A Tip for Financial Writers: Gloom and Doom Sell Big
NEW YORK -- When it comes to investing, it pays to be right. But in publishing, it sometimes pays just to be scary.</br></br>Consider a couple of the decade's most popular titles: Paul Erdman's "What's Next? How to Prepare Yourself for the Crash of '89 and Profit in the 1990s." Or Douglas Casey's "Crisis Investing: Opportunities and Profits in the Coming Great Depression."</br></br>Never mind that these visions of financial Armageddon turned out to be wrong; both books were red hot.</br></br>But does anybody but the author's family remember broadcaster Myron Kandel's "How to Cash In on the Coming Stock Market BOOM!"? And how about the book economist A. Gary Shilling wrote with Kiril Sokoloff: "Is Inflation Ending? Are You Ready? A sober look at the prospects for a decline in inflation and how it affects your business and investments."</br></br>Mr. Kandel's bullish book came out in 1982 just before one of the strongest bull markets in history began. Mr. Shilling's 1983 book correctly foretold another of the decade's central investing themes: lower inflation. Yet neither, to be polite, was a publishing success.