end of each chapter - usually framed as a question or an exclamation. Each series was published under a pseudonym that Stratemeyer owned. As Fortune later noted, it was good business for children to become attached to a name, but it would be bad business for that name to leave the syndicate with the ghostwriter.

There were a few missteps in the early years. In 1906, G. Waldo Browne, an enthusuatic contract writer, wrote Stratemeyer that he had completed the first book of the "Young Builders" series that Stratemeyer had commissioned. and excitedly outlined his ideas of forthcoming volumes, including "The Young Mechanics: How They Earned the Money to Build a School House," The Young Mill Owners: How They Lifted the Mortgage from the Old Red Mill," and "The Young Manufacturers: How They Won the Great Financial Battle." Alas, Browne was informed, he had not quite "hit the nail" with Stratemeyer.


To Be Continued

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April 01, 2006

April First

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