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

we lived, and do something we later learned was called “walking the floor.” More than 4,000 publishers would be in attendance and we could simply go up to each publisher’s booth in the exhibit area and ask them if they would be interested in our book. So off we headed to the Anaheim convention center with two backpacks full of spiral-bound copies of our best 30 stories to see if we could find a publisher.
    For two very long days we “walked the floor.” By the end our legs were sore, our feet were hurting, and our minds were numb from repeating the same sales pitch over and over. “We know this book will sell because we already have written commitments from people to buy over 20,000 copies,” we’d say, as we showed people examples of the completed commitment forms. For some reason we still weren’t gaining any traction. I don’t think they’d ever seen anything like us. No one had ever gone out and collected promises to buy before. Perhaps they didn’t trust that we had really collected 20,000 of them.
    Eventually, however, late on the second day, Peter Vegso and Gary Seidler, who ran HCI, a small publisher in Florida, agreed to take one of our sample manuscripts and read it when they got home. Much to our delight, a few weeks later the phone rang and it was Peter and Gary. They were gushing about how much they loved the book! “Your book made us laugh and it made us cry. We love it and we want to publish it.” They even said they got goose bumps when they were reading it!
    We asked them how many copies of the book they thought we might sell. They said, “Maybe 25,000 copies, if we’re lucky.”
    “That’s not our vision,” we said. “We want to sell 150,000 copies by Christmas and a million and a half in a year and a half.”
    We heard laughter on the other side of the phone line. They thought we were totally crazy.
    The book was finally published in late June of 1993. All the people who had agreed to buy the book did, but then the sales seemed to stall. Mark and I visited our very wise friend Ron Scolastico and asked for his advice. He told us, “If you were to go to a tree with an axe and take five solid cuts with the axe every day, eventually even the largest tree in the forest would have to come down.”
    From that conversation Mark and I created what we call our “Rule of Five.” We agreed to take five action steps every single day to promote or sell our book. Some days we would send out five books to book reviewers at newspapers. Other days we would call five network-marketing companies to see if they would purchase multiple copies to use to motivate their distributors. One day we even sent a whole box of books to the jury in the O.J. Simpson trial. A week later we received a nice letter from Judge Ito thanking us for our gift. Eventually that became a news story and landed us a lot of great publicity.
    One day I spotted a little red book at the checkout counter of my supermarket. It was The Celebrity Address Book and it contained addresses and phone numbers for motion picture and television stars. I bought it and for weeks we sent out five free copies a day to celebrities in Hollywood, hoping they would like the book and promote it to their friends and fans.
    One of those books ended up in the hands of the producer of the television show Touched by an Angel . She was so moved by the book that she required all of her writers, actors and even the crew to read the book. That story ended up in The Hollywood Reporter and eventually was syndicated across the country, leading to even more publicity.
    As a result we ended up selling 135,000 copies by Christmas and 1.3 million in a year and a half, and eventually that first book, which had been rejected by 144 publishers, went on to sell ten million copies. Our publisher stopped laughing. He asked us to write a sequel. To his surprise we were ready. When the book was about to be printed, he had informed us that because of the way the books were