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How to Create the Mindset of a Bestselling Author With Jack Canfield
MP3•Episode home
Manage episode 156943603 series 1204815
Content provided by Daniel Hall, Daniel Hall - Author, Online Marketer, and Publisher of the. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Daniel Hall, Daniel Hall - Author, Online Marketer, and Publisher of the or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Welcome to the Real Fast Results podcast! You have made a wise decision to join in today because it is our honor and privilege to bring for the words and advice of Mr. Jack Canfield. In this episode, Jack is going to share how to develop a bestseller mindset. According to Jack, there’s a lot that goes into creating a bestseller, but most importantly, you have to have the right outlook. As you probably know, this man has been able to accomplish more than most people could even dream of. Let’s see what he has to say… Benefits to Having a Bestseller Mindset For me, it has meant selling nearly 500 million books around the world. I’ve had 47 books on the New York Times Bestseller List, and I have been able to travel to 47 different countries and give workshops. As a result, I was in the movie The Secret, and I’ve had lunch at The White House. I hang out with people like Jeff Bridges, and Chaka Khan, people like that who are celebrity friends that I have now. And, you know, I’ve personally been able to stand on the first base line at a Dodger’s baseball game. I’ve had meetings with Bill Clinton, and John Gray, and I could just go down the list of fun things that have happened for me. Most important is the ability to make an impact in the lives of other people. I can remember being in a hotel in New York and watching this girl walk in with a bald head, probably about 12 or 13, obviously doing chemotherapy. I walked up to her, and I said, “I wanted to tell you that I’m supportive of you. I’m Jack Canfield.” “Oh my God! You’re the Chicken Soup for the Soul guy. I’ve read Chicken Soup for the Recovering Soul, Chicken Soup for the Teen Soul, Chicken Soup for the Cancer Patient Soul…” And, you just go like, “Wow! I’m making a difference in the lives of others.” That’s what really matters, the impact you can have. Achieving a Bestseller Mindset, from a Big Picture Standpoint You have to believe that it’s possible for you to have something really important to say, and that you have the ability to say it. So, a lot of it is self-esteem, self-concept, and belief in yourself. Then, I think most people don’t think big enough. One of the quotes that I have in my book, The Success Principles, is by General Wesley Clark, who used to be the head of the NATO forces in Europe for the United States. He said that it doesn’t take any more effort to dream a bigger dream than it does to dream a small dream. In other words, you can think of five zeros after a one, or six zeros after a one, or eight zeros after a one, in terms of your income and in terms of impact. I just set a goal to train one million trainers to do my work by the year 2030. People think I’m crazy, but we’ve already trained 1,500 people since last November and certified them. So, we now have people in 79 countries teaching our work. When I told my publisher, we wanted to sell a billion books by 2020, he thought we were freaking crazy. We’ve sold a half a billion books, and it’s only 2016. The “hockey stick curve” is taking off. You have to dream big and believe big, and I think you also have to have an attitude and a mindset that it’s going to take work. You have to learn how to market, you have to learn how to do a podcast, you have to learn how to be on Good Morning America. You have to learn how to do internet marketing. You have to have a mindset of studying. You have to be willing to learn. Quincy Jones, who’s 83 years old, the producer of Michael Jackson, “We Are the World”, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, etc., said something. He said that when he decided to do television, he went to UCLA, and this was in the 60’s or 70’s, but he said that he took six months of courses in screenwriting, producing, and directing. He said that every field has a structure and a science to it, and you have to study that if you want to be successful, whether it’s music theory, how to be a bestselling author, etc. What is the craft of being a good writer? What is the willingness to get feedback? You have to be able to get feedback. One of the things that I tell people all of the time is that most books get published when people have read them: The writer, the wife/husband, the acquisition editor at the house. Well, with Chicken Soup for the Soul, we had 40 people read every story and grade them on a scale of 1-10. We put that on an Excel spreadsheet, and everything that averaged less than a 9 never made it into the book, including stories that I wrote. It’s like you have to have the willingness to get feedback and get off your ego trip as well. How Can I Make Myself Feel Like I’m Worthy of a Bestseller? Here’s the