Not Sold in Stores!

Special Event: I am pleased to announce that Mr. Steve Forbes, Chairman and editor in chief of Forbes magazine, will be speaking at Chapman University this Tuesday, April 29, at 4:00-5:30 pm at the Sandhu Conference Center on campus at 571 North Center St., Orange, CA 92867. You’re invited!

He’s there to receive the annual Doti-Spogli Free EnterPRIZE, which includes five American eagle gold coins (now valued at $17,000). Past recipients were Nobel laureate Vernon Smith and John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market.

Both Jim Doti and Ron Spogli will be there as well as other VIPs from the board and the public.

Mr. Forbes will give a 20-minute talk, followed by a Q&A session with me and the audience. Hope you can make it. To RSVP, email me at mskousen@chapman.edu. Hope to see you there.

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“What secrets lie behind the contents of a plain brown envelope you receive in a post office box?”

Here is a story I’ve never told before.

Have you ever been tempted to respond to an ad that promises an item “not sold in stores”?

Many TV infomercials and mail-order advertising are famous for promoting their unique product by stating “this offer is not available in stores,” followed by “Limited supplies! Call this 800 number now, Operators Are Standing By…”

Recently, I mentioned the book “Lazy Man’s Way to Riches.” It was advertised in business magazines only… it was never found in bookstores.

I’ll never forget the day I pulled the book out of my mailbox and discovered the secret of success in a plain brown envelope. It was like finding an old copy of Playboy magazine hidden away under a mattress.

There’s something seducing about getting something in the mail in a plain brown envelope.

The author, Joe Karbo, promoted the mail-order business as a simple and powerful way to make money. His motto was, “Most people are too busy earning a living to make any money.”

I’ve used his technique over the years to self-publish a variety of investment and personal finance guidebooks.

The Story of My Privacy Book — Never Been Told Before!

In the early 1980s, I self-published my first bestseller called “The Complete Guide to Financial Privacy.”

The book revealed ways to transact business anonymously, buy gold and silver with cash and hide your money at home and in offshore Swiss bank accounts. Buyers bought the book because they wanted to hide their money from the government, thieves, crooks and sometimes from nosey relatives.

Back then, I gave standing room only workshops on “Financial Privacy” at various investment conferences, and sold hundreds of copies. Most book buyers paid with cash, and disappeared.

All in all, the Privacy book sold over half a million copies, entirely by mail or in person. It was not sold in bookstores.

It was so successful that Fred Hill, one of the top executives at the mainstream publisher Simon & Schuster, decided to publish it and sell it in Barnes & Noble and other retail outlets.

He was convinced it would be a New York Times bestseller like Harry Browne’s You Can Profit from a Monetary Crisis, or Howard Ruff’s How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years, both of which hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller lists in the early 1980s.

As a young writer, I was thrilled to sign a contract from the New York publisher. They wined and dined me at the 21 Club in Manhattan, and paid me a big advance.

But when the book came out in the bookstores, it bombed, and sold few copies. It didn’t make any of the bestseller lists.

Fred Hill and Simon & Schuster were baffled why a book that sold half a million copies by mail would flop in the bookstores, but I think I knew the reason.

Mail-order buyers were privacy seekers who didn’t want anyone to know about their financial affairs. Buying a book on privacy in a public bookstore with a credit card would expose their secret desires. They preferred to receive their copy in a plain brown envelope in a post office box.

Fast Forward to Today:

Another Book Not Sold in Stores Contains Five Secret “Rich Man’s Pearls of Wisdom”!  

The Financial Privacy book is out of date, and no longer in print. It’s a collectible. (Used copies are available on Amazon, Ebay and used bookstores.) Occasionally, attendees at a conference will show me their copy and ask me to autograph it.

Even today, some books are not available in bookstores or retail outlets.

When I was writing my investment newsletter in the early 1980s, I started collecting quotations from Wall Street, such as: “Sell in May and don’t go away, and don’t come back ’til Labor Day.”

Maxim Secrets!

But the book also includes a series of alluring “secrets” to investment success, especially my five “Rich Man’s Pearls of Wisdom” including:

–“The Story of a Rich Doctor”

–“Two Little Words”

–“I Make Money While I Sleep!”

