Ray Anthony, Bob LeVitus (Swifty’s favorite), Ed Tittel, Barbara Boyd, Tee Morris, Evo Terra, Chuck Tomasi, Rebecca Bollwitt, Andy Rathbone, Jesse Feiler, John Havens, John Carucci, David Busch, and many more. Former lines have blurred; author clients have now become lifelong friends.
Thank you to the many publishers, editors, and publishers’ marketing departments who contributed by sharing their advice over the many years, including ideas and success stories for authors to benefit. Thank you to those at Waterside who supported our efforts and visions in creating this book, with special thanks to Bill Gladstone, Margot Hutchinson, and Maureen Maloney; you are amazing in your experience and dedication to making authors successful. Thank you, Jack Canfield, for sharing your exceptional story and advice in the Foreword. More shoutout thanks to Richard Greninger (video), Karen Sterling (photography), Melissa Cavazos (transcription), and Doug Holliday (audio).
Most importantly, we could not have gotten through this long and arduous task and process of turning ideas into book form without support and encouragement from our friends, loved ones, colleagues, and supporters. Thank you all for your care and encouraging words and for never stopping your belief in us. Special thanks to Doug and Yvette, Jeanette McCallister, Karl Auker, Dory Willer, Gail Doering, Peter Gregory, Becky Gregory, Don Bangs, Glenn Reid, Zachary Romano, Michael Alves, and Michael McGrath to name a few. It’s been a long road of travel in the publishing world, and sending out thanks to all friends and colleagues from Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley, and Sybex for the many years (growing into a lifetime) of staying in touch.
I’M NOT A BOOK PUBLICIST BY TRADE. In fact, I had to learn how to do that. Given that I was not a “natural born salesman,” it’s fascinating that the year that Mark Victor Hansen and I won the ABBY Award (the American Booksellers Book of the Year award), we also won the Southern California Book Publicists Award. As I always say to authors, “You’ve got to become a master of book promotion. You’ve worked too hard writing it to let it die a slow death due to lack of promotion.”
July 1993 marked the publication of our first Chicken Soup for the Soul book. Great, it’s published! Now what? We had to ask ourselves, “How do we do this book-promotion thing? How do we get our book out to all our possible buyers?”
This question had a life of its own, and to be successful, this question has to permeate all your efforts—as it did ours, throughout the creation, promotion, and distribution of more than 200 separate volumes in our Chicken Soup book series.
So where is the right place to start book promotion? At the very beginning, we gravitated to a book that answered the question in a multitude of ways: 1000 Ways to Promote Your Book by John Kremer. Here was our start, a book chock full of promotion ideas. We were delighted to find these and decided to write out about 900 ideas on little yellow Post-it Notes. Then we stuck each one of those Post-its to a long wall in our office. You can imagine the look of 900 little yellow squares on the wall, defining our goal: Complete each suggestion until each one of these Post-its was taken off the wall. From that day on, we made it a daily game, to do everything on that wall to promote our book. Open all the doors. Talk to every possible distributor and buyer. Shake every hand. Consider how everything could contribute to the sales of our book.
We started in, doing unconventional things like calling up the buyers at the PX stores on military bases. We called and said, “We’ve got a great book we think your readers will be interested in! Would you be interested in purchasing it for your store?” For every “yes” we got, we sent out a free copy. One less Post-it on the wall, and it worked—we usually got orders! Next we called over 100 multilevel marketing companies, finding anyone interested, to say we created a book we believed would be motivational for their distributors. Yes, it’s true that we got a lot of rejections, but it didn’t matter. We contacted one company that bought 1,000 copies, and another that bought 1,700 copies. One more Post-it came off the wall!
We also gave lots of speeches and seminars anywhere we could—companies, direct sales organizations, chambers of commerce, hospitals, and universities. Every time we spoke, we would hold the book up high, saying, “You know, there’s one thing that’s stopping people from being successful more than anything else. And I’m going to demonstrate what that is by doing the following: I’m going to give away a copy of this Chicken Soup for the Soul book. Who would like it?” Then we just stood there until someone got up out of their chair, walked or ran up to the front of the room, and took it out of our hands. Then we’d say, “That’s right! You’ve got to get off your butt and take action in order to succeed in life!” At that point, everyone else in the room wanted a copy of the book, too, and we would sell fifty percent of the audience a book.
Then came the many in-store promotional book signings that bookstores love to hold. I’ll share a secret I learned by accident at one memorable signing. On that particular evening, we were all set up, sitting in front of the table at the bookstore, but nobody had arrived yet. Normally the crowd arrives at the specified time, we stand up, give a short fifteen-minute presentation, and then the audience lines up to pick up our book and get it autographed. On this evening, for some reason people were slow to arrive. Looking at the seats yet to be filled, I started thinking, Hmm, what if I put a copy of my book on everyone’s chair? While the audience waits for the talk to begin, they’ll start reading … and then maybe they’ll get hooked. The surprise result? We sold five times more books that night than we ever had before. I realized once people held our book in their hands, and especially if they started to read it, they actually started to “own” it, and then they wanted to take it home.
As we expanded and followed more book-promotion paths, we began to get better at working with the bookstore staff members. For example, we learned about the importance of book signing “bag stuffers.” About a week before the date of the book signing, we found we could provide the stores with a full ream of paper printed with our message on it: “On XX date and time, Jack Canfield and/or Mark Victor Hansen will be at our store for a book signing! Please be sure to mark your calendar and come early. You can meet the authors in person, shake their hands, receive their autographs on your books,” and so on. These printed sheets were invaluable as invitations and reminders, and steadily increased the numbers of people who attended our book signings.
Starting out is always humbling, yet we all must start out somewhere on our path upward. That first step is the one that counts most. The first step takes the most courage and faith, especially when there is no evidence of success in sight. My own first book signing had an audience of three people: one was the owner of the store and one was the janitor. Of the three people, the janitor was the only one who bought our book that night.
Later on, as our book climbed up the bestseller lists, we attracted more people to our book signings. However, I remember one night when Mark and I were signing books at a Waldenbooks store at a large shopping mall in Los Angeles, and the foot traffic had slowed down in the store. Mark left the store and walked up to people out in the mall and said, “You can’t believe what’s happening down here at the Waldenbooks store. Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen are signing their Chicken Soup for the Soul book. It’s a rare opportunity to get a book signed by two famous authors! And they are perfect gifts for your friends and family members.” Pretty soon a line of people would find their way into the bookstore where Mark and I would then sign their books. Sometimes, we would hear “Wait, weren’t you the guy out in the hall!” and by that point, we had already hooked them with our humor into buying our book.
With our first Chicken Soup book, we truly dedicated ourselves nonstop to doing anything and everything to get our book into the hands of people everywhere. We completely believed in what we were doing. So we next started working on something we called the “Rule of Five.” This is probably the most important message for authors to hear. The “Rule of Five” means that every single day, without any lapse, you do five action steps—in this case, five action steps to help promote or sell your book. On Monday, for example, we would choose to contact five churches and say, “Do you have a bookstore?