World s Greatest Copywriter Letter

lere are some of the head-
lines I used: HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH YOUR CREDIT CARDS (for a book titled "How to
Tum Plastic into Gold"); HOW TO KEEP YOUR MONEY FROM BEING MURDERDI (for a book
titled "How to Rob a Bank Without a Gun"); THE WORLD WOULD BE A BETTER PLACE
WITHOUT FAT PEOPLE - HERE'S HOW YOU CAN HELP GET RID OF THEM (for a book on
reducing); HOW TO INCREASE THE FREQUENCY AND QUALITY OF YOUR ORGASMS (for a book
on high-tech sex); and so on. There were others but, truthfully, I don't remember them all. I don't
remember the sales figures either because, by that time,
I had stopped counting. Life was good back then. I had all the badges of success. A showplace
luxury cars,
a huge bank account,
recognition of my peers, a boat, a condo
in Florida and whatever else I wanted that money could buy. I also had an ego as big as the national debt. It was at this point in my career that I began to think of myself as
someone really special. I considered myself the best advertising man who had ever
lived (except for Claude Hopkins) and, naturally, I wrote an ad about myself so
the rest of the world would be sure to be aware of my wonderfulness.

in Advertising Age, Madison Avenue and The Reporter of Direct Marketing and it had
a modest headline that went like this:
HOW TO WRITE COPY THAT
WILL MAKE YOU RICH
- A challenge fran the best
advertising writer alive today -
This ad did not seek sales, it sought other advertising people who would
write ads for me and add to my ever-growing bank account. I received a lot of
Copywriters from more than 1,700 ad agencies responded to that ad and
many of then sent me mail order ads that I tested in various publications. None of those ads worked. Not to worry. My own ads were still working and pulling in money like
there was no tomorrow. In fact, sometimes, some of my ads or letters would pull
in as much as $60,000.00 in a single day. Take that one about the book on social
fot to worry. My own ads were still working and pulling in money lik
In fact, sometimes, some of my ads or letters would pul
senarine that is distributed in Sunday noses
One of the publications I ran was Parade which is a
The cost of that particular ad
was $33,214.00 and the sales generated were $228,492.00. air that's just one ad in one publication! (go to Page 4)
- Page 4 -
But it wasn't enough. As I said earlier, I had a giant ego and it needed a
lot of care and feeding. All my life I had been poor and now that I was raking in
the money, I wanted everybody to know about it.

One of the dumb things I used to
lo back then was waltz into our little local bank with a duffle bag full of checks
and money orders and rather unceremoniously dumo them onto
ver seen twenty or thirty thousand checks and money orders
It makes a hell of
a impression on you and I milked it for all it was wortt
I wanted attention and I got it. It came in the form of two men wearing
ski masks and armed with U.S. Army.45 handguns. It was a Friday evening during
the first week of July, 1973. what happened is that I was unloading groceries
from the trunk of my car when I was approached by the aforementioned two men who
had been hiding in the woods adjacent to my property. One of them flashed his gun
at me (God, it was big!) and told me to be quiet while the other one went on into
the house to capture and tie up my wife. A Very Bad Scene! At first, these guys were very courteous. The one outside with me asked me
to remove my glasses and told me
to put them on top of the air conditioner. way, he explained,
I'd know where they were when ali this was over. After that,
marched me inside to the master bedroom where his partner had my wife blind-
gagged, and tied up on the bed. Then, these guys did the same thing to me
they added an extra touch. The extra touch was they stuffed me inside a canvas bag. It was a memorable experience.

There I was, helpless inside a mail sack
(that's ironic isn't it?) and these two guys were ransacking my home and making
They took some gold and silver coins,
some cash, some of my wife's
jewelry (including a heirloon ring given to her by a treasured relative),
about $80,000 worth of orders for one of the books I was selling by mail. They
put all this into a Cadillac (mine) and then drove off. No good. That crime has never been solved and it set off a chain-reaction of events
that got me involved with insane psychiatrists, "nad dog" postal inspectors and
fiendish con men. I'll be writing about those experiences in my newsletter in an
article titled "The Dark Side of Success" and I an sure you will find it instructive and rather morbidly fascinating. But that's later. Right now, let's get back to the good stuff. O.K. with
you? Good. Anyway, along about this time, I decided to move to California and,
shortly thereafter,
I became aware of the possibilities inherent in investing in
U.S. postage stames and I decided to write a book about that subject. if the book was the same as the headline of the mail order ad I used to sell it. To wit:
THANK GOD NOT EVERYIHING PRINTED
BY IHE U.S. GOVERNMENI LOSES ITS VALUE! This book was a modest commercial success (about $250,000.00 in sales) and
working on it was good therapy for me.

Soor after writing the stamp book, I became interested in trading cormodi-
(go to Page 5)
- Page 5 -
ties and I developed a system that I used to execute 78 consecutive winning
mail promotion I created to sell this book was spectacular. The book sold for
$35.00 (a dumb price) and one list pulled as high as 35%! Are your greed glands at full secretion yet? Are you starting to see the
possibilities? Just to make sure, let's look at a few more examples. Do you
remember this headline?