deal. Everybody has a message. Every life has lessons that people have learned. You have to be willing to share that, and if you are willing to be clear that you have something valuable. Now, if you don’t work on yourself, if you don’t do self-introspection, if you don’t take seminars, if you don’t do therapy, if you don’t meditate, etc, your awareness of what you know and how much you know is going to be limited. So, #1, you have to be somewhat committed to growth, somewhat committed to constantly learning and never-ending improvement. CANI, as Tony Robbins likes to say. The reality is that you’ve got to be a learner, and then you share what you’ve learned. The belief is that you’ve got something of value. Mark Victor Hansen used to always say to me, when we were co-authors of Chicken Soup for the Soul… I’d say something, and he’d say, “You have to write that down. Write a blog. Write a chapter.” I’d say, “Mark everyone knows that,” and he’d say, “No Jack, they don’t.” Often, we figure that everyone knows what we know, and the fact is that we all have a lot of unique knowledge. I think that whether it’s through affirmations, through meditation, whatever it may be, you’ve got to start with the idea that, “I have something to share, and I am worthy of success.” My wife is writing a memoir right now, and she has had some amazing lessons in her life. She’s so afraid that people are going to judge her for where she used to be in the earlier chapters of her book. I told her, “I’m going to steal the freaking manuscript and publish it behind your back if you don’t publish it because it’s so good.” I think the main thing is to have other people read what you’re writing, and they’ll tell you if it’s good or not. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have something to say, it just means you haven’t written it yet. Most people, the feedback they get is, “Oh my God! This is so valuable,” or “Oh my God! I wish I had read this book 20 years ago.” I was counseling some writers the other day, and one of the women had written a book called: Dial Down the Drama: Reducing Conflict and Reconnecting with Your Teenage Daughter--A Guide for Mothers Everywhere. She is a woman who was a child psychologist, and she was working with lots of, I think, 20,000 teenagers, but when her daughter hit 12, it was like “Uh-oh”. Now she’s in it, right? So, she negotiated those teenage years. Her daughter is now 20, and she wrote a book based on her experience. The only people who are going to be interested in that book are going to be mothers with daughters, but that’s a lot of people. You may be someone who had a special needs child, and you had to learn how to negotiate the educational system. That’s a valuable message. You may be a meditation teacher, but you’re only going to attract a certain kind of person. Maybe they’re Christians, maybe they’re Buddhists, maybe they’re teenagers that are getting off drugs, but everybody has a group that will resonate with your message. You have to believe that. Also, don’t compare yourself to someone who has a universal message, like the Dalai Lama, Tony Robbins, Lisa Nichols, The Secret. You know, we’re not all meant to be billion dollar bestsellers, but we’re all meant to get our message out there and be bestsellers in certain categories, for sure. The Path to Feeling Worthy First of all, you can’t feel worthy or unworthy. You feel mad, sad, glad, and scared. That’s it. What you think is that you’re unworthy. So really, you have to address your thoughts. Self-esteem comes from the Latin word “aestimare”, which means to estimate. We either estimate that we’re good or we estimate that we’re bad. It is a thought. It is a thought that most of us picked up either from our parents telling us, “You’ll never amount to anything,” or “You’re a bad kid,” or we made a decision because we got rejected by our girlfriend, we didn’t make the debate team, we didn’t get into Harvard, you know, whatever. Then, we tell ourselves, “I’m not okay,” or “I’m bad.” You know, maybe you had an abortion when you were 16 and now you’re judging yourself as a bad person, but that’s you making a judgement. The fact is that you can simply replace that thought with another better-feeling thought. So, it’s a matter of repetition. Thoughts are things we think, and we can change them or replace them through repetition. I don’t know if you’re familiar with EFT tapping, where you tap on these 9 acupuncture points while you think your negative, limiting belief. Literally, you can disappear a limiting belief. I’ve seen people do it in 10 minutes or less, using tapping. I wrote a book called Tapping Into Ultimate Success about tapping with a tapping expert. You can go on YouTube and type in “tapping”, and there’s like 5,000 free YouTube videos teaching you how to tap. But, the main thing is that it is a choice. You do not have to suffer with low self-esteem anymore because it is simply a thought that can be replaced with another thought through repetition, through tapping, through self-hypnosis; there are a number of things