Micahel Samonic, publisher of the Special Effects Cookbook, made millions of dollars by self publishing, and I want to tell you how you can do it too.
Here’s what he did…
As an entrepreneur, he always had relative success with space ads.
Then he ordered and read Karbo, which launched me into direct mail marketing. Up until that point, he had never had done direct mail.
He always had been interested in health and cooking, so the first project he ever did was how to cure hiccups. He got the hiccups when he drink any kind of irritating stuff or if he ate spicy foods. He always used to get the hiccups.
He did a little research. This was long before acupressure. He called it acupinch.
He went and found out that there was a Chinese meridian on your left forearm that if you pinch it just in the right place, you could interrupt that impulse.
It worked for his, so he wrote a little course like four or five pages and he put an ad in the one of the rags. It was Enquirer. He sold a few books. It wasn’t anything great.
He got 20 or 23 orders. The cost was only $5 or $6. The ad only cost $20 or $30, so he made a profit from the very beginning.
From there he went into a full-size book that he created, How To Get Free Dental Care.
Necessity is the mother of invention, right?
He had bad teeth and he was living in Cleveland, Ohio. At the time there was a dental school there, Case Western Reserve is still there, a school of dentistry. If you called up you could get into the school and be a guinea pig for the students.
Fillings and have all kinds of procedures done for free. At the time there were federal programs in place, the state funded.
So, he put together a whole directory of schools and funded program where you could walk in and say I’ve got dental problems, fix them for free. That was my first big selling product.
He sold tens of thousands of those.
So, he put a directory together. The first ad was a junior page ad.
A junior page is smaller than a full page, but it 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 around there.
My first ad was in The Spotlight. Now, it’s called The American Free Press. It’s a tabloid newspaper.
It was published out of Washington, D.C. Extremely good for testing health food related items.
The headline is what really did it. The headline was Dentists Scream Bloody Murder.
You can bet the headline got people’s attention to read the ad. The job of that headline is to capture the attention of the reader immediately. You’ve only got them for about a half a second and if you don’t get them immediately, they just turn the page and they’re gone forever.
Dentists scream bloody murder. The readership of that publication is heavy into conspiracy theories and political conspiracies and things like that. So, he designed the headline to match the demographics of the readership.
The subhead was Dentists Are Mad because you can now get free dental care or something like that.
This was a copy intensive ad. It’s all it was. All his ads are editorial.
This was his first ad for this product.
It was a weekly, and once you place the ad, you wait ten days to two weeks depending upon when you place it before the ad to appear. He had to pay all up front.
At that time he had no credit with anyone.
The cost of the ad was was $600. That was late…maybe ’79 or ’80. Even with all the risk, he wasn’t nervous. Actually he was excited.
Then he waited.
He got 700 orders. At $10 a pop, that’s $7,000.
He was in business.
Do you have some great ideas to share? Information is worth money, and people will pay for it. You can make millions by self publishing your book.
