Ensifer

First off, a short bit of recent history.

For close to 28 years, or perhaps more, I have had a small cash balance at Flag. Depending on the year and who was calling me the actual amount ranged between $20 and $2000 credit. I’d vote for the $20 because it’s hard to believe even I would have overlooked two thousand bucks.

Okay. Now that you’re up to date – until about the year 2001 I got phone calls pretty much every few months from Flag. The credit balance was the proverbial ‘foot in the door’ to open a dialog directed at recovering me, getting me to pony up more money and come back to Flag to get repaired, renewed and reviewed. Then I bought a small horse property in another county, disconnected the land line and all but disappeared off the Scientology radar. It was pretty strange, not opening a mailbox and having 30 or 40 pieces of Scientology promo fall out. And since I was now totally cell phone the only way for Flag reg teams to get that number was for someone currently on lines to give it to them.

Guess what? Someone did.

It was actually my nephew Sam. He was at Flag training on something-or-the-other for the Org he works for and ended up in the call center. That’s what I term it, the call center. The guy he was talking to happened to be a person I have untold quantities of affinity for. My former roommate, a guy I audited back almost 40 years ago and who also worked for me on staff at my Mission. Bob Goodwin is his name and if you know him you know he’s wonderful. But Bob is also in the Sea org and has targets to meet. Isn’t that what most relationships between Sea Org members and their non SO friends eventually boil down to? Targets? Now I know Bob likes me. At the same time, he wasn’t calling to discuss old times. He was on Miscavige’s dime and he was all about informing me about the new revision in the Scientology library. That and this awesome DVD introducing the Golden Age of Technology.

Half of Bob. All of me. Late 1970s. Booze was flowing.

My apologies for the truncated image of Bob. When I scan in a full image of him I’ll replace it. The funniest part of this picture is me though… I crack up every time I see the size of those lapels on my suit. Sweet huh?

Anyway, Bob is nothing if not persistent. I agreed to let him send me the DVD. He did. I put it in the player, watched maybe 3 minutes of it and ejected it. You all probably know why. I’m not a fan of slasher/horror flicks.

Bob didn’t give up though. He called me every couple of weeks for well over a year. I told him how much I like him and suggested he was wasting valuable time with me. But then he had an idea! Why not let him send me some of the new books in exchange for the credit I had on account? Sounded okay to me. I agreed and quickly forgot about it.

Then, about 3 weeks later, I was at the post office and the guy behind the counter said some packages arrived for me. Huh? I didn’t order anything. He instructed me to wait by a door and about 5 minutes later came out with a hand truck loaded with 7 heavy boxes. It was the complete flippin’ library! Not only that, but there were full sets of CD lectures, about a dozen of them. I was flabbergasted. What the fuck?! Oh well, I loaded them in my truck and dropped them off at my storage unit.

Bob eventually gave up on me. Cut his losses I reckon. Hopefully Bob is doing well. But I was stuck with a couple hundred pounds of books and CD’s and began to wonder how they afforded to do that. So I did some scouting around on the Internet and discovered that the GAT and the revision (re-structuring?) of the basic library was nothing more than a huge reg cycle being done on current Scientologists. The best I could figure out is that one of you guys actually bought the books for me. You got regged for $10K or maybe $50K and that cash was applied, as a stat, to book sales. People like me were selected out, sent the books and viola! The Golden Age of Tech is born and stats are up. See? Look at all the books we sold!

In other parts of society this is known as money laundering. You, the target of an IAS reg team, pays $25K. Bob and his team send maybe $5K hard money worth of books out. The books and lectures are ‘valued’ at $25K. And an extra $20K is banked by the CofS… or whatever the organization is called these days.

I don’t know about you, but that whole scenario feels like some sort of continuing criminal enterprise. Maybe I’m wrong . Maybe not. I’d prefer to ask the person who bought my 7 boxes of books what they think.

You know what though? Before I left the church we also sold Scientology books. The main difference was that we sold them to people who hadn’t read them yet. Or if they had, they bought back-ups or gift copies. In fact, I always felt the basic books were key to getting people into Scientology. You know, they delivered new knowledge, cognitions were had and need of change was arrived at. But there is also a checkered history of manipulation of numbers by the church in order to have bragging rights on sales numbers. Wikipedia references this here:

Various sources allege that the book’s continued sales have been manipulated by the Church of Scientology and its related organizations ordering followers to buy up new editions to boost sales figures. According to a Los Angeles Times exposé published in 1990, “sales of Hubbard’s books apparently got an extra boost from Scientology followers and employees of the publishing firm [Bridge Publications]. Showing up at major book outlets like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, they purchased armloads of Hubbard’s works, according to former employees.” Members are asked to contribute by placing Dianetics in public libraries.