you can do. Bestseller Mindset: Write the Book Well, I think it’s simply, you have to write the book. And, part of the mindset has to be, “I’m going to do whatever it takes to make it good.” That’s where I really am a big believer in feedback. I know one couple who wrote a business book, and they invited 15 people to come to their apartment in Aspen. Every morning they had to read a chapter and give them feedback, and in the afternoon, the other people went skiing, and they edited the chapter based on the feedback. The next morning, they did another chapter. What we did was send our stories to our 40-reader panel. Urban, rural, black, white, brown, Asian, old, young, conservative, liberal, independent. You know, trying to get a really universal feedback thing. Most people are afraid to put it out because they are afraid of what they’re going to hear. Treat everything as a first draft. Just get words on paper, and then you can go back yourself and edit it, like, a week or two later, when you’ve got some distance. Then, give it to people and let them bleed all over it. You’re not in school, you’re not going to get a grade, you’re not going to fail. You’re just going to get feedback. “Here’s where I’m confused,” “You said this in another chapter,” “I don’t know what you mean here.” You know, that’s how you make it better. The guys who wrote The One Minute Manager, they would take their book, print 5,000 copies, sell them for cost to all of their clients, get feedback, and only then would they rewrite it and send it to a publisher. You’ve got to be committed to doing the work, and again, your message is worth the work because once it gets out there, it’s going to last forever. We all have life lessons that someone coming along behind us can benefit from. Whether it’s an 80-page book or a 500-page book, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is getting your message out there. I think another thing you have to deal with, in terms of a bestseller mindset, is you’ve got to get over your fear of rejection because you’re going to get rejected by editors that are going to acquire your book, the publishers. You’re going to be rejected by people who won’t have you on their podcast. You are going to have people read your book and give you critical reviews. But, you’re going to reach so many more people. I just did a book called The 30-Day Sobriety Solution. It came out in January. It’s got 95 reviews on Amazon. Ninety-three of them are five-star reviews, and three of them are one-star reviews. So, you’re always going to have people that are going to go, “This doesn’t work. These guys are full of it.” You’ve got to develop a thick skin. Your message isn’t for everybody. You know, if I had a message for fundamentalist Christians, that might turn off the New-Agers living in San Francisco. If I had a new age message, it might turn people off, you know, going to Joel Osteen’s church in Texas. So, you’re not going to please everybody, and you just have to confront that. Get over that fear. Really spend time on getting a great title. You know, the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” title came in a meditation. Originally, we got rejected by a lot of people, but that title is now a brand worth almost a billion dollars. You know, there’s “Chicken Soup for the Soul” cat food and dog food. It’s ridiculous what has happened with that, and we actually won a brand management award in Asia for the best brand in books and so forth. I was counseling some people that were writing a book, and it was about how to avoid your children, declaring you incompetent and assigning you to an insane asylum so that they can take your wealth. They had some big, legalistic title that nobody would pay any attention to. We ended up with, “How to Protect Yourself from Your Own Children in Old Age”. So, people are like, “Stop. What is that? I want to know what that is.” Really invest in a good title. Sometimes you might have to pay a consultant to brainstorm with you. Your book is going to be sitting on a table somewhere, or spine out on a shelf. You want something that’s going to grab you. We did a lot of research on titles. You can actually muscle test titles. Put covers of a book in front of somebody and have them muscle test it. If they go weak when you push down their arm, when they’re looking at your book, they won't but it. They will look at that cover, and they won’t know why they didn’t buy it, but they won’t buy it. We had a guy that had a book called Dumpster Diving for Wealth. People were throwing away valuable things in their dumpsters, and the cover was a guy’s butt sticking out of a dumpster. Everyone we tested with that cover went weak. When we took the guy out of the dumpster and had him standing next to it with something valuable, everyone tested strong. Nobody wanted their face in a garbage bin, basically. So, there are a lot of tricks like that you can learn along the way. You’re sending a message to people emotionally, and you don’t even know you’re doing it. That’s, I think, a critical piece of it