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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
Posted by mysterygamers at April 8, 2006 02:06 PM