Now that the happy holidays are over, we find Scientology embarked upon a new year which presages greater gains than ever before. With the opening of 1956 we discover that we have certain definite assets which are now paying excellent dividends. With the excellent job being done in Washington and London and with new efforts under way in South Africa and Australia and with auditors in many places doing more and better than ever before we are moving in to our first real organizational year. I wonder if you realize in the past how much of a burden of dissemination has been carried by myself. I wonder if you know the number of hours I have sat over a typewriter late at night beating out stencils, shoving booklets through on inadequate budgets in order to hold up the public interest while we got an organization built, but you might have some comparison in the amount of work which you have done to keep things rolling during these last years. Now more than ever we look like a team and certainly we are acting as organizations and carrying forward the dissemination of Scientology as never before.
In the last issue of Operational Bulletin — Op. Bull. No. 10—I gave you a brief outline of the facts of organizations to which I had paid very clear attention. These aren’t by the way a series of fragments thrown together with a lot of stuff left over. That outline is given to you for your study because it does contain in it actually all the points; when we go too far outside these points we have a very difficult time of it.
You may not realize how much distribution is possible by one individual. The way you do this is to procure telephone books for the various cities, particularly the more important ones, and you comb down through the classified directory listing all bookstores. Now you take this as a complete bookstore list and you have made up a very fancy and presentable circular, and you offer them the usual trade discounts and operate just like a book distributor. You don’t have to have any order form or order blank, you simply put together a little brochure which tells them what books you have available and puts these books on order to them. You will be amazed how many orders come in particularly as the sale of Scientology and Dianetics books has been tremendous and you say so in the brochure.
Now making proper coverage you then continue to hammer and pound away at the bookstores which didn’t order until you have set up a full distribution machine. Thereafter you very carefully keep this bookstore distribution circulation as a separate enterprise and activity, fill their orders very promptly and remember to watch your billings. Many of these stores will order books on credit. It is perfectly all right to sell the books on credit but it is necessary to bill them at a certain time. If this is done on the release of any new book it is necessary to send copies of this book to every prominent newspaper for review. These newspapers will review the books. Furthermore, in such things as the Saturday Review of Literature you can buy a small ad or two announcing the publication of the book. In addition to that, and particularly this, you place an ad in the booksellers’ trade journal. The booksellers have a trade journal and this trade journal sells ads and you buy a big ad in the trade journal and then all the bookstores look at this ad and many of them send in for this book.
Now this takes a little bit of doing but this is the totality of operation and action which the publisher actually gives you. Of course he has a salesman or two but these salesmen are actually working for many publishers and are seldom relative to just one publisher. They are trying to sell so many books at once that they get into quite a confusion over the thing.
Action for this in the United States is of course Bill Young; action in London is Jack Parkhouse. We should begin to compile a complete list of bookstores and get our campaign in order. We should also place our ads in the publisher’s weekly.
As Issue 6 got lost in the testing, SLP Issue 7 is now being prepared by myself and will be released as soon as one more of its processes is adequately tested. This SLP is really a killer. For the first time it gives us ways and means of processing successfully and directly a chronic somatic. There are no really violent changes from SLP Issue 5 in form and order. There are no processes dropped. There are processes added and some changes are made.
The first issue of the Washington news letter has been released and is being sent out by Don Breeding to the various HASs. It is an effort to keep the organization informed within the Washington organization and to inform others of what the Washington organization is specifically doing.
There have been several questions concerning how one country could get books from the organization of another country. These are best answered by a credit system of the value less discounts of the merchandise. London transferring books to Washington, D.C. , is keeping a booklet which is full of these transfers. This also applies to tapes and other materials. Thus the organization in London can transfer as much as it likes to Washington, D.C. Similarly Washington, D.C. , can transfer as much as it likes to London, and eventually these accounts will be balanced off one against the other. South Africa and Australia could be doing the same thing providing of course that they have materials to submit to London and Washington which can operate on an exchange basis.