You’ve seen them: Factual biographies is the publishing trade name. Authors take a commonplace commodity or object and show how it has changed history. They’re right beside the self-help shelves where you can find Women are From the Amazon, Men are From Uranus, How Jerry Springer Made Me a Famous Murderer, or How Oprah Winfrey Rotted My Brain.
If you browse a little further you’ll come across Spam: How a Barely Organic Meat Product Transformed a Nation’s Cuisine; Corsets: the True Story of How Foundation Garments Changed the Shape of the World; and Cheese Slices: the True Story of How Chemists Got Even More Cholesterol into a Big Mac.
There are now similar best-selling volumes on a whole range of subjects: cod, potatoes and, most recently, salt. I am waiting for Vinegar: How Sour Wine Changed the World, before I begin my companion volume on Fish & Chips: The True Story of How Britain’s Major Contribution to World Cuisine Changed My Waistline.
It’s not that the concept is bad. On the contrary it’s a good one, but it’s like Hollywood. When someone makes a movie people like because it’s fresh and original, you can guarantee the studios will repeat the concept to absurdity and boredom.
I suppose people always think there’s a winning formula that will win time and time again, a more sophisticated version of waving a wand and, ‘Abracadabra!’
Speaking of Spam: The True Story of How E-mail Can Rot the World’s Brains, not to mention Wands: The True Story of How People Believe that Waving Magically Endowed Ones Solves Every Little Thing, anyone who gets spam in their in-box gets floods of offers on how to enhance bust size or penis length.
For example, I did a web search for a book on navigation, Dava Sobel’s Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. This was one of the pioneers of factual biography, but it was a very different problem of the ages that scored the most hits. It was ‘Longitude: Advanced Men’s Formula. 100 percent natural herbal supplement. You can increase your size by 1-3 inches!’ My first thought was that metrification makes sense for the bruised sexual ego, since measuring in centimeters increases the appeal to the innumerate by almost threefold. Doesn’t increasing your size by 3-8 cms look better – especially if you put ‘centimeters’ in very small print?
The second is that e-marketing is clearly not an exact science since the ads take no notice of the recipients’ gender. However, it seems to be making someone money. To begin with it was, after all, porn.com – not Wittgenstein.com – that made money as the dot-coms inflated and deflated. So there is clearly more consumer demand for sex stuff than there was for internet pet food or holistic homeopathic veterinary remedies.
People like the anonymity of the net when purchasing such intimate products. When I was a prepubescent schoolboy in Liverpool, the main suppliers of condoms were the men’s barbers who, as they finished a man’s haircut, would say meaningfully, ‘Will there be anything else, sir?’ As I sat there in my school uniform getting a trim, I used to look at the tray of products in question, and look forward to the day when I would be admitted into the fraternity of manhood and be asked the same question. As it happened, by puberty, I was not going to the barbers – I was growing my hair long in emulation of the Beatles – so it never happened. Still, you know what I mean.
The blanket-fire blunderbuss e-sales approach seems more effective than you would guess. I have an acquaintance who has a scorecard that would make Don Juan envious. His secret is to offer to make love to almost any woman he meets. The percentage of acceptances is low, but the absolute numbers are quite amazing. He meets a lot of women, and if only 2 percent say yes…
It must be the same with spam. You send out millions of e-mails, and if only 10,000 buy your homeopathic Viagra substitute you are in the money. And the nice thing about snake oil is that it works. People believe in this stuff. They probably apologize for their size before they begin wooing. There is lots of scope to extend the principle. Analysts: The True Story of How a Group of Tirelessly Self-interested Frauds Helped Enron Run Away With the Pension Plan, or Financial Reporters: The True Story of How a Group of People Recycled Corporate Press Releases and Inflated Corporate America. This should not, of course, be confused with IROs: The True Story of How a Dedicated Group of Professionals Told the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth – Insofar as the CFO Allowed Them – and Thus Saved the Equity Markets and the World Economy From Collapse. This comes out, of course, in instalments every month, in Investor Relations magazine.
