Right! Anyone will pay a few dollars for a paperback, without giving it too much thought. Any more than one would give a lot of thought to buying a magazine. So (I told them back then – I was very naive and earnest about this issue back then) so just sell it cheap in paperback and get millions to buy it without thinking about it too much – just something to read, you know? It will click with some people, and others not, but selling DMSMH will be easy and fast and produce results this way…And the response was…nothing. No, we had to lug thes heavy hardcovers and set up tables and e-meters and sweat and find their ruin, and get ecstatic if we sold even one book…for $25…God how I resented wasting my free time like this…such a waste of time, such a total waste of time and mostly no product when it could have been so very easy; make the books cheap and sell them, lots of them, cheap, without this whole fucking prior procedure added to what could have been hundreds, possibly thousands of simple, fast book sales. I wonder whose stupid idea the stress test was and why am I even asking such a stupid question? Any procedure that doesn’t work and wastes time and effort would have to be the Dwarf’s idea, right? I’m ranting again but I’ll tell you, far more than any money I threw down the rathole for this cult, far more do I resent the wasted time of 1) Events, and 2) Book Selling.

Yeah, back in the day, we sold them on the street when it was only 2 bucks. Once while on the bus, I sold one to the driver. It didn’t seem that hard.

When I first got in, around the mid-80s, Dianetic was $3,50 in paperback. I was taking a long bus ride, and I just needed something to read. I bought it and read it because I’ll read pretty much anything.

When I left which was 11 years ago, Dianetics was now part of the Basics package, in hardcover only and cost $25.

I always wondered why, if DMSMH was so vital to be read by everyone on the planet they didn’t keep selling it inexpensively in paperback.

There are still al lot of people who will read something, just because its there. Magazines cost $5 or more and they’re mostly fluff and people read them all the time.

I never understood back then, taking away the inexpensive paperback option and making it an expensive book to buy.

Regarding the Melbourne man selling dianetics (a whole two of them) i can tell from the picture he was set up only a few hundred metres where the Jahovas Witness try and recruit – how ironic they are so near by – should be called cult corner. That area has a heap of passing foot traffic, a lot who are wealthy and affluent, to only sell two books in that environment should be considered a major failure.

Glenn, I think approaches like worked in the early days – but then had diminishing returns as time went on and things changed. That was the era of door-to-door sales too – and even the Jehovah’s Witnesses are now deemphasizing door-to-door proselytizing. The CofS seems unable to change, though the costs of mailings must now be a big burden on struggling orgs.

That the girls later got a civil case through on him showed the truth does come out eventually. And then Jan dodged a bullet on a legal technicality for her part in whole sorry saga.

Sometimes the bs is plain sickening.

And going to Canberra for a protest? I remember doing that over 40 years ago with a handful of people to chant anti-psych crap at Parliament House for a brief while then we had to get back on post that night. Sure made a lot of difference. Not!

Evil kult is evil. And relentlessly brain-dead. So glad I got out.

Right? It doesn’t add up they say they are the fastest growing and most successful and humanitarian yet they can’t sell many if their books to anyone. I’m pretty sure the people who are buying the books are Scientologists anyways. So like you said it’s not an accomplishment.

If you haven’t heard the story, Google “Jan Eastgate” “sexual abuse.”

When I was an eager noob back in the mid-70s, I wanted to read dmsmh to find out about this ‘clear’ stuff. I was actually discouraged from reading it by the mission staff because they said it was “too hard to understand”. I was steered towards ‘New Slant on Life’ which I found to be a nebulous attempt by Hubbard to be philosophical.

There was a ‘Book 1’ (dmsmh) revival of sorts in the early 80s and people were encouraged to audit their ‘wog’ friends using the methods outlined in dmsmh. That went nowhere. I remember a fellow named John Galusha (an early 50s auditor) touring orgs and missions promoting this ‘Book 1’ revival. When he mentioned in his presentation that smoking was an addiction. there was an uncomfortable silence in the room. Most of the staff smoked and everyone knew Hubbard’s views on tobacco use and his chain smoking habit. Galusha wasn’t heard from in the cult after that. I believe that he started his own ‘squirrel’ group shortly after that with Mike Goldstein. Diana Hubbard was supposedly backing them. Shortly after that, Kingsly Wimbush emerged with his de-dinging stuff, the Finance Police swarmed the missions after the infamous mission holders massacre and the rest is history. Good times in the cult for sure. Bottom line: dmsmh went nowhere then and is going even more nowhere now.

PeaceMaker, as far as I remember, all the stands set up at book fairs, whether by New Era or the orgs, have NEVER covered the organizational costs. It has always been for PR or in the hope of catching a big books distributor. It might have worked in the ’80s, but not anymore. In the end it’s the usual propitiation attitude begging for some approval that we see everywhere now.