Carla Emery: Author of the Old Fashioned Recipe Book
(Page 4 of 17)
May/June 1975
By the Mother Earth News editors
And then I asked myself, "Well, how much should I charge for this guide to country living?" . . . and $3.50 sounded about right. So I wrote my ad about this book I was going to sell on canning and making sauerkraut and sausages and candles and all this other stuff . . . and I submitted it to the magazine with my money. It was much cheaper to advertise in Organic Gardening , you know, five years ago than it is now.
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PLOWBOY: And you told the readers to send you $3.50 and you'd send them a book.
EMERY: Right, right. I said to send in $3.50 and I'd mail out a book. But, two months later when the ad was published and 200 people mailed me checks for $3.50, all I had to send back was a title and table of contents!
Well my husband, who's a very practical and conservative man, said to return everyone's money. But we were desperate for cash so I said, "Oh Mike, we need the money. I'll write the book. Just give me two months more. I can finish it, and in the meantime I'll write everyone a letter and tell them I'm not done yet."
So that was the beginning of the newsletter. I knew nothing about reproducing such things then so I wrote out two hundred copies of the same letter: "Dear Friend, I don't have the book ready yet, but it's coming. Give me two more months, and if you want a refund I'll send it."
Two months later, of course, I still wasn't finished and I had to write another newsletter. I did that one by hand too and I said, "It's still not done but it's coming, it's coming." And I gave a little progress report. I told people what part of the book I was working on and how they'd be able to use that section when the guide was done.
After a year of this I began to get a few letters that were kind of angry. And a few really pushy letters that said, "Carla, we need this book now."
So I said, "OK. I'll send everybody as much as I can. I've completed three chapters out of the 12 on my table of contents . . . and here they are." And since the book wasn't finished and I had to have some way to hold the chapters together, I just punched three holes in every sheet of paper and bound the pages with covers and rings . . . metal rings. And I said, "OK. I'll send you more when I get it."
So from then on, every year, I sent each of my "subscribers" a newsletter that told what I'd been up to and I included the chapters I'd gotten done that year and that's the way the book came out. The last section was mailed in February of 1974 and the first complete book was shipped during March of 1974. And that's how it happened. The Old Fashioned Recipe Book was finally finished four years after I'd gotten the idea for it.
PLOWBOY: How many orders did you take before the book was completed?
EMERY: About 800. Because what I did, you see, was I spent the money on postage and paper for the newsletter and other supplies as it came in so that every time I thought I was about ready to print the book I had to run another ad in Organic Gardening to get up the money to publish the next batch of chapters. So I finally wound up with 800 orders before the book was even done. And in all that time—four years—only six people asked for their money back. They got so interested in the newsletter and in waiting to see how the next chapters came out that all but six of those first 800 customers stuck with me until the book was completed.
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