We’ve received another account from a former Scientology manager who previously told us about the development of contracts in the church after the death of Lisa McPherson. This time, they gave us another timely look into Scientology’s past.
The release of Mike Rinder’s book this week reminded me of some of the insanity that surrounded trying to get L. Ron Hubbard’s books onto the New York Times Bestsellers List.
There were unusual methods for getting a book on the list, which spread around because much of the staff “enhancement” — correction, confessionals, auditing — was done in a centralized section of management. The information I am giving here is from the people directly involved. A number of them gave up the information in sec checks (confessionals), correction interviews, “debugs” or overt-and-withhold write-ups, all considered not confidential and so “actionable.”
Those Scientology staff and managers would talk about the Dianetics boom in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The main component was the question-and-answer ads designed by Jefferson Hawkins that were so popular on cable television, and another component was making sure a lot of copies of Dianetics had flooded the market and were available at any point of sale possible. The book hit the New York Times Bestsellers List multiple times as well as many other bestsellers lists around the US.
The Dianetics story here is relevant because it “proved” a couple of things that became the model of what was to be done after that. One, if a book could get on the New York Times list it would, as a result, sell in big numbers because of that alone. Two, a huge volume of books in circulation gives the appearance of a “book so in demand that it was everywhere,” and that created word of mouth, the best way to get sales.
By around 1993, the advertising budget had been cut and sales of Dianetics were struggling. There was constant conflict between the Publications Org and the Planetary Dissem Org/Central Marketing Unit (a division of Gold) over whose fault the lack of “sell-through” was. There were literally screaming matches between these people at times. “Pubs” was blamed for poor distribution into the bookstores, and PDO/CMU was faulted for a lack of marketing. As it goes with the Sea Org, the poor performance just meant an increase in ethics and justice procedures and “correction” of those involved.
Meanwhile, Scientology was also trying to elevate Hubbard’s reputation by keeping his old pulp fiction in print. Fiction did not have the marketing budget that a Dianetics or Scientology book would have, but it was just as important to get the books on the New York Times list and to get tons of books in circulation to create the word of mouth and thus sales.
This may not be the first time this happened but it was the first I heard of it: When a new edition of Ole Doc Methuselah, a 1970 science fiction short story collection, was released about 1992, Pubs staff were sent on “projects” to select Scientology organizations, including the Flag Land Base in Florida. Because the book was fiction it was decided this couldn’t be promoted “on church lines by church people,” so there would be a short little announcement at a graduation and a display set up so people could buy the book. The registrars (sales people) and org staff would help sell the books on the side. The publics (non-employee members) would be persuaded to also buy extra copies for family, friends, or acquaintances as gifts. The idea was to “disseminate” L. Ron Hubbard as an author, thus raising interest and curiosity for his other works and leading to them getting on The Bridge.
The people on these projects had to report in multiple times a day so that Author Services Inc. (Hubbard’s literary agency, another Scientology subsidiary) could be updated on the regular. Pressure was on for quotas to be met.
Someone in Author Services (I was told it was Hugh Wilhere) had acquired the list of the stores whose sales were what the New York Times would base their list on. At the time it was a variety of big bookstore chains, small independent stores, and big-box stores. This list was not publicly known so that it could not be manipulated and so the list would be based truly on public demand for books.
Once sales quotas were met, Pubs staff would target locations where there was a concentration of New York Times-reporting stores, and they would use the money from the cash sales to buy back the books from these particular stores, literally buying back thousands of books. Now the number of books being bought back were being reported to ASI throughout the day (how many bought and from which stores). The pressure to get it done and in the right volume to get the book on the list was very high.
The book-buying procedures were this: Books for the pre-release were taken out of stock on “consignment” by a staff member (the project person), sold at the orgs, bought back from the stores from the cash sales and then returned back to stock by that person along with the check and credit card sales. Assets remained the same (from a profit & loss perspective) and it appeared that the Pubs org was not involved in the buying of books back – there was no paper trail.
