'Pulp' is a term for a type of basic paper stock, made from wood chips or plant fibres. By the 1890s mass production, improved distribution methods and advances in printing combined to make it a viable stock for cheap magazines, amongst other things.
And in the 1890s cheap story magazines, printed on pulp paper, began to appear. Low prices and widespread distribution meant pulp magazines could be a viable business, even if margins were tight.
The timing was auspicious: monthly story magazines had been around for many decades, along with the lurid 'penny dreadfuls' and 'dime novels.' Literacy rates were increasing in the US and Europe. Advertising had become an important income stream for publishers to tap into...
But there's something missing in the traditional story of pulp's birth: something more than technology and distribution...
Marketing!
Marketing is different from sales: it focuses on identifying, segmenting, understanding and exploiting a target market. It's goal may be market share, market dominance or customer loyalty - but its methods are strategic and rigorous.
Marketing emerged in the 1910s as a branch of economics: what other factors, apart from price, scarcity and labour costs, were responsible for economic growth? The ideas of marketing defined the 20th century, and the pulps were one of the first industries to seized on them!
For an example let's look at Black Mask Magazine, launched by journalist H. L. Mencken and theatre critic George Jean Nathen in 1920 as a way to subsidize their slick, influential, but loss-making magazine The Smart Set.
Initially Black Mask published a traditional mix of adventure, mystery, romance and detective stories. After eight issues, and with their money made, Mencken and Nathan sold the pulp title to its publishers and went back to the world of slicks.
And it was editor Philip Cody who used the techniques of marketing to turn Black Mask into a huge success. He built a strong relationship with the readers, asking them for ideas and feedback to help him shape the magazine to better match their tastes.
He also used specific writers - Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner - who could nail the kind if story his readers said they wanted: gritty, hard-hitting and pacey.
Cody, later followed by J.T. Shaw, were doing something rather special. They weren't just selling a product - a story magazine. They were offering a service: the service of an expert editor, carefully curating content for a specific and well understood audience segment.
Hugo Gernsback took the same approach with science fiction. Amazing Stories wasn't just a story compendium, he carefully nurtured a relationship with is audience through editorials and market research. Gernsback, as much as the magazine, was the commodity you were buying into.
This hyper-targeted, marketing-driven approach became the hallmark of successful pulp. It also proved alluring to advertisers. Detailed customer segmentation data was available to help maximize their effectiveness.
You see from a publisher's point of view pulp isn't a writing style, a genre, or a commodity: it's a strategic approach to developing long-term value from an audience through careful application of modern marketing techniques.
Pulp is honed to your tastes - both actual and latent. It's a more personalized approach to publishing, built on the ability of the publishing house to understand you and serve you what you like. This stuff hits the spot - that's the true hallmark of pulp.
Stan Lee, Gary Gygax, George Lucas, Mark Zuckerberg: they've all in their own way used the techniques of strategic marketing to build up incredible empires of content creation and provision based on this insight. And it all started in the pulps!
More tales another time...
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Today in pulp I try to discover what the Bra Of The Future will look like... courtesy of Thrilling Wonder Stories!
Ever since the dawn of time Man has pondered the bra. What will it be like in the future? Will it even be needed?
And one magazine did more pondering than most. Thrilling Wonder Stories not only probed the mysteries of the future, it also tried to guess the evolution of the humble brassiere.
"The gun is GOOD! The Penis is EVIL!" bellows a huge stone head floating over the Irish countryside. It's quite a strange start to any film, but it's about to get even stranger.
This is the story of John Boorman's 1974 sci-fi spectacular Zardoz...
In 1970 director John Boorman began work on a Lord Of The Rings film for United Artists. It would be an unusual adaption; The Beatles would be the Hobbits and Kabuki theatre would open the movie. Alas the studio said 'No', but the idea of making a fantasy film stuck with Boorman.
So in 1972, following the commercial success of Deliverance, John Boorman started work on Zardoz - a fantasy film into which he would cram many unorthodox ideas. Initially Burt Reynolds was to play the lead role of Zed, but pulled out citing other filming commitments.
"Fear is the mind-killer," but movie production is a close second. As Denis Villeneuve's epic movie adaptations of Dune pull in audiences worldwide, I look back at an earlier struggle to bring that story to the silver screen.
This is the story of David Lynch's Dune...
Dune is an epic story: conceived by Frank Herbert after studying the Oregon Dunes in 1957 he spent five years researching, writing, and revising it before publication. He would go on to write a further five sequels.
Dune is a multi-layered story and a hugely immersive novel. It's about a future where the mind rather the computer is king, aided by the mysterious spice melange. It also has more feuding houses than Game of Thrones.
Detective stories have always been a staple of young adult fiction. I guess every young person wants to be a crime fighter at heart.
The Hardy Boys (Frank and Joe Hardy) are possibly the longest-serving teenage detectives. Their first adventures began in 1927, published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate and they've been in print pretty much ever since.