Dear Mr. Woodworth: I have recently returned from a trip to China, followed by a summer on Martha's Vineyard, to find the back issues of your very interesting and novel publication, along with your cordial letter.Each author has a slightly different take on why his or her series was discontinued by Grosset and Dunlap during the 1960s. Margaret Sutton, Helen Wells, and others felt that their series were discontinued due to pressure placed upon Grosset and Dunlap by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. From the above letter, Cavanna apparently blamed it on the feminist movement.
I had fun writing the Connie Blair series, which was off my beaten track but attempted in an effort to improve the writing in this genre. They sold quite well in hard-cover and paperback for a number of years, but were eventually dropped when the women's lib movement accelerated to the point where children's books came under scrutiny.
Connie, alas, in one of the books apparently used her attractive appearance as a stepping stone to a better job. What a gaffe! Girls are supposed to get ahead on their own ability, never on their good looks.
I think it is both entertaining and interesting that you've reviewed the series in your magazine.—Betty Cavanna (Mrs. Elizabeth C. Harrison)
In truth, Grosset and Dunlap was lax in its promotions for its various series. The publisher had a successful enterprise in which it did not have to do anything in order to keep making sales, particularly for the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. Lack of promotion is most likely the reason why all of the independent series ended. Ultimately, the Stratemeyer Syndicate sold the publishing rights to new titles in its series to Simon and Schuster since it was dissatisfied with Grosset and Dunlap's lack of promotion. From 1979 on, all new Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys titles have been published by Simon and Schuster. Grosset and Dunlap maintains the rights to just the original hardcover titles of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books.
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The Mystery and Adventure Series Review is an interesting magazine. I have an index of the contents of the older issues on my Series Book Magazine Index.
I have long been puzzled by the firm opinions expressed by Margaret Sutton and others which indicated that their series were pushed aside due to strong-arm tactics by the Stratemeyer Syndicate.
For one thing, a number of its series also died in the 1960s as sales of all books contracted. The 1950s saw strong sales as the Baby Boom Generation (lets call it kids born between 1946 and 1952 for the largest part of the wave) entered into series book reading age. By the early 1960s, the number of kids in the right age group was much smaller. Also, color television was making serious inroads in the early 1960s and this was another competing factor for kids' spare time.
Second, the Syndicate could not get what they wanted from Grosset & Dunlap either. Your sense about their failure to promote series is consistent with what I have seen by examining letters at the Stratemeyer Syndicate Records Collection at NYPL.
Grosset & Dunlap issued semiannual royalty statements and there are fairly regular exchanges between the publisher and the Syndicate where the publisher presents the royalty statement and remarks that it is the largest check thus far. However, since the number of volumes increased each year, along with the retail prices, the actual sales per volume dropped. Harriet Adams recognized this.
Shortly before Edward Stratemeyer died, he worked out a new royalty plan for the series where he would get 2c on a 50c book. That's 4% when it used to be 2.5c (5%). Today a lot of publishers pay 10% but I think that G&D's norm was 5% for the independent authors.
G&D stubbornly stuck to this lower percentage rate as long as the Syndicate stayed in business and no amount of persuasion from Harriet would cause them to change it. As production expenses would go up, the prices would be increased and the same 4% royalty would be paid.
G&D's books started to appear in the catalogs from the department stores and they seemed to rest on their oars rather than actively pursue new sales. They got money from the foreign publishers who wanted to issue the books (shared with the Syndicate, I believe) but they mainly coasted.
Soon titles from a series went out of print and it was not cost effective to reprint them. The pictorial cover format was introduced in 1962 for most G&D series. This sometimes required new artwork, especially for the books that did not yet have the wraparound style of art for the 1961 dust jackets since the proportions were a little different.
G&D had already shown great resistance to making a new cover for Secret of the Old Clock when the 1959 text came out. They had already paid for the Bill Gillies art in 1949 so why have a new cover just because it didn't match the new story? Here, too, Harriet tried to be persuasive but a new cover did not come for several more years.
Part of what made these books were their popular prices (50c in 1930, $1 in 1960, etc). However, these same low prices limited what the publisher would change due to expense of printing plates, artwork, etc. Even going from the traditional printing plates to the new offset printing, which used plastic sheets instead of copper, cost as much as a new story. I would not be surprised if the older titles by the independent authors remained in the old-style printing plates with only the post-1957 books using the new method.
G&D's pricing structure required careful control of expenses. Every penny in the production cost counted. If the amount paid to the Syndicate for one of its books was slightly less than that for the independent authors, it's not too surprising that the Syndicate books might get preferential treatment by G&D in the form of better placement in their catalogs or more push by their sales force.
Note that G&D had the fold-out ads in 1964 which promoted all of the series, Syndicate and independent. A Rick Brant multi-page ad appeared in a few Hardy Boys volumes well into the picture cover era. This is not the sort of thing you'd expect to see if the Syndicate had their own way with G&D. From the evidence I have seen, they did not.
James Keeline
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