The following article about Joe Karbo is excerpted from an interview entitled, “The Creators” from the now defunct publication, The Capitalist Reporter, circa 1975.
But was the mail order magnate who penned The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches, himself lazy?
Here’s some rare info about this direct marketing legend.
The wonder is that Joe Karbo works at all anymore. He is the millionaire author, publisher and mail-order advertising salesman of The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches, after all. With more than 400,000 copies of the paperback sold in this country alone at $10 each – versus 50 cents per copy production cost – Karbo can afford to take it easy. Foreign markets now have begun to open up in a big way.
Karbo, 50-year-old son of a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked as a tailor in Los Angeles, now spends about half the year in LA, where he maintains a posh suite of offices overlooking the Pacific to tend to his various ventures that make him $300,000 a year. The rest of the time, he and the family (wife and nine children, although not all the kids still live at home) are at a sumptuous retreat in Washington State, about 50 miles south of Olympia – an ideal place to be, well, lazy.
The trouble is, Karbo doesn’t like being lazy. “The idea of being lazy is appealing, but doing it, or rather not doing anything, is not my idea of a way to pass the time,” he says. [Read more…] about The Lost Joe Karbo Interview…Was He Really Lazy?