Years ago, browsing through a cardboard box of assorted paper collectibles—pamphlets, old magazines, and other items of ephemera—I found an old copy of Naylor’s Epic-Century, a quarterly magazine put out by a now defunct company once ranked as one of the nation’s largest regional book publishers. Founded in 1929 by Joe Naylor, the San Antonio-based company published hundreds of books from 1930 to 1976. Flipping through the yellowing pages of the old magazine, an article by Naylor called “Book Publishing: Can Your Book Be Published?” looked interesting. [fn: Naylor’s Epic-Century, July 1952.]

Despite the passage of so many decades, much of what Naylor had to say still applies. Early in his article, he said there “are three important phases in successful book publishing.” To paraphrase:

1. A manuscript must be written.
2. That manuscript must be published.
3. The book (same for magazine articles) must be sold.

Laughingly simplistic. But these three steps are the foundation of publishing—magazines or books—as fundamental as the truth in the old joke about how to grill a buffalo steak: “First, get a buffalo.”  As surely as a triangle will collapse without the support of any one of its angles, subtract any of these three elements, and an article or book will not come to be.

When Naylor made his three points, most writers produced their magazine or book manuscripts on typewriters (not to mention some who still wrote them in longhand). The Alamo City publisher and his staff edited those manuscripts with pencils and then had them set into metal type. That system seems as antiquated today as clay tablets must have seemed to the first users of papyrus. But while the technology continues to evolve, the organic law of publishing has not.

An article or book cannot exist unless a writer produces a manuscript. Then, it must get published, either by a traditional publisher or privately, either on paper or digitally. Again, it makes no difference how it is published. Finally, the published work must be well-written and interesting enough to induce people to buy it. –Mike Cox