NEWSPAPER SYNDICATES

The syndication of news and other features to American newspapers began in 1861, and literary materials were first syndicated shortly after this. It was only in the 1880s, though, that syndicates began significantly to affect literary authors, readers, and the American publishing world in general. For the following two decades syndicates played a major role in the literary marketplace. After approximately 1905, however, even though syndicates continued to distribute numerous short stories and serial novels to newspapers, their importance declined dramatically.

Some readers were dismayed to learn that the contents of their local newspapers were not all written specifically for those papers, and they frequently complained about how syndicates faked "originality." As seen in this quotation, however, not everyone felt this way.

I may find it provoking when seven out of ten of my weekly papers have the same serial, or short story . . . , but perhaps the family next door has only one weekly and no daily paper; surely the well-written articles bought by a good syndicate are better for my neighbor's instruction and amusement than would be the trash possibly served to him otherwise.

Adelaide Cilley Waldron, "Business Relations between Publishers and Writers," Writer 1 (1887): 57.

THE EARLY HISTORY OF NEWSPAPER SYNDICATES

Technically newspaper syndicates are defined as firms that sell and distribute the same materials—be it advice columns, cartoons, or political columns—to multiple newspapers for nearly simultaneous publication. Although primitive forms of syndication known as "readyprint" or "patent insides" were introduced by Ansel Nash Kellogg in the United States as early as 1861, the first syndicate to have any major impact on the literary marketplace was the American Press Association. Founded in Chicago in 1882, the APA by 1890 was supplying over six thousand daily and weekly newspapers in twenty-eight states with stereotype-plate blocks of news, features, and fiction, which local editors could simply insert into the printing forms for the newspaper. Unlike the readyprint companies that typically used previously published magazine fiction, the APA was the first to purchase fiction directly from authors for first-time serial use, thereby providing an entry to the publishing world for hundreds of authors in small towns and cities across the United States who had literary aspirations but little hope of placing their work in major magazines. Some of the better-known authors who had contact with the APA early in their careers were Jack London, Maurice Thompson, Charlotte Perkins Stetson (later Gilman), Kate Chopin, and Kate Field.

THE HEYDAY OF LITERARY SYNDICATION

The year 1884 would prove to be the most important turning point for American newspaper literary syndication. In the spring of that year the British newspaperman William Frederic Tillotson (1844–1889) visited the East Coast to view the American operations of his company, Tillotson's Newspaper Fiction Bureau. Founded in Bolton, England, in 1873, this firm copied the French method of the feuilleton, whereby one company purchased an original work from an author and then sold galley proofs (printed slips of paper) of that fiction to multiple, widely dispersed newspapers that would publish them simultaneously on a fixed date; each paper was guaranteed exclusive rights within its circulation area. The local newspaper editor, after receiving the galley proofs of fictions in the mail, would edit the work to fit the space available or to suit his or her audience, have it typeset, and print it. Tillotson's advanced only minimally in the American market in the late 1870s and early 1880s, though, and it confined itself chiefly to syndicating British and Irish serial novels, almost exclusively romances by the likes of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Duchess (Margaret Hungerford), Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), and Florence Marryat.

Even after the mid-1880s, because American newspaper editors generally declined to purchase harshly realistic works by French and British authors, the few dozen American papers that purchased Tillotson's materials tended to get a continued steady dose of British historical romances. The Authors' Syndicate too, founded in London in 1890 by the British Society of Authors, offered similar fare to American newspapers. Possibly Tillotson's greatest claim to literary fame has to do with one work it turned down: after Thomas Hardy had, under contract, finished half the manuscript of what would become Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), the editors rejected it for its supposed immorality. One of Tillotson's most popular writers, ironically, was the American western romance writer Bret Harte, who was living in England in the 1890s; he ended up selling the English-language serial rights of fourteen short stories and novels to Tillotson's at very high prices for worldwide distribution. After the opening of a New York City office in 1888, Tillotson's Newspaper Fiction Bureau began to purchase a small number of American short stories, but the only noteworthy American author whose works were purchased and distributed by this office was Jack London, whose tales "The Unmasking of a Cad" and "The Grilling of Loren Ellery" were syndicated to American newspapers in 1899.

Possibly in consequence of William Frederic Tillotson's visit to the United States in early 1884, the New York Sun editor Charles A. Dana that spring contacted four major American authors to see if they would like to be paid large sums of money in return for the right to syndicate their original works to multiple newspapers across the country. Mark Twain expressed interest initially but then dropped out in June; William Dean Howells, after writing a long narrative play with which he was displeased, also opted out. Bret Harte, however, contributed "A Blue Grass Penelope," and Henry James sold his short stories "Pandora" and "Georgina's Reasons" to Dana; all were published in June or July of 1884.

