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
Why This Book Was Written
This book is a product of years of collecting strategies, best practices, pre-digested routes, and major elements in getting up and running with a solid author platform. It will be a relief to be able to do my job more efficiently, to be able to simply hand authors this book and say, “All of your questions about the author platform are answered in this book. Just follow the 14 steps.”
The beauty from an agent’s and author’s and publisher’s perspective is that this is a complete system that covers all the bases. We’ve identified 14 steps that work together to supercharge author visibility and audience. Once a platform is built, it has a magnetic power of its own and can be expanded. We’ve found that author platforms impact sales in major positive ways, which affects the bottom line for everyone involved in creating books. The motivation for taking the time to create this book is that our authors demanded it, knowing that an effective author platform directly increases sales and publishing opportunities.
For decades, I have been listening to authors’ concerns about platform and promotion. As they work hard on their books, consulting, and other day jobs, they wonder, where will they find the time to research, much less create a successful author platform? Finally, the time has come to answer every question, concern, problem, and complaint right here, under one roof.
Our Unique Experience and Value to Authors
You’ll find a unique and valuable perspective here. We wrote this book from two unique perspectives and sets of experience that will benefit you in many ways: more than 30 years of my own publishing experience and background helping give voice to authors’ ideas via books, coupled with an equal number of years of tracking and understanding technology, right as it’s being created, by my coauthor, Mike McCallister. Mike is personally dedicated to simplifying and clarifying technology and making it accessible to all. There are many online short articles and blogs about how authors can use tech, but these pieces are often written by those who are still figuring it out, not having come from the depth of experience offered here. Misinformation online is frustrating at best, time wasting at worst, and can set authors in the wrong direction to the point of losing motivation to finish creating a cohesive author platform.
As a former editor at top publishing houses for a decade and current literary agent for two decades, I’ve worked closely with trendsetters, idea makers, and inventors of the technology we use today, alongside writers, many of whom have given voice to clarifying tech tools. Over many years, I’ve worked to create success for authors in every way possible, which has led to many millions in book sales. My publishing work has included all aspects of the book creation process, from nurturing ideas to editing, acquiring, and promoting the final book products. Far beyond agenting, I’ve created, responded to, and applied audience building and promotion strategies for authors who have proved