too. Another thing is to set big goals. You’ve got to dream big. Set a big goal. We set a goal to sell a million and a half books in a year and a half, and our publisher laughed at us. He said, “You’ll be lucky to sell 20,000.” We said, “No. We’re going to visualize it. We’re going to affirm it.” We put mock New York Times headlines all around our office. You know, “Chicken Soup for the Soul Sells 1.5 Million”. We made up fake bestseller lists with our book #1 in the New York Times. Now you can do it on your computer, but then we did it with whiteout, back in 1993. You have to have that big dream, and then visualize it. We used to visualize bookstore windows where the whole window was filled with Chicken Soup books, just like you see them when the new Harry Potter book comes out. Well, three years later there were bookstores with whole windows full of Chicken Soup books. People underestimate visualization. See, you want to live in that dream as if it’s already true. This is basic “Law of Attraction 101”, but it works. Visualizing There are two things that are important:
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- You want to have a vision board where you have some external images. For example, you sitting next to Oprah. You can Photoshop it. I just was on Super Soul Sunday in December; I had Oprah on my vision board for a year before that. I wanted to be on Super Soul Sunday, so I had that, and in September I get a call out of the blue. We weren’t even talking to our editors and producers. Images of a headline with how many books you’ve sold. Pictures of your books you can mock up. You can go on Fiverr and have someone for $5 make all kinds of images for you.
- Then, what you want to do is maybe have 3x5 cards, or index cards, with your affirmations. “I’m so happy and grateful that I’ve sold a million copies of Real Fast Writing,” or whatever it is. You read your affirmation with enthusiasm, close your eyes, and then visualize what you would see from inside your eyes as if you were looking out at the world, with some iconic image that says, “I’ve made it.” So, whether it’s the $1,000,000 check, the headline, your cover on Writer’s Digest. You know, Success Magazine or whatever it might be. Visualize that, and feel the feelings that you would feel if you already had that experience.
146 episodes
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Manage episode 156943603 series 1204815
Content provided by Daniel Hall, Daniel Hall - Author, Online Marketer, and Publisher of the. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Daniel Hall, Daniel Hall - Author, Online Marketer, and Publisher of the or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Welcome to the Real Fast Results podcast! You have made a wise decision to join in today because it is our honor and privilege to bring for the words and advice of Mr. Jack Canfield. In this episode, Jack is going to share how to develop a bestseller mindset. According to Jack, there’s a lot that goes into creating a bestseller, but most importantly, you have to have the right outlook. As you probably know, this man has been able to accomplish more than most people could even dream of. Let’s see what he has to say… Benefits to Having a Bestseller Mindset For me, it has meant selling nearly 500 million books around the world. I’ve had 47 books on the New York Times Bestseller List, and I have been able to travel to 47 different countries and give workshops. As a result, I was in the movie The Secret, and I’ve had lunch at The White House. I hang out with people like Jeff Bridges, and Chaka Khan, people like that who are celebrity friends that I have now. And, you know, I’ve personally been able to stand on the first base line at a Dodger’s baseball game. I’ve had meetings with Bill Clinton, and John Gray, and I could just go down the list of fun things that have happened for me. Most important is the ability to make an impact in the lives of other people. I can remember being in a hotel in New York and watching this girl walk in with a bald head, probably about 12 or 13, obviously doing chemotherapy. I walked up to her, and I said, “I wanted to tell you that I’m supportive of you. I’m Jack Canfield.” “Oh my God! You’re the Chicken Soup for the Soul guy. I’ve read Chicken Soup for the Recovering Soul, Chicken Soup for the Teen Soul, Chicken Soup for the Cancer Patient Soul…” And, you just go like, “Wow! I’m making a difference in the lives of others.” That’s what really matters, the impact you can have. Achieving a Bestseller Mindset, from a Big Picture Standpoint You have to believe that it’s possible for you to have something really important to say, and that you have the ability to say it. So, a lot of it is self-esteem, self-concept, and belief in yourself. Then, I think most people don’t think big enough. One of the quotes that I have in my book, The Success Principles, is by General Wesley Clark, who used to be the head of the NATO forces in Europe for the United States. He said that it doesn’t take any more effort to dream a bigger dream