Dana did not continue in the syndicate business, but late in 1884 two young American entrepreneurs with little capital founded two separate syndicates that began taking on the risky business of promising authors large amounts of money for first serial rights with no guarantee of recouping their outlays as well as assuming the laborious task of selling the fictions to multiple newspapers across the country. These men were Irving Bacheller (1859–1950), whose syndicates went by many names, including the Bacheller Syndicate, the New York Press Syndicate, and Bacheller, Johnson, and Bacheller; and Samuel Sidney (S. S.) McClure (1857–1949), whose firm was known as the Associated Literary Press and, after 1900, the McClure Newspaper Syndicate.

Having grown up in rural Indiana, the early syndicator S. S. McClure knew what it felt like to go without good reading materials. Always concerned with financial success, McClure nonetheless was motivated by a strong desire to provide cultural uplift for Americans who felt similarly limited in their choices of reading materials.

[Syndication] is an attempt to give to the great mass of people through the newspapers reading equal to that which appears in the best magazines.

S. S. McClure, 1891 circular, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

On the whole authors welcomed Bacheller and McClure (and, to a lesser extent, the Authors' Alliance and the United Press syndicates) because in the days before the Chace Act of 1891 neither British nor American authors had been reaping the full financial benefits of their work. In the state of copyright law existing prior to the Chace Act, British authors' works could be pirated by American periodical editors for free, and consequently such editors had naturally shied away from purchasing copyrighted works by American authors.

Many newspaper editors were interested in syndicated fiction because they hoped it would boost their newspapers' circulations and thus their advertising revenues. However, not surprisingly, numerous members of the book and magazine publishing establishment, reacting to the success of the syndicates, lashed out at these competitors. Edward W. Bok (1863–1930), who was the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal from 1889 until 1919, railed in 1895 against what he saw as the syndicates' injection of "commercialism" into the relationship between publishers and authors, arguing that the high prices the syndicates paid were turning authors into mere workers writing to order rather than true artists. He concluded, "For the most part the newspaper syndicate is the sewer of the author" (Bok, p. 340).

What truly angered magazine and book editors and publishers, however, was that the syndicates—with Bacheller and McClure in the lead—were driving up prices generally and luring authors away with offers of much higher payments. Bacheller and McClure paid large sums to British authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, and Wilkie Collins for first serial rights to their works, even though legally such payment was not required. Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle received their first major exposure to American audiences via newspaper syndication; most of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, in fact, were syndicated by McClure in the early 1890s. In 1894 Bacheller offered to pay Doyle £30 per thousand words for the first serial rights to a new series of Holmes stories, double what Sir George Newnes of the Strand Magazine had been paying him, which resulted in Doyle breaking his exclusive arrangement with Newnes.

American authors, though, were the ones who benefited most from Bacheller's and McClure's syndicates. To solicit the works of American authors, they posted announcements in magazines, ran prize contests, sent out flyers, wrote directly to authors, and occasionally even called on them at their homes. Some American authors, like the British ones before them, initially balked at the idea of having their works first appear in newspapers, a print venue that some felt was rather déclassé, but when they heard of the extremely high amounts these syndicates were paying, this reluctance appeared to evaporate. Sarah Orne Jewett first sold a story to McClure in 1884 ("Stolen Pleasures") and would later sell nine more stories to Bacheller and him. Mary E. Wilkins (later Freeman) sold "The Emmets" and "A Wayfaring Couple" to McClure in 1884 and 1885, respectively, and subsequently contributed eleven more stories to these syndicates. Mark Twain, desperate to raise as much money as he could to pay off his own debts, in 1891 had already accepted an offer of $6,000 from the Ladies' Home Journal for the American serial rights to The American Claimant (1892), but he changed course rapidly when McClure visited him and offered twice that amount for American and British serial rights. Henry James returned to syndication only once after 1884; in 1892, at a time when he needed money to finance his experiments in writing drama, James sold "The Real Thing" to McClure. Even William Dean Howells sold one serial novel, The Quality of Mercy, to McClure in 1891 (for $10,000), and at least one children's story, "The Flight of Pony Baker," to the syndicate in 1895. Many better-known authors also appreciated the syndicates for their willingness to purchase their "secondary" works at generous prices. Both syndicates, for example, liberally paid Mary E. Wilkins Freeman for her children's and holiday fictions that she could not always place in major magazines; Bacheller paid her $50 per thousand words and arranged for her to win a $2,000 prize for "The Long Arm," an experimental detective story she coauthored with Joseph Chamberlin in 1895.

Syndicators were in large part salespeople, and much of their time was spent traveling across the country to sell their literary wares face-to-face with newspaper editors.