The other way was for the people not taking the books with them at the time of sale or sold over the phone. They needed the book shipped, and the order would be placed with one of the New York Times-reporting stores on their behalf (without telling them) and then was shipped to them from the store.
This created a problem because some of the public reported this as being out-ethics, deceitful or just weird. Also, some bookstores charged shipping which the public were not told about, and they were unhappy about the additional charge on top of the fact that they didn’t understand why their book had come from a Walden Books or other such store that they hadn’t called.
If I remember correctly, Ole Doc Methuselah did make it on the New York Times list for a week or maybe two, but it didn’t maintain any significant level of sales and so off to ethics and correction the sales staff were sent.
This way of attempting to get on the NYT list happened with several books or books on tape over the years, and even some non-fiction books. Another big one I remember was years later. It was another fiction book called Ai! Pedrito! – When Intelligence Goes Wrong, an original story idea by Hubbard that was turned into a novel by writer Kevin J. Anderson in 1998. (“Dreadful preadolescent plotting in comic-strip prose,” was the verdict of Kirkus Reviews.) This time the new book was allowed to be released at a big church summer event. Books were sold by Sea Org members as well as staff in the area. Public were regged to buy for themselves but also to buy in bulk to donate to libraries.
Again, money from cash sales was used to send people out to go buy books back from the NYT-reporting stores to get the book on the newspaper’s list. After the initial boost of sales, it tanked and continued to go down. Sec checking as well as what they called “metered debugs” (looking into possible ways the sales could go down with an E-meter to un-bug the sales) and other handlings were being administered, but the Pubs sales staff were at a loss on what to do without a demand for the book.
This time there were some instances of public who paid cash that came in to get a copy of their invoice they never received. (Uh oh.) One salesperson said they had got some donations and used some of the money to put the sale on the accounts of the people so that the they could get their invoices. Not that the public knew this, they were told it was just an error and to them it was understandable since there were so many sales at the event. Problem solved, right? Sure, except for the salesperson who was now in ethics for doing something they felt was an overt of a financial irregularity.
There was also concern, what if somehow the NYT found out that it was them buying all of the books, not real sales, it could have bad repercussions. At one point it was not enough to go in and buy one or two copies so Pubs staff were told to buy 3 and 4 copies and apparently some got sarcastic comments like “You must really like that book.” or “Someone came in earlier buying several copies of the book.” or “Did you already lose your book?” clearly recognizing the person from earlier.
From the sales staff’s perspective there was insufficient marketing and PR to create a lasting demand. These staff would literally get stuck on the “debug” because they got the distribution and sales still did not happen. What else could they do? In Scientology “if the tech won’t go in then ethics is out.” With the debugs not working, correction not working, off to ethics they went.
Marketing and PR staff would do their rounds in correction and ethics as well but it wasn’t really to the same degree as sales staff. The sales staff were beat up on, the scapegoats for books that are really not in demand and not selling.
L. Ron Hubbard had a couple of lines in policies that were pounded in, to the effect that books in circulation create word of mouth and thus sales. In another policy he said that Marketing had to furnish their product, but the main sales channel is sales managers; otherwise, marketing goes nowhere.
Then the funny (or not so funny) thing was that many Pubs staff, later on, got in trouble for doing the whole book-buying thing as an out-ethics “off-the-rails” activity. If you know anything about the Sea Org, if you are given an order by higher up, especially the level of Author Services, you salute with both hands and get it done or you find yourself posted somewhere considered to be menial like a dishwasher or even put on the RPF. So damned if you don’t and damned if you do.
Thank you for reading today’s story here at Substack. For the full picture of what’s happening today in the world of Scientology, please join the conversation at tonyortega.org, where we’ve been reporting daily on David Miscavige’s cabal since 2012. There you’ll find additional stories, and our popular regular daily features:
Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history
Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea
Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time
Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology
Random Howdy: Your daily dose of the Captain
Here’s the link for today’s post at tonyortega.org
And whatever you do, subscribe to this Substack so you get our breaking stories and daily features right to your email inbox every morning…
Now available: Bonus for our supporters
Episode 14 of the Underground Bunker podcast has been sent out to paid subscribers: We check in with Clearwater city councilman Mark Bunker about Scientology’s latest attempts to sabotage progress there. Meanwhile, we’ve made episodes 1 through 13 available to everyone, with such guests as Jesse Prince, Paulette Cooper, Michelle ‘Emma’ Ryan, Jefferson Hawkins, Patty Moher, Geoff Levin, Pete Griffiths, Sunny Pereira, Bruce Hines, Jeffrey Augustine, and Claire Headley. Go here to get the episodes!
What a clusterphuck of an operation. Gaming the NYTimes system and gaming their public. Yeah, that is the $cieno way.
A lot of dismal dodgy dicey book selling.
I was twinned on the KTL with one of the Bridge Publications Inc staffers, he was a mainstay at BPI for decades. He and his wife both, Don Arnow and his wife.
The early 1990s was a transition time, when the fiction works had to be stripped from BPI's bookselling lineup, and moved over to ASI first, and then Galaxy formed to do what BPI used to do, which was RE selling the LRH pulps and LRH "golden age of fiction" books Hubbard had written.
Those trade fiction booksales, were actually in the ASI LRH final traffic, and LRH was sending those orders to ASI, and ASI "complied" with them pushing Bridge to sell LRH's trade fiction.
Then the solution today, is Galaxy to sell LRH's trade fiction. And let BPI and NEPI sell just "church" books and products.
The stat pushing, that's just a long long nasty pattern, and "buy backs" went on in earlier years at ASI even. ASI would sell "LRH prints" in huge amounts, to certain big buyers, and ASI ended up buying back huge quantities of the "LRH prints" due to them never selling.
The way "buy backs" are described here, are doing "buy backs" on LRH trade fiction books.
The whole LRH trade fiction strategies that Bridge used to do, I think have been phased out now.
It's Galaxy that does LRH trade fiction booksales, correct? If the writer of this article can answer, I think that's been the final solution.
The other false stats stuff, the buying back to make the NYT bestseller, that's really gross.
Hubbard, when he was live, in the 1980s and the Mission Earth books were one by one stat pushed and nefarious shennanigans done to inflate sales of each that did get onto the NYT bestseller lists, was pushed and executed by ASI. And LRH was falsely reported to, never told of how they were stat pushing his books onto the NYT's bestseller lists.
"Pink legs" type of Simon Bolivar policy themes, of not telling the boss how you were making his books "hits" on bestseller lists.
False reporting that Hubbard didn't hear, and people were too scared to tell Hubbard of the stat pushing and false tactics to get his books on the bestseller lists.
Something that his sci fi and pulp writer colleagues would have sadly also kind of expected from Hubbard. Hubbard who to them was beyond the beyond for starting his own "religion" and then later having his minions do these false tactics to get Hubbard's old era fiction books on the bestseller lists, in modern years, is just sadly kind of how they saw Hubbard decline into that sick state Hubbard did decline into. Hubbard pushed his minions to push each other to create the false picture that Hubbard wanted to hear. He wanted "good news" and so the battered abused staff minions produced "good news" and false accomplishments to feed Hubbard's deluded wishes.
I think if the history of L. Ron Hubbard the "writer" is told more succinctly, someday, if ever, it will have to include the "captive audience" theme; and the "captive minions" theme who "falsified the captive audience false statistics" and lie to Hubbard to please deluded Hubbard who insisted his authorship fiction products were more valuable than they ever were to the 1980s and 1990s real people audiences.
If the ASI LRH traffic were in the public domain, you could see the Hubbard pressure and insistence on the Hubbard keep pushing and keep hyping, and force the sales of his old era books, to make money for the LRH accounts. ASI staff complied, by browbeating then BPI trade fiction and all those false buying schemes to get on the bestseller lists. All to please sick Hubbard's demands.
It all goes back to sick Hubbard, and how he set up his minions to do his bidding, at their peril if they didn't accomplish his delusions.