Every Line Has One Job: Get the Next One Read.

What it is

Sugarman ran his own mail-order company, JS&A, and wrote its ads and catalogs himself, so every line he wrote was tested against the orders it brought in. The handbook distills that into a set of numbered axioms. The best known:

“The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to get you to read the second sentence.” Axiom 3, p. 33

What we took from it

Copy as a sequence. Every element has one job, which is to get the reader to the next element: the headline gets the first sentence read, the first sentence gets the second read, and so on down what he calls the slippery slide, until the reader reaches the order form.

“That’s what the slippery slide is all about: getting your reader to read all of the copy.” Chapter 8, “The Slippery Slide,” p. 48

It’s the same shape as a funnel, and the same discipline: find the step where people fall off and fix that step.

Where it shows up in our work

Sugarman’s slide is built to get everyone to the bottom. For most of what he sold, that was the right goal. When customers differ a lot in what they’re worth, though, a perfectly slippery slide brings everyone down it, including the buyers you’d rather not have.

So we read him alongside the economists of screening. Sometimes the best thing a step can do is ask for a little effort, the kind a serious buyer will make and a casual one won’t. A slide with a deliberate stair in it sells fewer, and sells better.