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? Would you carry our book in your bookstore? Can we speak to your minister?” And if we were able to get through to the minister, we would say, “How would you like to have a Sunday off where you don’t have to prepare a sermon? We have prepared a sermon using stories from Chicken Soup for the Soul to illustrate biblical principles. We are offering to come in and do a great talk for your congregation on some future Sunday.” By that point, we had a track record, so people already knew we were strong speakers, and we found people trusted us to deliver an inspirational message. All we asked in return was to be able sell our books somewhere afterward; it didn’t matter where—in the back of the room, outside on a table, or in the bookstore. Almost everyone agreed with a big “yes.” That’s dedication! Even on Sunday when most people take a day off to relax, we were out there selling our books.
Sometimes we would draw a blank on five places to send books or five things to do next to promote our book. When we couldn’t think of anything else, we would just choose five celebrities and send them each a free book. I remember coming across a book in a Vons supermarket called The Celebrity Address Book, which seemed like a major find for us! I’ve since learned that over 90% of these addresses were the celebrity’s agent’s addresses, but we didn’t know any better then. We just used the addresses to send out five books to people like Harrison Ford, Sidney Poitier, Paula Abdul, or whoever was listed there. And this is the best part of this story: One day the earth moved. We got a call back from a woman, the producer of the television show Touched by an Angel. Here it was for us, the reward for our perseverance and our belief; this woman had decided that the quality of the stories in our book mirrored the exact quality that she wanted to project in Touched by an Angel. She bought copies for all of her writers and asked them to read our book to get the feel for the kind of stories she wanted to portray on the series. She bought a book for everyone on her staff and production crew. That was one of the most important sets of books we ever sold. She gave copies of our book to the sound people, the cameramen, the gaffers, the lighting people, and to the editors, in addition to the writers and the actors. She asked everyone that had any role in the show to read Chicken Soup for the Soul, stating, “I just want this feeling to come through on the set.” The new term for the way our idea took off is viral, which is a pretty good term for how the word spread from there. Next, that story made news in the Hollywood Reporter. Then Variety picked up the story. Then the Associated Press wrote up the story, and onward from there until it became a national press story. The significance of Chicken Soup for the Soul and our story found readership in about a hundred newspapers. Well, needless to say, once our book became known and loved by so many, even more people went running out to buy our book. Our audience began to expand beyond our wildest dreams.
Then we looked to get excerpts of our book placed in magazines and felt that a story in the first book called “We’re Raising Children Not Flowers” would be a good candidate for parent magazines. We decided to inquire at a local newspaper in L.A. called L.A. Parent. I wrote the editor and said, “Here’s an article you might be interested in. It’s about a parent and their six-year-old son, and it’s a very moving story. Would you publish it in your magazine? And if you would, at the end could you put a little box that says ‘Excerpted from Chicken Soup for the Soul … available from your local bookstore, etc.’?” I’ll never forget the response we received from Jack Bierman, the editor, who responded in a really funny letter. He wrote, “I read your mail and I thought how dare you tell me to put something at the end of your article! And then I read the article. I’ll put that in and more! And by the way, did you know that there are 75 of these parent magazines? There’s the L.A. Parent, the San Diego Parent, the San Francisco Parent, the Denver Parent…. We’re all part of a consortium, and you can submit this to all 75 at once.” Suddenly our article not only got published in L.A. Parent, but also in about 50 more magazines, all across the country.
Our attention and focus were on constantly promoting our book, and because of this intense focus, we were able to realize that all the little weekly community newspapers, like the Malibu Times, are pretty much advertising vehicles for local businesses. These local weeklies have a hard time finding a lot of copy, so if you can provide them with interesting reading, they’re usually very happy to print it! Of course we followed this lead and compiled the master list of all of these local weekly papers across the USA. We started sending all of these stories they were mostly happy to print, and the doors opened wider, this time leading to loads of print space for our book-promotion purposes.
Every single day we asked ourselves, “What promotion can we do today that is unique?” We’d call five radio producers and ask, “Can I send you a copy of our book?” From there, we found our way to speaking on long lists of radio shows; in fact, I’ve personally spoken on over 600 radio shows. It’s amazing; sometimes I’ve even spoken on five shows in a single day. When your book is fresh and you are in the mode of promoting it, there is no action that is too small to take. They all add up over time.
One day we were scratching our heads over the question, “What the heck can we do to promote today?” We took a look at the headlines and saw that the O.J. Simpson trial was happening. Mark and I looked at each other and said, “What if we send books to the jury?” The jury is sequestered, so they can’t read magazines. They can’t read newspapers. They can’t watch television. And our collective lightbulb went on: “All the jury can do is read books, so let’s send them ours!” Instantly we sent the famous box of books over to the O.J. Simpson trial. Judge Ito was moved! He sent us back a nice letter saying, “Nobody ever thinks of the jury. I’m going to distribute these to them. Thank you very much.” I still have that letter framed. About a week later, all these jurors walked back into court, with almost every member carrying a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul. Then the press saw the personal angle opportunity: “Why are all these people in the court reading the same book?” Once again, our story became a press story, and it spread, virally, across more papers in the country.
Then one day I read in the San Diego Union-Tribune about a woman who had been raped. My wife and I were visiting my sister-in-law in San Diego at the time. The victim of the rape seemed like a very compassionate woman. She was kind of a new-age person who hadn’t let the experience devastate her, so I reached out to her. I sent her our book with a note saying, “I was inspired by your story and I just wanted to send you a copy of our book.” What happened next is phenomenal—at the sentencing hearing she asked the jury for leniency for the man who had raped her, and then she offered a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul to the defendant and said, “This book helped me a lot. I hope it will help you, too.” That story ended up on the front page of the San Diego Union-Tribune the next day.
