In the summer of 1928, after Lloyd Douglas had combined his novel Salvage with the non-fiction material he had been working up in Exploring Your Soul, he reached out to his most recent publisher to tell them what he was doing.
Douglas’s non-fiction book, Those Disturbing Miracles, had been published by Harper and Brothers the previous year. Since its release, Harper’s Religion Editor had died and was replaced by Eugene Exman, a young man who had recently earned a Masters degree in Religion from the University of Chicago; his mentor had been Shailer Mathews. Because of the influence Mathews had on Douglas early in his career, it seemed like a good fit. (For more information on Exman, see Stephen Prothero, God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2023).)
Exman was very interested in what Douglas was doing. But there was a problem. Because the book was technically a novel and he was the Religion Editor, he had to refer the manuscript to the Literary Department. And that’s where the problem came into sharper focus: what genre was this book?
It comes down to this: publishing is a business, and it costs money to print books and distribute them to bookstores. Publishers have to believe that they will recoup their losses before they agree to publish a book. In the case of Douglas’s earlier books, they fit neatly under the heading, “Non-fiction, Religious,” and his publishers knew exactly who would buy them: ministers. All they had to do was add up the number of ministers in North America who could reasonably be expected to buy the book, and that would tell them (roughly) how much revenue the book would earn. It wouldn’t be much, but that was to be expected for religious non-fiction.
In the case of this new book, however, it wasn’t clear who would buy it… or whether anyone would. In September 1928, Exman reported to Douglas that there was “a divergence of opinion” among the members of the Literary Department, “and this divergence of opinion [about the book] largely centers on the sale possibility it has…. We all agree that your manuscript does have literary merit,” he said, but they worried that it would not sell enough copies: “in its present form we cannot be sure that it is good enough to get out of the class of ‘just another novel.’” Despite that evaluative term “good enough,” the focus was on sales. “If… you could indicate in a conservative way what demand there would be for the book [in cities] where you have friends, that would also be of distinct help to us in making a final decision as to its publication.”
On an internal memo, William H. Briggs from the Literary Department confirmed that this was the main consideration. After typing a list of suggestions for improvement from a literary standpoint, he then wrote in pen, beside his initials, an estimate of potential sales: 500 to the religious trade and 1000 to members of Douglas’s past congregations. If it was going to be presented to the public as a novel, then their goal was to sell at least ten thousand copies. Beneath this he wrote “general trade” (the general public, in other words) but was unable to make an estimate. That was the point at issue. In order for the book to reach the sales goal, it would have to appeal to the public. Douglas had written the book with a wider audience in mind, but the editors at Harper were uncertain whether the general public would be interested in such a book.
This was the main issue. If Harper did agree to publish the book, would it be most successful if packaged as a non-fiction religious book just like his others, or as a novel? Exman told Douglas that he was strongly in favor of publishing it one way or the other, and that he would push to have it released as a religious work of non-fiction if it came down to that, but he advised Douglas to make the narrative changes that Briggs and others had suggested.
Over the next two months, Douglas made some of the requested improvements. He also changed the name of the story…
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 