Then came the first of many journeys up and down the continent. I slept on Pullman cars; I climbed innumerable flights of stairs, often late at night, to ratty editorial rooms in all the big cities. . . . There was a steep grade in the way of the syndicate man [in] those days.

Irving Bacheller, From Stores of Memory (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1938), p. 44.

As a result of their efforts, Bacheller and McClure were able to offer their newspaper customers a wide array of fictions, including historical romances, local color sketches, domestic dramas, and traditional love stories. Bacheller's and McClure's only general stipulation was that fictions could not be morbid or immoral or offend southern readers, for these qualities would make them unappealing to newspaper editors and, it was assumed, their readers. Because Bacheller and McClure both greatly enjoyed regionalist fiction and stories written in dialect, though, their customers received an extremely heavy dose of this type of fiction. Charles W. Chesnutt, Mary Noailles Murfree, Hamlin Garland, Joel Chandler Harris, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Octave Thanet, Rose Terry Cooke, and Ruth McEnery Stuart were only a few of the regionalists whose works they syndicated.

These syndicates did not, however, publish only the works of the most famous authors; they also discovered and fostered numerous up-and-coming writers who are now recognized as major voices of the era. Jack London, for instance, might have disparaged syndicates in his later novel Martin Eden (1908) as requiring only formulaic fiction, but McClure encouraged him as a young author, bought many of his stories, and at a critical time of his life paid him a stipend to write a novel. Charles W. Chesnutt's first major encouragement as a writer came from S. S. McClure, who, after reading Chesnutt's submissions to one of his contests, bought and syndicated approximately ten of his earliest stories between 1885 and 1888. Frank Norris was brought east by McClure in 1898 and given a half-time sinecure at the syndicate office from early 1898 to December 1899; this afforded him a great deal of time to write, much of which he used to draft McTeague (1899).

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) skewered McClure in some letters to his friends, at one point calling him a "Scotch ass," chiefly because he had held on to the manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage for many months in 1894 while considering it for publication, yet Crane neglected to mention how frequently McClure advanced him money and paid him generously for his work at critical times in the mid-1890s. Irving Bacheller also played a key role in Crane's career. He purchased and syndicated The Red Badge of Courage (in truncated form) in December 1894, which allowed Crane to approach the book publisher D. Appleton in 1895 as a nationally well-known author, no doubt greatly contributing to this publisher's decision to bring out Red Badge in book form later that year. It was also Bacheller who financed Crane's trip throughout the western United States and Mexico in 1895, an experience that would eventually result in such stories as "The Blue Hotel" (1898) and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" (1898). Crane was also on assignment to Cuba for the Bacheller Syndicate in 1897 when his ship, the Commodore, was sunk off the Florida coast, an experience Crane turned not only into a newspaper report but also into his classic story "The Open Boat" (1897), which he sold to Scribner's Monthly.

For various reasons, however, syndicates declined in importance as players in the American literary world around 1900. One major reason was that the Chace Act leveled the playing field for American and British authors, who were now both receiving their just rewards from American magazines for literary work. Another reason was that the many cheap, mass-market magazines that appeared on the scene in the mid-1890s were able—because they reached a national audience and could thus carry national, name-brand advertising—to pay authors higher amounts than did the limited-circulation magazines with which the syndicates had competed in the late 1880s. Syndicates found too that transportation advances hurt their ability to pay high fees to authors. Swift and reliable railroads expanded the circulation of each metropolitan newspaper that bought a particular syndicated fiction, and because each newspaper wanted exclusive publication rights within its circulation area, the number of newspapers to which a syndicate could sell an individual work declined, thereby reducing the amount the syndicate could pay its authors. In addition, after S. S. McClure founded McClure's Magazine in 1893, he had little to do with the syndicate, leaving it in less capable hands until it ceased operations in 1912. Bacheller sold his syndicate in 1898 not only because it was not sufficiently profitable but also because he wanted to spend more time with his wife and become a full-time novelist himself.

In the wake of these pioneers, other syndicates continued for many decades to distribute fiction. These included the American Short Story Company, the American Press Company, Frank Carpenter's Newspaper Syndicate, the International Syndicate of Baltimore, the Albert Bigelow Paine Syndicate, the Editors' Literary Syndicate, the Pacific Press Syndicate, the Lorraine Literary Press Association, the Bell Syndicate, the Authors' Co-Operative Company, and the Wilson Press Syndicate. Many individual major metropolitan dailies also operated their own syndicates: the Chicago Daily News, the New York Journal, and the New York World, for instance, in the late 1890s started selling to other newspapers various materials that had originally appeared in their own pages. With rare exceptions, however, these syndicates purchased either second serial rights or first serial rights to fictions by less-talented authors. For all intents and purposes the heyday of literary newspaper syndicates had passed by 1905.

