Opportunities Never End

letters and advertisements, he included this offer: “The subscription could be cancelled and all money refunded if the reader wasn’t satisfied.” The result was that subscription requests and money orders began to arrive. Right from the start, he collected enough money to publish two issues without difficulty. Dewitt’s plan worked. Not a single person cancelled, and no one asked for a refund. He increased his efforts to reach more readers. By February 1922, his magazine had reached a circulation of one thousand. From there it kept growing, and by 1987 it was publishing more than 28 million copies, in 15 languages, across 139 editions. This was the magazine the world now knows as Reader’s Digest. It became the most widely read magazine in the world. By 1980, Dewitt and his wife had a fortune of fifty billion dollars. Dewitt won subscribers by making his magazine, in effect, “risk-free.” Anyone could subscribe without fear of losing money. But this strategy only worked because of another factor: quality. Without quality, the first idea would only have led to failure. This second factor was maintaining high standards— producing a magazine so well-prepared that readers felt it was truly worth their money, and wanted to continue subscribing. To achieve this, Dewitt worked extremely hard. His magazine was a digest—a selection of published articles.