Some of this is true. But it’s also true that in the later half of the 70’s Dianetics did hit the NYT best seller list legitimately. I know this for a fact because my center in Fresno and my teams of booksellers were #1 in the world for selling copies of Dianetics to non-Scientologists. The new cover was published in paperback form… you know, the BT-laden volcano one… and the game to get DMSMH back to the #1 spot was announced. I can’t recall any Mission not getting behind the game. Any that didn’t were dumb asses because selling books to public in large numbers usually ended up with people coming in to buy services. And I wanted our Fresno Mission to be #1… to win the game.

We did win. And somewhere in my storage unit I have the plaque to prove it. Diana Hubbard handed it to me at a Mission Holder conference in Mazatlan, Mexico at the end of the game. In the Fresno area we sold in excess of 25,000 individual copies of the DMSMH paperback book. And we did old school. Door-to-door. I organized teams of booksellers, trained them up myself on how to actually knock on a door. Then on how to parley the ‘script’ into a sale. I taught them simple things like to actually get the $5 from the customer and to always, say thank you. In addition I provided them with data cards where they could record the address and name of the buyer if the buyer agreed.

It was insanely successful. Think about it… 25,000 copies sold over a 6 month period to complete non-Scientologists in one city alone. If every Mission had done that there really might have been a massive effect instead of just a positive one. I’ll also admit I had a few tricks that helped. One of them was a brace of very, very cool looking Dianetics vans.

See?

Are these great? Or what? Not the Porsche dummy! Although, it was pretty cool as well.

The sales team hit the streets in these vans. I had the gal who painted them also spell out DIANETICS in backward ambulance style on the front of each so people could read it in their mirror. That VW went through about 3 motors during the campaign, but everyone liked driving it. Probably because a lot of them were former Hippies.

The guy in charge was one of my top staffers. His name was Pat McCabe and he ran a great team. He organized each day, set up the grids they worked and kept meticulous logs of sales, expenses and all the other little crap that needed to be done. Pat was also the mentor and moral support for the book sellers. This was door-to-door and unless you’ve done it then you cannot possibly know the confront required to get out there and do it every day. Another thing that helped was that I not only paid the book sellers whatever the weekly salary was but they earned commission on each book. My memory is a bit sketchy but as I recall we bought the $5 books for $2.50 total. Pat and I worked out that we needed about $1 from each book for expenses and so each sale meant $1.50 into the staff’s pocket. May not seem like much but realize that there were probably never more than about 8 sellers total and they sold 25,000 books in 6 months. So they made their salary plus about $30K between them.

The unacknowledged Super Star of the Dianetics book campaign though is a quiet little gal named LeeAnn Smith. She really was quiet. Shy even. Cute and very mellow, but not aggressive at all. The type of young lady who put her hand over her mouth politely when she laughed or smiled. LeeAnn was a total fucking animal out in the field. She was like the Navy SEAL of selling books. She overwhelmingly beat the numbers of any other seller on the teams. In short, she was a Goddess. I hope to hell I gave her a cash bonus. I’m certain I did. I do know she got a plaque every bit as grand as the one I received for being the Mission Holder who “won”.

LeeAnn getting her plaque at our winning celebration in Fresno. Notice how shy and meek she looks? Trust me, it's a trap!!!!

When I started this blog I stated I wanted to tell stories about what it was like being a Scientology staff member before the RTC, Financial Police and the rise of Miscavige.  The message I hope to pass on with this story about book selling is that we had fun. Yeah, stats mattered. But when we aimed for numbers the numbers had integrity. We didn’t sell books to launder money or to create a false impression to the media. Our team In Fresno sold a ton or two of books to people who might actually read them and walk in the door. It was the most basic concept of marketing… get out a huge quantity of material. And the fact that people paid for the book attached a value to it.

Speaking of value. I suppose I ought to thank someone for all those books and CD’s. I’ve done pretty good on eBay with them.