–“A Young Man Takes a Journey”

–“I’m Richer than You!”

Plus “My Favorite J. P. Morgan Story” and my own short story, “The Extra-ordinary Life of Warren G. Hardaway.”

Intrigued?

By the early 2000s, I had quite a collection, and decided to publish them in a book. Alex Green, the editor of the Oxford Club, gave me the brilliant title, “The Maxims of Wall Street.”

 The subtitle is “A compendium of financial adages, ancient proverbs and worldly wisdom.”

Would Wiley Take a Chance on the Maxims?

At the time I had published a book called “EconoPower,” with John Wiley & Sons, another establishment publisher of financial books. It was successfully published in English and other foreign languages.

I called the editor and told him about my new book idea, and made the case that thousands of investors, brokers and money manager would love to have this compilation of financial wisdom, and they would want to give the book out to their friends and clients. It could be a bestseller as a quote book and a gift book.

I thought he would jump at the chance, since nobody had ever published a book of investment adages and worldly wisdom from Wall Street (even today, mine is the only one).

But he rejected my proposal. “Sorry, Mark,” he said, “Quote books and gift books don’t sell!”

I was shocked but not deterred. I decided to co-publish book with Eagle Publishing, with the first edition coming out in 2011. I pay for the printing myself.

The rest is history. “Maxims” has now gone through 11 editions and sold nearly 50,000 copies. John Wiley & Sons proved to be wrong.

Investors, money managers and stockbrokers have bought multiple copies for themselves and their friends, colleagues and clients… Hundreds have purchased an entire box (32 copies), and several institutional leaders such as Frank Holmes (U.S. Funds) have bought a 1,000 copies… and Brian Wesbury (First Trust of Chicago) bought 10,000 copies to give out to their employees and best clients.

But guess what? You can’t find “The Maxims of Wall Street” in the bookstores… or even on Kindle… or Audible.

Here’s more about the book: The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches – Mark Skousen

The leather-like hardback is sold strictly by mail order! Order it today at a 30% discount from the retail price at www.skousenbooks.com. Only $21 per copy, $11 for additional copies. A box (32 copies) for only $327. All postpaid within the United States.

It will arrive in a plain “white” envelope. And no, I do not sell or rent your name and address. Your privacy is guaranteed.

BTW, if you want to buy the book anonymously, I’ll be autographing copies at my big show, FreedomFest, on June 11-14 at the Palm Springs Convention Center. See you there: www.freedomfest.com.

Privately yours, AEIOU,

Mark Skousen

You Nailed it!

Are We on the “Road to Freedom” or the “Road to Serfdom”?

by Mark Skousen

I teach a class here at Chapman University on “Modern Political Economy: Who’s Winning the Battle of Ideas?” My book “The Making of Modern Economics” is our textbook (available at a discount at www.skousenbooks.com.)

Recently Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia professor who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, wrote a book called “The Road to Freedom.” Stiglitz based his title as a counterpoint to Friedrich Hayek’s bestselling book, “The Road to Serfdom,” published in 1944. I saw similarities between the two books of opposite titles: both are depressing… both are polemical… and both are hard to read!

I was delighted to see Vernon Smith review Joe Stiglitz’s new book. See Book Review: The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, By Joseph E. Stiglitz. Congratulations to Vernon for doing this. Glad he’s still going strong in his 90s!

Vernon Smith’s critique of Stiglitz is absolutely correct. The markets do not have to be perfectly competitive and “all knowing” to achieve a successful outcome. Smith’s breakthrough work in experimental economics has proven that.

I was glad to see the Nobel Committee correct their errata by giving the Nobel Prize to Vernon Smith in 2002 a year after giving it to Stiglitz!

Still, I give credit to Stiglitz for leading the economics profession to start publishing the most popular and readable journal, The Journal of Economic Perspectives!

He also was willing to publish in his own online journal, Initiative for Policy Dialogue, at Columbia University my first article on gross output (GO) in 2004, and for that I’ll always be grateful. Joe is surprisingly open to hearing alternative views while at Columbia (rare in today’s academia). I consider him a friend.