Several years later we compiled a book of stories under the title Chicken Soup for the Unsinkable Soul. Very soon after, in October of 2000, one of our naval ships, the U.S.S. Cole, was attacked by terrorists and badly damaged while it was refueling in the Yemen port of Aden. Seventeen American sailors were killed and 39 were injured. It was later towed from the Gulf all the way back to Norfolk, Virginia.
We had sent copies of Chicken Soup for the Unsinkable Soul to many of the wives of the sailors on that ship. As the sailors disembarked from the ship and were met by their wives, photographers and photojournalists were snapping hundreds of pictures. And there, front and center, appeared a woman hugging her sailor in one arm and holding in her hand a copy of Chicken Soup for the Unsinkable Soul. It ended up being the front-page color photograph on the next day’s issue of USA Today. You can’t even buy an ad on the front page of USA Today! That had to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to us.
So every day we continued with the question, always asking, “What are five things that we can do today?” One day we decided to take a drive to the Los Angeles Times. You know how hard it is to get reviewed by a major metropolitan newspaper? It’s almost impossible. So we just went in and walked from desk to desk. We started with the obituary writer. Next, the Living section writer, who covers things like what’s happening in Jennifer Aniston’s life. We talked to everyone, including the sports writers. We said, “Here’s our book. We thought you might be interested in it. You know, if you could find a way to write about it if you like it, great. If not, just enjoy the book.” We did not stop until we had talked to almost every writer and had given them a book. Our efforts paid off: One month later, our perseverance became a front-page story in the View section. It was not a book review, but a story about these authors with all this chutzpah! With a distribution of about 1.3 million readers, we became the lead story, pictures and all!
We were constantly looking for ways to promote, no matter what. With everything we looked at we’d constantly ask, “How can we use this to promote the book?” One day I was driving to the airport, still holding that question. I looked around at my immediate surroundings and I thought, “I’m in a limousine…. How can we use a limousine to promote our book?” I remembered an author I’d met from Australia by the name of Bryce Courtney, who had written a book called The Power of One, which was made into a movie with Morgan Freeman. When Bryce was promoting a new book he would print a couple of thousand copies of the first chapter of his book, and he would hand them out free to people congregated at bus stations, railroad stations, and the like. That first chapter was a teaser, sort of like a chapter in a Harry Potter novel ending like this: “and there was a knock at the door.” You are compelled to turn the page to see who’s there! The idea occurred to me, “What about having limousine companies put copies of our book on the backseat of their limos, and then people riding in them would start to read the book, and at the end of the trip the limo driver would ask the client if they wanted to buy the book.” We ended up with several companies doing that.
Another technique I learned from Bryce was to call in to the local talk shows and say things like, “As I say in my book Chicken Soup for the Soul …” or “You know, there is a story in my book Chicken Soup for the Soul that I think is relevant to this discussion.” As our book began selling in bigger numbers, we started to become more well known, so we were recognized when we called in. The subject of the talk show didn’t matter! They might be talking about the problem of the loggers and the tree huggers in Oregon protecting the white owls and we’d call in and hold a conversation about that. But guess what they would always say? “Oh, our next caller is Jack Canfield, the author of Chicken Soup for the Soul. What’s new with you guys?” That’s how we got even more free advertising.
Here’s the main point for authors: Don’t stop promoting! Our first Chicken Soup for the Soul book did not immediately hit it big. It took 14 months after it was published before it appeared on a bestseller list: The book published in July 1993 and didn’t hit its first bestseller list until September of 1994. We were #15 on the Washington Post list. The next week it jumped up to 13. The next week it was #15 on the New York Times list, and then it kept moving up, up, and up until it became #1 on the Times list and stayed there for three years.
Several years later we set a Guinness World Record for having seven books on the New York Times bestseller list on the same day. We broke another Guinness record (it’s actually been broken by someone else since then) for the largest book signing ever held. It was a multicity book signing, with all the contributors from Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul signing at the same time at different locations. It was everywhere! It was in Denver, in Philadelphia, in Washington, in Los Angeles and San Francisco and several other cities. Thousands of people came to get their books signed.
Remember this: When your book first comes out, you may experience “the calm before the calm”—not the calm before the storm. Your book comes out and you’re waiting for it to suddenly take off, and it doesn’t. I tell authors that most publishers are printers. They’re not good at promotion. That’s not true of all publishers, but it’s true of far too many. Therefore, you literally have to become a skilled book promoter. If you can afford a PR company, great! If not, read everything you can absorb in the pages of this book you are holding in your hand: Build Your Author Platform: The New Rules: A Literary Agent’s Guide to Growing Your Audience in 14 Steps.
Today authors have advantages and additional promotion channels that we didn’t have in our early days of promoting Chicken Soup for the Soul. As authors using the new rules of Internet promotion, you have access to all the tools covered in this book: social media, blogs, websites, audio, video, and more amazing tools that reach huge numbers of people that we would have jumped on and used in every possible way if they had been available to us.
There’s a lot more you can do today that you couldn’t back then, and using social media and these other channels is a big piece of it for you. So study what is in Build Your Author Platform: The New Rules and then apply it … day after day after day. If you do that, you will get to experience the unparalleled fulfillment of having entertained, uplifted, inspired, informed, and transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I promise you that it is worth all the effort.
— JACK CANFIELD
Motivational Speaker and Author,
Co-Creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul