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    Love Story Writer
    Love Story Writer
    Love Story Writer
    Ebook150 pages2 hours

    Love Story Writer

    By Daisy Bacon

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    About this ebook

    LOVE STORY WRITER is crammed with practical information on the art and craft of creating and selling the romantic story. It does not pretend to "teach" you how to write. Yet the novice or the professional writer will find more help in this wise and witty book than in many so-called text books. It takes you from the gestation of the idea to its final submission to a magazine. It tells you why so many manuscripts fail to sell. It tells you, very simply, how you can avoid the most common pitfalls that keep authors from success. It tells you more about editors, their habits and crochets, than any other book of its kind. Started on a writing career before she became one of America's most successful and highest paid editors, Miss Bacon shares her insights and experience in managing a successful publication and authoring romantic fiction. Her advice gives us a glimpse into a past era, but remains as fresh today as when the pulps dominated newsstands across America.

    With introductions and afterwords by pop culture historians Laurie Powers and Michelle Nolan.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBold Venture Press
    Release dateJul 7, 2016
    ISBN9781311666079
    Love Story Writer
    Author

    Daisy Bacon

    Daisy Bacon was born in Union City, Pennsylvania, and eventually migrated to New York City in the 1920s. While her writing career was in its infancy, she answered a job listing at Street & Smith Publications and eventually became the editor of Love Story Magazine.Under her direction, Love Story Magazine, became the top-ranking newsstand seller -- and the only weekly -- among women's magazines. Known as a "lucky" editor for giving new writers their start, she received and read thousands of unsolicited manuscripts each year. During World War II, Miss Bacon edited Detective Story Magazine, and was the final editor of The Shadow and Doc Savage, the most famous superheroes of the pulp magazine era.Miss Bacon retired in the 1950s and penned Love Story Writer. Much of her retirement was devoted to writing. In the 1960s, she began her own publishing imprint, Gemini Books.Miss Bacon died in 1986 at her home in Port Washington, NY, at the age of 87 years.

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      Book preview

      Love Story Writer - Daisy Bacon

      Love Story Writer

      by Daisy Bacon

      Introduction by Laurie Powers

      Afterword by Michelle Nolan

      Published by Bold Venture Press

      www.boldventurepress.com

      Copyright 1954 by Daisy Bacon. All Rights Reserved.

      This book is available in print at most online retailers.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express permission of the publisher and copyright holder. All persons, places and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to any actual persons, places or events is purely coincidental.

      License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please purchase your own copy.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction by Laurie Powers

      A Note About the Author

      Chapter One — What a Love Story is

      Chapter Two — Can the Experts Help You to Write Love Stories?

      Chapter Three — How Can I Find Out What the Editor Wants?

      Chapter Four — Cinderella Becomes a Stumbling Block

      Chapter Five — On Love, Geography

      Chapter Six — Getting Along With the Story

      Chapter Seven — Appearance of the Manuscript

      Chapter Eight — Dear Editor: I Take My Pen in Hand …

      Chapter Nine — The Grass Is Always Greener

      Chapter Ten — Keeping Up With the Parade

      Afterword by Michelle Nolan

      Connect with Bold Venture Press

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction

      By Laurie Powers

      WHO was this Daisy Bacon, and why should you read Love Story Writer now?

      Daisy Sarah Bacon was the editor of Street & Smith’s Love Story Magazine, the biggest selling pulp fiction magazine during the dark days of the Depression and World War II. Love Story Magazine was such a formidable leader in the romance pulp fiction field that, in 1941, it was described in Writer’s Yearbook as "a magazine larger than Harper’s Magazine, The American Mercury, and The Atlantic Monthly rolled together." In addition to Love Story Magazine, Daisy also commandeered several other Street & Smith magazines, including some of the most popular of the era: Detective Story Magazine, The Shadow Magazine, Doc Savage Magazine, and Romantic Range. Daisy became such a formidable presence in the pulp fiction industry that, early on in her career, she was given the title Queen of the Pulps.

      Daisy was born on May 23, 1898, in Union City, Pennsylvania. Both her mother and father were descendants of some of the most venerable families in American and English history. Her father was a descendant of a cousin of Sir Francis Bacon, and her mother was a descendant of William Bradford, five-time governor of Plymouth Colony. Daisy herself was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

      Raised in Westfield, New York, she was the valedictorian of her high school. Shortly after graduating from high school, Daisy, her mother, and her half-sister Esther moved to New York City. There Daisy took on several different jobs and tried to make a go of being a freelance writer. She experienced some initial success, publishing two nonfiction articles in the Saturday Evening Post in 1924. But in 1926 she found herself needing a change and, supporting her sister and mother by then, a full-time job. Enter Street & Smith, the biggest pulp fiction publishing company in the world, where Daisy began work on March 13, 1926.

      Daisy’s first job at Street & Smith was to work on the advice column, The Friend in Need, that appeared in Love Story Magazine. Over the next two years she read thousands of letters, selected those that would appear in the magazine, and answered their questions with help from other staff. At the same time, she took it upon herself to learn everything she could about the company and what it took to produce a nationally-distributed magazine. She also wrote four short stories that appeared in Love Story Magazine. Then, in 1928, she received the call to become the editor of Love Story. She was just turning 30 years old.

      At the time she became editor, Daisy knew that the magazine needed some updating. Even though women had earned voting rights in 1920 and the sexually-aware flapper was the American symbol of sexual freedom, the stories were still set in dime-novel settings in which the heroines were orphans and helpless waifs, imprisoned by evil relatives.

      Daisy began to steer Love Story Magazine towards including more stories that featured young women who were emancipated, self-sufficient, and confident. By the early 1930s, the magazine had reached a circulation of 600,000 copies, setting a record that was never broken by any other pulp fiction magazine. During that time, in addition to the hundreds of manuscripts that showed up at Street & Smith every month, the Love Story office was receiving over 10,000 letters a month from people wanting either to be published in the magazine or the advice of Laura Alston Brown, the fictitious author of the A Friend in Need column.

      In 1929, Daisy hired her sister Esther, who became her indispensable associate editor. Over the next eighteen years Esther would touch almost every aspect of the magazine’s production, so Daisy could dedicate most of her time to reading the endless avalanche of manuscripts that arrived in the Love Story office and edit stories until they were suitable for publication. It is to her-half sister, Esther, that Daisy originally dedicated this book, and rightly so.

      It wasn’t long before Daisy became known as an editor who worked well with writers, especially those trying to break into publishing. She took great pains to help writers; stories that needed help weren’t just rejected and sent back with a note. Instead, she marked up manuscripts with suggestions on how to make them better. As a result, many writers would see their first stories appear in love story and many of them continued to be loyal to Daisy and continued to send her stories for many years.

      What made Love Story so successful? Much of it can be credited to Daisy’s uncanny ability to know what the reading public wanted in a Love Story. She stressed the importance of the story itself, rather than the love interest. She insisted that the most interesting stories can be found in the most mundane of settings, in the most ordinary of jobs, in the smallest of towns. The writer had to juggle several elements, she admits, but this ability was necessary for an intriguing yet believable story.

      In 1941, Daisy was given Detective Story Magazine to manage. Daisy and Esther now had three magazines to supervise: Love Story Magazine, Romantic Range, and Detective Story Magazine. Love Story was discontinued in 1947, although it would be resurrected briefly in the early 1950s with another publisher. In total, Love Story had generated 1,158 weekly issues, each of which contained 8 to 10 stories. In 1948, Daisy was handed two of the most popular of the Street & Smith pulp magazines, The Shadow and Doc Savage. Then, in 1949, Street & Smith announced that they were discontinuing all of their pulp magazines. Daisy was shown the door.

      Daisy decided to not pursue getting another job; instead, she retired even though she had just turned 51. She bought a house in Port Washington on Long Island and spent the first few years of her retirement writing two books: a novel based on her years at Street & Smith, and this book, Love Story Writer. She struggled with the novel for many years and, if it was ever finished, it never saw publication, and no manuscript has survived. But Daisy found the writing of this book much easier, and Love Story Writer was published by Hermitage Books in 1954.

      In her early 60s, Daisy started her own publishing company, Gemini Books, and reprinted Love Story Writer as a paperback under the title Love Story Editor. She also wrote the occasional article, including one very famous piece, The Golden Age of the Iron Maiden, that appeared in The Roundup Magazine in 1975. In that piece, Daisy brings us into the world of Street & Smith and its demise, which she felt was due to mismanagement.

      Daisy died in obscurity in 1986, but her legacy lives on. Her personal papers, stored by her Port Washington neighbors for decades, are now being used as sources for a full biography of Daisy that will appear in the next few years. And every year, the Daisy Bacon Fund Scholarship grants awards to high school students in Port Washington that want to pursue careers in journalism.

      SO why read this book now? After all, most of the instruction in this book was directed to the writer who wants to be published in magazines in the 1950s, and the pulp fiction magazine has been long gone. But the principles behind the Love Story have not changed, and these can be applied to writing both short stories and novel-length books. All of the instruction that Daisy provides is timeless, and her passion for helping writers break into the publishing world shows on every page of Love Story Writer.

      Daisy dispels the myths around writing the love story, such as that it is the easiest kind of story to write. She discusses when to embrace the Cinderella story and when to avoid it. She stresses that the romance story doesn’t have to take place in the exotic or enticing settings; the best stories are those that take place in the settings that are close to the writer.

      For writers wanting to get published, Daisy’s tips on that aspect still ring true. Know your publication. Know what the editor wants in a story. Make sure your submission is exactly what is called for in the requirements. This chapter on the latter instruction, although written when all submissions were sent via regular mail on bond paper, is still relevant because it stresses the importance of writing the best cover letter, and having your submission in the best possible and most readable condition. Those requirements apply whether you’re sending hard-copy or an email attachment. All of these components are aspects of getting the love story published, or any story written in any other type of genre, that will never change.

      For those who are interested in the history of pulp fiction, Daisy provides enough information to satisfy anyone who wonders what it was like to edit a magazine during the golden age of the pulp magazine. Her anecdotal examples and personal experiences are woven in seamlessly, so that before you know it, you are swept away in the story of this relative or that coworker or her many examples. In her conversational tone she brings us into the world of what it took to edit these magazines that enraptured an entire generation of American readers.

      Laurie Powers

      April 25, 2016

      Laurie Power’s interest in pulp fiction began in 1999 when she discovered that her paternal grandfather, Paul S. Powers, (1905–1971) had been a successful writer of stories that appeared in magazines such as Weird Tales, Wild West Weekly, Western Story Magazine, Real Detective Tales, Thrilling Western, and many more. Since then, Laurie has been very active in the community of pulp fiction historians, writers, and collectors. She wrote the prologue and epilogue that appear in her grandfather’s memoir, Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street, has published several collections of her grandfather’s stories, and has spoken to a variety of audiences on the history of pulp fiction. Laurie is now writing a biography of Daisy Bacon and has written articles and book introductions about Bacon and the romance pulps.

      A Note on the Author

      When Pennsylvania-born Daisy Bacon moved to New York in the late 1920s, she got a part-time job as a dress model and a part-time job doing bookkeeping for an auctioneer. She proceeded to write pieces about the auction rooms which she sold to Thomas Costain of the Saturday Evening Post. Then she saw a want ad in the N.Y. Times; the opening was an editorial position on Love Story Magazine. She applied and landed the job. Quite soon she became editor of this publication — a weekly with a huge circulation. And she became famous.

      At various times she edited other magazines simultaneously with getting out Love Story Magazine. From 1930 to 1932 it was a first person magazine called Real Love that appeared twice a month. Then there was a confession magazine called True Love Stories. In 1937 she edited Pocket Love, a forerunner of the paperback books of today. 1n1939 she edited Romantic Range which gave Ranch Romances a good run for the money. During World War II she was the editor of Detective Story Magazine which was distributed overseas to

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