Publishing Fast and Slow

 In August 1831 Thomas Carlyle came down to London from Craigenputtock to find a publisher for his genre-breaking philosophical novel Sartor Resartus. He left it at the offices of John Murray, with a note requesting that 'no time may be lost in deciding on it' and declaring that 'At latest next Wednesday I shall wait upon you...' This is pretty pushy behaviour for a not very well known journalist and essayist, and suggests that publishing then was, shall we say, a rather more urgent affair than it is now. 
  Next Wednesday, however, came and went with no word from Murray, so Carlyle took to calling in at the office, always finding Murray out of town. He became increasingly exasperated – 'I have lost ten days by him already' – but eventually Murray agreed to publish. At this point, Carlyle made a fatal mistake by approaching another publisher to see if he could get a better offer. Learning of this, Murray decided to send the manuscript out to a literary friend for an opinion on its merits and its commercial potential. This friend, Henry Hart Milman, reported that Sartor Resartus was too clever, too German, too whimsical, too elaborate and too long to find many English readers. On 6 October Jane Carlyle wrote to her mother: 'They are not going to print the book after all – Murray has lost heart lest it do not take with the public and so like a stupid ass, as he is, has sent the manuscript back.'*
  Murray's decision was commercially sound: it would be some years before Sartor Resartus began to be widely read and regarded as a classic (if one that has hardly survived to our time). What is surprising, though, is the speed with which all this was transacted – less than two months from Carlyle's delivery of the manuscript to its final rejection, with at least one serious reading, an initial acceptance and Carlyle's fatal mistake along the way. In that more leisurely age, publishing seems to have moved remarkably fast.
  Things were very different when, in 1963, Cynthia Ozick set about getting her first novel published. In her essay 'James, Tolstoy, and My First Novel', she recalls how it took three whole years to achieve publication: six months waiting for the editor who had initially accepted it to come up with the 'suggestions' he had promised to supply; a further 12 months of waiting while said editor assured her he was working on a long list of 'suggestions'; an interview in the course of which it became clear that he had no such list; the eventual delivery, from another editor, of the first 100 pages of the manuscript, densely covered with scribbled 'suggestions'; Ozick's rejection of all these 'suggestions', the editor's agreement, and finally, eventually, publication of Trust, her first novel, exactly as she wrote it. Today, I fear, she would have had many more obstacles – minefields indeed – to negotiate on her way to publication. And it is still a slow, slow business...

* I take all this from Dear Mr Murray: Letters to a Gentleman Publisher, an excellent browsing book that I was given for Christmas.