Free Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind by Ellen F. Brown, Jr. John Wiley Page A

Gone With the Wind . To earn a profit on such a lengthy book, Macmillan would have to raise the price or cut its costs. The publisher decided to do both.
    Depending on how well the book sold, a suggested retail price of $2.75 or $3.00—both of which were at the top end of the market for fiction—would be needed for the firm to break even. Yet, the Macmillan sales team was worried that a high price tag would scare away readers. With the nation in the throes of the Great Depression, disposable income was scarce. Only one other publisher in recent memory was known to have asked readers to part with $3.00 for a novel—Farrar & Rinehart for Anthony Adverse , an epic historical saga of 1,244 pages published in 1933. Cost had not hampered that book’s success; it had gone on to be a mega bestseller. Was Gone With the Wind good enough to carry the same price as Anthony Adverse ? The team approached George Brett with the dilemma. According to Macmillan lore, Brett heard what the sales and marketing people had to say and then leaned back in his chair and asked if Mitchell’s book could possibly be as good as everyone said. When they assured him of its merits, he told them to go with $3.00. If it was that good, people would want it, he said. 11 It was a bold decision, of which Brett was proud the rest of his life. 12
    To further protect its bottom line, Macmillan also decided that Mitchell should accept a reduced royalty. According to the contract, Macmillan owed her 10 percent of the suggested retail price on the first ten thousand copies of the book sold, and 15 percent on any copies beyond that. The firm now wanted her to accept a 10 percent royalty on all copies of the book, with no increased percentage for higher sales. Latham was in Europe, which left Cole to break the news to Mitchell. The associate editor did her best to soften the blow. Cole explained that, if Mitchell did not agree to the revised royalties, the publisher would have to cheapen the book’s format by using a smaller font and scale back on advertising. On the bright side, with the book priced at $3.00, the total royalty payment on the first ten thousand copies would be $500 higher than if the book sold for $2.50 under the original royalty rate. For additional copies, Mitchell would receive less than she had been entitled to under the original agreement, but Cole predicted the loss would be minimal, given the increased sales associated with an attractive volume. Laying it on thick, Cole promised her friend that Macmillan planned a splendid-looking book to match its splendid content. Lest Mitchell have any hesitation, Cole appealed to the author’s vanity, noting that they would not want Gone With the Wind to go out into the world looking other than its best. 13
    The Marshes were not pleased. Macmillan had known from the beginning that the finished product would be long and had never hinted this would pose a problem. Moreover, the final manuscript was shorter than the original one given to Latham. If she had known length was an issue, Mitchell felt she should have been allowed to make additional cuts. Mitchell and Marsh also worried that pricing the book at $3.00 would kill its chance of success. 14 And perhaps most irritating, Marsh suspected Macmillan forced Cole to ask for the concession, knowing it would be difficult for Mitchell to say no to her friend. 15
    Despite these reservations, Mitchell accepted the reduced royalty. The author consoled herself that the book would not sell enough copies for the royalty terms to make much difference. Although claiming Mitchell’s “Scotch ancestors must be turning over in their graves,” Marsh told Cole that Mitchell wanted the book to do well and hated the idea of it being published in a substandard format. However, she could not accept Macmillan’s casual attitude toward copyediting. If the company failed to edit the manuscript prior to production, she thought the publisher