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
