"Dime Authorship"
October 11 2022
I've returned to the Nickels and Dimes website, and this time read the other article I was very very interested in, titled 'Authorship'. I haven't found a lot of information on actual dime novel authors up until this point, which is too bad, because the nature of being a dime novelist would be really helpful info! This post (by Matthew Short) was very helpful in filling in some gaps, thankfully, and I also got some interesting points from one of the books I picked up back in September, Selling the Wild West by Christine Bold. Here's some of what I learned!
Being an author wasn't always a very lucrative business in America. Many literary newspapers and story papers simply pirated already popular stories from England, by authors like Charles Dickens, for "low risk and high reward, because there were no international copyright laws" (Short). However, "by the 1840s, there was a greater demand for fiction, which made competition between publishers more fierce" (Short), and suddenly, finding fresh, new material was very lucrative. Soon came the rise of literary celebrities. Nicely enough, many of these celebrated authors were female; Metta Victor, E.D.E.N. Southworth, and Ann S. Stephens are a few ladies celebrated for their fine work. However, just as it is today, many authors were exploited for their work by the publishers that they worked for - while one would become rich, the other would struggle to remain relevant. There was also an issue in protecting 'house names'. If a series became popular, many publishing companies would attempt to steal the likeness of the main character to get draw fans in to their own publications. Again, this is another case where the actual author is neglected.
Dime authorship quickly became more of a numbers game. In Selling the Wild West , Bold explains the concept of the "fiction factory" (Bold, 18). That is, the very capitalistic viewpoint many authors had on their trade. A lot of aspiring writers recognized that publishing companies had become very reliant on the Western formula, and creativity was not really valued by them. To make money, you essentially had to commit to writing cheap, simplistic, repetitive genre fiction. One writer from the famous Beadle and Adams publishing company said "'A writer is neither better nor worse than any other man who happens to be in trade. He is a manufacturer.'" (Bold, 19).
However, lots of authors made sure to have their way in being creative nonetheless. Ned Buntline of Buffalo Bill fame is slated as inserting himself into his work as a character, the Narrator (Bold, 22). Some authors prided themselves in being more historically accurate, even biographical. Others developed their own unique authorial voices. While the industry was tough, plenty of authors prevailed in sending authentic, original work into the world.