Chicken Soup for the Soul 20th Anniversary Edition Read Free Page A

chicken soup.”
    “This book is not about sick people,” I replied.
    “People’s spirits are sick. They are living in resignation, fear and hopelessness. This book will help them rise above it.”
    My mind mulled that over. Chicken Soup for the Spirit, I thought. Hmmm. Chicken Soup for the Soul. Wham! All of a sudden I was covered in goose bumps. Chicken Soup for the Soul: Stories to Rekindle the Spirit! Ooh, I liked that. The goose bumps grew stronger. I was excited. I immediately opened my eyes and ran to tell my wife. She got goose bumps too. Then I called Mark and he got goose bumps as well. Mark then told me that several of his friends called them “God bumps,” and that it meant you were getting divine inspiration. That felt right to me.
    We then called our agent, and he also got goose bumps. Armed with our book and our title we headed off to New York to meet with a series of publishers over several very cold and windy February days to see if we could sell our book.
    Sadly, no one in those meetings in New York got goose bumps. In meeting after meeting we were told that collections of short stories didn’t sell, the stories were too “nicey-nice,” too Pollyanna, too positive, and that the title, which had evolved into Chicken Soup for the Soul: 101 Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit , was dumb.
    Obviously disappointed, we returned to our hotel and prepared to fly back to Southern California. But before we did, we headed over to St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and while neither of us is Catholic, we lit a candle and prayed that God would help us find a publisher.
    A few weeks later our agent called us and told us that he had talked to several other publishers since our New York trip and they had all declined as well. He then said he was giving us back the book because he was convinced he couldn’t sell it.
    We asked him what a publisher would need to know in order to be willing to publish the book, and he replied, “They’d need to be absolutely convinced that they could sell 20,000 copies. This would assure them that they could recover their investment in editing, producing, printing, distributing and promoting the book. If they knew they could sell 20,000 copies, they would definitely be willing to publish it.”
    That gave Mark and me an idea. Because we were speaking to large groups several times a week—some as large as 1,000 people—we could print up a Pre-Order Form and ask people to put into writing their commitment to buy one or more copies when the book was eventually published.
    For the next several months we put what we called “A Commitment to Buy Form” on every chair in every audience we spoke to. At the end of our speech or workshop we asked people to fill out the form with their name and address and write down how many books they promised to purchase. Because we were telling many of the stories in our presentations, people knew the quality of what they would be getting, so almost everyone participated. Raymond Aaron, a success coach and trainer in Canada, even committed to buy 1,700 copies — one for each of his students — when the book was published. (Much to our delight he later followed through with that commitment.) It wasn’t long before we had several Bankers Boxes full of completed forms adding up to more than 20,000 books! By that time we had also collected almost 100 rejection slips from what seemed like every major publisher in America.
    By now the book had become a “divine obsession” with us. We knew from all of the positive feedback we received from the participants in our workshops that the stories were inspiring, healing, motivational and transformational, and we were committed to getting these stories out to people. No matter how many rejections we received, we were committed to never giving up.
    One day a friend of ours suggested we attend the American Booksellers Association convention in Anaheim, California, which was not far from where