The First Hundred Million
Emanuel Haldeman-Julius's account of selling 100,000,000 Little Blue Books in nine years: 1,260 pocket titles of one size and binding, five cents each, about 95 percent sold by mail from Girard, Kansas.
What it is
Emanuel Haldeman-Julius's account of selling 100,000,000 Little Blue Books in nine years: 1,260 pocket titles of one size and binding, five cents each, about 95 percent sold by mail from Girard, Kansas. He argues that because every title had the same price and format, the sales figures show what Americans actually want to read, and he prints them by category: sex and love first, then self-improvement, humour and freethought. The Hospital chapter sets a quota of 10,000 copies a year and shows weak books retitled: Gautier's Fleece of Gold went from 6,000 to 50,000 as The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, and Whistler's Ten o'Clock from under 2,000 to 9,000 as What Art Should Mean to You. Later chapters cover keyed coupons, returns per 1,000 orders from seven named publications, and why he dropped date-line sales in 1928.
Why read it now
The retitling data is the most useful part. It is an early record of simple tests: same text, same price, same list, only the name changed, with yearly sales before and after. The lesson that a title must say plainly what the reader gets, not be clever, matches modern headline and subject-line testing, where clarity usually beats wit. His keyed addresses (Dept. X-114) are the ancestor of tracking links and promo codes, and his point that an advertiser with no key cannot tell one magazine from another still applies to much brand spend. His last chapter adds a caution on deadlines: a plain full-page list with no closing date pulled $320 on its first day in the Chicago Tribune, against $265 for his best date-line page. Weak points: the before-and-after figures do not control for list growth or season, and some retitles sold on sensational framing that would now draw complaints or ad rejections. Use: put your weakest product pages or offers in a 'hospital', rewrite only the name or headline to state the benefit, and compare sales over the same period.
Passages worth keeping
A good title is a work of genius.
العنوان الجيد عمل عبقري، سواء جاء من إلهام لحظة أو من تفكير طويل، لأنه يقرر وحده هل يُشترى الكتاب أم لا.
Gautier’s title is picturesque, even poetic, but it lacks informative value. It tells nothing whatever.
عنوان غوتييه جميل وشاعري، لكنه لا يخبر القارئ بشيء عن مضمون الكتاب، ولذلك لم يبع.
You can sell the classics as classics, all dressed up in handsome bindings, with gold tops and all that sort of thing, as merchandise. But merchandise is not read.
يمكن بيع الكتب الكلاسيكية بتجليد فاخر لتُعرض في البيت كأنها قطع زينة، لكن ما يُشترى للزينة لا يُقرأ.
But the advertiser who uses no key cannot tell at all whether one magazine is better than another, or whether his billboards are doing any good whatever.
المعلن الذي لا يضع رمزًا يميّز مصدر كل طلب لا يستطيع أن يعرف أي مجلة أنفع له، ولا هل لوحاته الإعلانية تأتي بأي نتيجة.
It is simply impossible to forecast what an advertisement will do.
لا يمكن التنبؤ بنتيجة أي إعلان قبل تجربته، ولذلك يبقى الاختبار هو الحكم.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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