than it does to dream a small dream. In other words, you can think of five zeros after a one, or six zeros after a one, or eight zeros after a one, in terms of your income and in terms of impact. I just set a goal to train one million trainers to do my work by the year 2030. People think I’m crazy, but we’ve already trained 1,500 people since last November and certified them. So, we now have people in 79 countries teaching our work. When I told my publisher, we wanted to sell a billion books by 2020, he thought we were freaking crazy. We’ve sold a half a billion books, and it’s only 2016. The “hockey stick curve” is taking off. You have to dream big and believe big, and I think you also have to have an attitude and a mindset that it’s going to take work. You have to learn how to market, you have to learn how to do a podcast, you have to learn how to be on Good Morning America. You have to learn how to do internet marketing. You have to have a mindset of studying. You have to be willing to learn. Quincy Jones, who’s 83 years old, the producer of Michael Jackson, “We Are the World”, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, etc., said something. He said that when he decided to do television, he went to UCLA, and this was in the 60’s or 70’s, but he said that he took six months of courses in screenwriting, producing, and directing. He said that every field has a structure and a science to it, and you have to study that if you want to be successful, whether it’s music theory, how to be a bestselling author, etc. What is the craft of being a good writer? What is the willingness to get feedback? You have to be able to get feedback. One of the things that I tell people all of the time is that most books get published when people have read them: The writer, the wife/husband, the acquisition editor at the house. Well, with Chicken Soup for the Soul, we had 40 people read every story and grade them on a scale of 1-10. We put that on an Excel spreadsheet, and everything that averaged less than a 9 never made it into the book, including stories that I wrote. It’s like you have to have the willingness to get feedback and get off your ego trip as well. How Can I Make Myself Feel Like I’m Worthy of a Bestseller? Here’s the deal. Everybody has a message. Every life has lessons that people have learned. You have to be willing to share that, and if you are willing to be clear that you have something valuable. Now, if you don’t work on yourself, if you don’t do self-introspection, if you don’t take seminars, if you don’t do therapy, if you don’t meditate, etc, your awareness of what you know and how much you know is going to be limited. So, #1, you have to be somewhat committed to growth, somewhat committed to constantly learning and never-ending improvement. CANI, as Tony Robbins likes to say. The reality is that you’ve got to be a learner, and then you share what you’ve learned. The belief is that you’ve got something of value. Mark Victor Hansen used to always say to me, when we were co-authors of Chicken Soup for the Soul… I’d say something, and he’d say, “You have to write that down. Write a blog. Write a chapter.” I’d say, “Mark everyone knows that,” and he’d say, “No Jack, they don’t.” Often, we figure that everyone knows what we know, and the fact is that we all have a lot of unique knowledge. I think that whether it’s through affirmations, through meditation, whatever it may be, you’ve got to start with the idea that, “I have something to share, and I am worthy of success.” My wife is writing a memoir right now, and she has had some amazing lessons in her life. She’s so afraid that people are going to judge her for where she used to be in the earlier chapters of her book. I told her, “I’m going to steal the freaking manuscript and publish it behind your back if you don’t publish it because it’s so good.” I think the main thing is to have other people read what you’re writing, and they’ll tell you if it’s good or not. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have something to say, it just means you haven’t written it yet. Most people, the feedback they get is, “Oh my God! This is so valuable,” or “Oh my God! I wish I had read this book 20 years ago.” I was counseling some writers the other day, and one of the women had written a book called: Dial Down the Drama: Reducing Conflict and Reconnecting with Your Teenage Daughter--A Guide for Mothers Everywhere. She is a woman who was a child psychologist, and she was working with lots of, I think, 20,000 teenagers, but when her daughter hit 12, it was like “Uh-oh”. Now she’s in it, right? So, she negotiated those teenage years. Her daughter is now 20, and she wrote a book based on her experience. The only people who are going to be interested in that book are going to be mothers with daughters, but that’s a lot of people. You may be someone who had a special needs child, and you had to learn how to negotiate the educational system. That’s a valuable message. You may be a meditation teacher, but you’re only going to attract a certain kind of