Building Your Business by Mail
The pattern
This still is filed under Craft-argument book.
Define
A book or manual that sells a method by arguing it. Chapters as proof, not as decoration around a product.
Mechanism
Authority by treatise. The reader who accepts the argument has already accepted the seller as teacher.
Verdict
We can teach a craft in public and the teaching is the funnel.
Why it works
The persuasion is proof by volume. Instead of arguing that direct advertising works, it stacks up named peer firms with numbers attached, so the reader is outvoted by his own industry rather than lectured. The chapter grid is sorted by the reader's trade, which lets him self-select into a chapter about himself before he has bought the general argument. Method chapters break an art into numbered mechanics, Step 1 and Principle 1, and set the principles in italic display so they lift straight off the page as rules. The illustrated captions carry the specific tactic, so a skimmer who reads nothing but the pictures still absorbs the system.
Steal this when
You are selling a method to a skeptical trade audience that has heard the pitch before. Build the case from named peers' results rather than theory, and cut the chapters by the reader's own industry so he finds himself before he has to agree with you.