![]() ![]() ![]() Samuel Clemens sold more Mark Twain books and attained a broader audience than he would have reached with regular trade publications, but he had to contend with the lower status that subscription authors were accorded. Prospective buyers selected a binding and signed an agreement to pay for the book when it was delivered to their door. Tens of thousands of sales agents, many of them veterans and war widows, canvassed small towns and rural areas armed with a sales prospectus and a “book” containing sample pages and illustrations, and offering multiple binding options to fit every décor and price range. The subscription publication industry blossomed in post-Civil War America. The book was “Issued by subscription only, and not for sale in the book-stores.” All of Mark Twain’s major nineteenth-century titles were sold by salesmen door-to-door rather than as trade publications in bookstores. ![]() It would also be Mark Twain’s best-selling work during his lifetime. ![]() That book, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress, would be both a critical and a popular success, selling over 70,000 copies in its first year of publication. In November of 1867, publisher Elisha Bliss contacted Samuel Clemens about writing a book based on his travel correspondence from his 163-day tour of Europe and the Holy Land. ![]()
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