Anonymous Patron writes “One From The Associated Press on Philosophy professor emeritus (Yale University) Harry G. Frankfurt’s short book on the use of bombast, poppycock, hooey and balderdash in American culture. Impolite as it is, though, the title has been both a marketing hurdle, and a stroke of sales genius.”
“The initial print run was 5,000 copies, but interest swelled after the irreverent Comedy Central talk show host Jon Stewart had Frankfurt as a guest. There are now 300,000 copies in print. Frankfurt acknowledges that his choice of title undoubtedly fueled sales”. The title…?
…On Bullshit.
Which
If you were on my list, you got a link to download the whole thing awhile ago.
He’s upped the price on Amazon from around $5 to $9.99. And it’s barely a couple of pages long…
Lemme see if I can go do a wc of the .html file…
841 lines, 52664 characters.
http://web.archive.org/web/20041012003437/http://w ww.jelks.nu/misc/articles/bs.html
— Ender, Duke_of_URL
Re:Which
I must admit, I was blown away by an 8,000-word “book” getting big sales. With anything but huge type and leading and margins, that’s a pamphlet (unless, of course, it’s a children’s book with loads of illustrations).
But hey, if you can get 300K copies of a pamphlet produced and maybe sold at book prices, more power to you.
(And here I was a little abashed because my latest book was only about 40,000 words…)
8K word-book
Yup. I’m blown away too.
— Ender, Duke_of_URL
Re:Which
It seems the file has been removed from the archive. The link does not seem to work anymore. Any other links you know of?
Re:Which
I found the problem. There is a space between the www. If you take the space out you retrieve the article.
Yup, you can thank slash-code 😛
For that. You always have to check that stuff.
— Ender, Duke_of_URL