Jumia Books Breakthrough Advertising

Breakthrough Advertising was first published in 1966—what seems to be three lifetimes ago. It was put out by Prentice-Hall, a marvelous house; it sold only a few thousand copies. But since it was published I have had people coming to me regularly to tell me that they directly credit reading this book with their making millions of dollars.

This is amazing enough, but even more remarkable is the fact that—when I look back on it—not a single one of these people was a copywriter. Here is a book that is called Breakthrough Advertising...and yet was used by men and women who were

not in the business of advertising at all, to make more money than most of us ever dream of accumulating.

How did this happen?

Why was a publisher, a financier, a manufacturer of novelties, able to make so very much money with a book that is about putting sentences together? (The financier told me that, within one year after obtaining the book, he had raised his net worth from $100,000 to $10 million).

Are the sentences contained in these pages actually that powerful?

Can they change the fortunes of men so radically? Are they far more universally adaptable than I had first thought...so they are no longer about advertising products, but literally about opening whole new markets for them?

Therefore, eighteen years later, when Boardroom Books asked me to republish this text, I had to study it again, with the fresh eyes of a person who had not read it in all that time, to see what was the real content of my book, and its real effect on its readers.