The Way the Future Was: A Memoir by Frederik Pohl

Author:Frederik Pohl
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2015-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

And then I tried one more card, which said:

HAVE YOU GOT A BIG BOOKCASE?

Because if you have, we have a BIG BOOK for you…

and that was the winner. We didn’t bother transmuting the copy appeal to a circular, we just mailed out those cards. Nearly a million of them, and the only reason we didn’t mail more was that we ran out of books.

That was the fun part, and the addictive part, and the part that makes advertising people cynical about the wisdom of their customers—which is to say, you, and me, and all of us. Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people’s lives. And, you know, most people’s fantasies are pretty sad.

But still it was fun. We used our ingenuity particularly in the subscription efforts for the magazines, most doggedly of all in the renewal series. Because the money in the magazines came from advertising, and advertising rates were tied to circulation, we were glad to spend three or four times the subscription price to get you to subscribe. And if you once subscribed, boy, we hung on to you. You would stay on our list, one way or another, until you died. If you let your subscription lapse, we would send seventeen separate renewal efforts to get you back. First we would bill you. Then we would remind you. Then we would coax you. Then we would start to bribe you: two free issues, three free issues, a year at half price. If you still held out, we began to get desperate. Kidding letters. Belligerent letters. Pathetic letters. I wrote one that purported to be from Diane, the girl who had cut your Addressograph stencil: “Dear Friend, my boss just told me I had to take your subscription stencil out of our file. To me, every name on those plates is a friend, and I hate to see yours go—” They all worked, exactly like the osmotic diffusion barriers in a uranium-isotope separation plant. Ten percent responded to the first appeal. Ten percent of what was left to the second. Ten percent of the remainder to the third. We got a perfectly satisfactory return on every mailing at every stage in the cascade, and if you managed to get away unrenewed after receiving all seventeen, my hat, sir, is off to your determination. (Wow, why didn’t I think of that then? “My hat, sir, is off to your determination, and as determined readers like you are our favorite subscribers, I am going to extend this one more chance—”)

Popular Science was a great success story as a publishing company, and a good place to work. Gene Watson was the VP in charge of our department, wise, sharp, highly competent. Harry Walton, old sf-writing friend, was one of the editors on the magazine side, and now and again we would get together for lunch or coffee. I kept getting promoted, with added duties and added assistants: book editor, manager of subscription agents, executive in charge of book fulfillment; and I was always allowed to try whatever crazy ideas I thought might work.

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