SIGNIFICANCE

Despite the relatively brief time during which they played a key role in literary publishing, newspaper syndicates affected the American publishing world in many long-term ways. First, they greatly encouraged the distinctively American genre of the short story. In his 1893 article "The Man of Letters as a Man of Business," William Dean Howells gave the syndicates much of the credit for increasing the demand for short stories and the prices paid for them. Concomitantly, syndicates played a major part in transforming American fiction authors into true professionals. Because the syndicates required vast numbers of fictions and helped increase the pay for such work, authorship—especially for Americans—became a viable profession for a much larger number of people than had previously been possible. Further, many authors used the syndicates as bargaining chips in negotiations with magazine and book editors and publishers for higher pay; in this way syndicates broke open the genteel publishing world and helped authors to be free agents in control of their labor rather than writers working under exclusive contracts to specific firms.

Syndicates represented a great financial boon for numerous British and American authors. Some, however, such as the British novelist Ouida, criticized what they saw as the syndicates' strict regulations as to the subject matter, length, and treatment of acceptable fictions. These guidelines, however, were imposed more by the customers—the newspaper editors—than by the syndicators themselves.

[A syndicate] is an "immense organization" which treats authors precisely as the Chicago killing and salting establishments treat the pig; the author, like the pig, is purchased, shot through a tube, and delivered in the shape of a wet sheet (as the pig is in the shape of a ham), north, south, east, and west, wherever there is a demand for him.

Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), Letter to the Editor, London Times, 22 May 1891, p. 3.

Possibly most important, syndicates reached hitherto unrecognized and underserved audiences outside of the urban, northeastern United States. Each fiction syndicated by Bacheller and McClure, for instance, was typically published in 20 to 140 newspapers across the country, from the Portland Oregonian, to the Nebraska State Journal, to the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Constitution. Given the quite large circulations of many of these papers, the combined audience for each syndicated fiction was approximately one to two million readers, a much greater circulation than any of the major monthly magazines of the time enjoyed. Moreover, the low price of these newspapers (two cents on weekdays and five cents on Sundays) meant that even though newspaper editors might have intended to use syndicated fiction to attract middle-class readers to their newspapers, millions of working-class readers were now able to enjoy the type of first-run fiction that previously only wealthier people could purchase. Some East and West Coast magazines did circulate nationally in the 1880s, but it was the syndicates who helped make their editors and publishers more fully aware of the importance of the large, socioeconomically diverse market for quality fiction that existed throughout the country. Because editors, authors, and publishers had to take these readers more into account, the syndicates thus in some ways helped determine the content of and paved the way for the success of the many low-priced, mass-market magazines founded in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Fiction, in large part because of the syndicates, became a part of Americans' everyday lives, something to be read on horse-drawn trolleys and subway cars, during a break at work, on the farmstead, at a park, or in one's parlor. Syndicates affected hundreds if not thousands of authors and exposed millions of readers to generally good short stories and novels; in so doing they truly helped transform the conditions under which the American literary marketplace operated.

see alsoJournalism; Literary Marketplace; Presidential Elections; Spanish-American War

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Bacheller, Irving. Coming up the Road: Memories of a North Country Boyhood. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928.

Bok, Edward W. "The Modern Literary King." Forum 20 (1895): 334–343.

McClure, S. S. My Autobiography. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1914. Reprinted as The Autobiography of S. S. McClure by Willa Cather. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Secondary Works

Colby, Robert A. "'What Fools Authors Be!': The Authors' Syndicate, 1890–1920." Library Chronicle of the University of Texas 35 (1986): 60–87.

Harter, Eugene. Boilerplating America: The Hidden Newspaper. Edited by Dorothy Harter. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991.

Johanningsmeier, Charles. Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates in America, 1860–1900. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Johanningsmeier, Charles. "Henry James's Dalliance with the Newspaper World." Henry James Review 19, no.1 (1998): 36–52.

Johanningsmeier, Charles. "Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins (Freeman): Two Shrewd Businesswomen in Search of New Markets." New England Quarterly 70 (1997): 57–82.

Katz, Joseph. "Bibliography and the Rise of American Literary Realism." Studies in American Fiction 2 (1974): 75–88.

Mrja, Ellen M. "Ansel Nash Kellogg." In American Newspaper Journalists, 1873–1900, vol. 23 of Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Perry J. Ashley, pp. 180–183. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983.

Watson, Elmo Scott. A History of Newspaper Syndicates in the United States, 1865–1935. Chicago: N.p., 1936.

Charles Johanningsmeier