Micahel Samonic, publisher of the Special Effects Cookbook, made millions of dollars desktop publishing, and I want to tell you how you can too.
This is what he did…
As an entrepreneur, he was always relatively successful with space ads.
Then he ordered and read Karbo, which launched me into direct mail marketing. Up until that point, I had never done direct mail.
He had always been interested in health and cooking, so the first project he did was how to cure hiccups. He hiccuped when he drank any type of irritating substance or if he ate spicy foods. She always used to hiccup.
He did some research. This was long before acupressure. She called it acupulgada.
He went and discovered that there was a Chinese meridian on his left forearm that if he pinched it in just the right place, he could interrupt that momentum.
It worked for him, so he wrote a four or five page course and put an ad on one of the rags. It was the Enquirer. He sold some books. It was nothing great.
He received 20 or 23 orders. The cost was only $5 or $6. The ad only cost $20 or $30, so you made a profit right from the start.
From there, he went on to a full-size book he created, How to Get Free Dental Care.
Necessity is the mother of invention, right?
He had bad teeth and lived in Cleveland, Ohio. At that time there was a dental school there, Case Western Reserve is still there, a dental school. If you called, you could walk into the school and be a guinea pig for the students.
Fillings and we carry out all kinds of procedures for free. At that time there were federal programs going on, funded by the state.
So, he put together a whole directory of schools and funded programs that you could walk into and say I have dental problems, fix them for free. That was my first big-selling product.
He sold tens of thousands of those.
So he put together a directory. The first ad was a junior page ad.
A junior page is smaller than a full page, but dominates the page. If a full page ad is 7 x 10 in a magazine, a junior page will be 5-1/2 by 6-1/2; somewhere out there.
My first ad was in The Spotlight. Now, it’s called The American Free Press. It is a tabloid newspaper.
It was posted out of Washington, DC Extremely good for trying healthy food related items.
The headline is what really did it. The headline was Dentists Scream Bloody Murder.
You can bet that the headline caught the attention of people to read the ad. That headline’s job is to grab the reader’s attention immediately. You only have them for about half a second and if you don’t get them right away they turn the page and are gone forever.
Dentists scream bloody murder. The readers of that publication are very into conspiracy theories and political conspiracies and things like that. So, he designed the headline to match the demographics of the readers.
The subtitle was Dentists Are Mad Because Now You Can Get Free Dental Care or something.
This was a copy-intensive ad. It’s all it was. All of their ads are editorials.
This was his first advertisement for this product.
It was weekly, and once you place the ad, you wait anywhere from ten days to two weeks depending on when you place it before the ad appears. He had to pay everything in advance.
At that time I had no credit with anyone.
The cost of the advertisement was $600. That was late… maybe ’79 or ’80. Even with all the risk, he wasn’t nervous. He was actually excited.
Then he waited.
He received 700 orders. At $10 each, that’s $7,000.
He was in business.
Got some great ideas to share? Information is worth money and people will pay for it. You can earn millions by self-publishing your book.