person. Maybe they’re Christians, maybe they’re Buddhists, maybe they’re teenagers that are getting off drugs, but everybody has a group that will resonate with your message. You have to believe that. Also, don’t compare yourself to someone who has a universal message, like the Dalai Lama, Tony Robbins, Lisa Nichols, The Secret. You know, we’re not all meant to be billion dollar bestsellers, but we’re all meant to get our message out there and be bestsellers in certain categories, for sure. The Path to Feeling Worthy First of all, you can’t feel worthy or unworthy. You feel mad, sad, glad, and scared. That’s it. What you think is that you’re unworthy. So really, you have to address your thoughts. Self-esteem comes from the Latin word “aestimare”, which means to estimate. We either estimate that we’re good or we estimate that we’re bad. It is a thought. It is a thought that most of us picked up either from our parents telling us, “You’ll never amount to anything,” or “You’re a bad kid,” or we made a decision because we got rejected by our girlfriend, we didn’t make the debate team, we didn’t get into Harvard, you know, whatever. Then, we tell ourselves, “I’m not okay,” or “I’m bad.” You know, maybe you had an abortion when you were 16 and now you’re judging yourself as a bad person, but that’s you making a judgement. The fact is that you can simply replace that thought with another better-feeling thought. So, it’s a matter of repetition. Thoughts are things we think, and we can change them or replace them through repetition. I don’t know if you’re familiar with EFT tapping, where you tap on these 9 acupuncture points while you think your negative, limiting belief. Literally, you can disappear a limiting belief. I’ve seen people do it in 10 minutes or less, using tapping. I wrote a book called Tapping Into Ultimate Success about tapping with a tapping expert. You can go on YouTube and type in “tapping”, and there’s like 5,000 free YouTube videos teaching you how to tap. But, the main thing is that it is a choice. You do not have to suffer with low self-esteem anymore because it is simply a thought that can be replaced with another thought through repetition, through tapping, through self-hypnosis; there are a number of things you can do. Bestseller Mindset: Write the Book Well, I think it’s simply, you have to write the book. And, part of the mindset has to be, “I’m going to do whatever it takes to make it good.” That’s where I really am a big believer in feedback. I know one couple who wrote a business book, and they invited 15 people to come to their apartment in Aspen. Every morning they had to read a chapter and give them feedback, and in the afternoon, the other people went skiing, and they edited the chapter based on the feedback. The next morning, they did another chapter. What we did was send our stories to our 40-reader panel. Urban, rural, black, white, brown, Asian, old, young, conservative, liberal, independent. You know, trying to get a really universal feedback thing. Most people are afraid to put it out because they are afraid of what they’re going to hear. Treat everything as a first draft. Just get words on paper, and then you can go back yourself and edit it, like, a week or two later, when you’ve got some distance. Then, give it to people and let them bleed all over it. You’re not in school, you’re not going to get a grade, you’re not going to fail. You’re just going to get feedback. “Here’s where I’m confused,” “You said this in another chapter,” “I don’t know what you mean here.” You know, that’s how you make it better. The guys who wrote The One Minute Manager, they would take their book, print 5,000 copies, sell them for cost to all of their clients, get feedback, and only then would they rewrite it and send it to a publisher. You’ve got to be committed to doing the work, and again, your message is worth the work because once it gets out there, it’s going to last forever. We all have life lessons that someone coming along behind us can benefit from. Whether it’s an 80-page book or a 500-page book, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is getting your message out there. I think another thing you have to deal with, in terms of a bestseller mindset, is you’ve got to get over your fear of rejection because you’re going to get rejected by editors that are going to acquire your book, the publishers. You’re going to be rejected by people who won’t have you on their podcast. You are going to have people read your book and give you critical reviews. But, you’re going to reach so many more people. I just did a book called The 30-Day Sobriety Solution. It came out in January. It’s got 95 reviews on Amazon. Ninety-three of them are five-star reviews, and three of them are one-star reviews. So, you’re always going to have people that are going to go, “This doesn’t work. These guys are full of it.” You’ve got to develop a thick skin. Your message isn’t for everybody. You know, if I had a message for fundamentalist Christians, that might turn off the New-Agers living in San Francisco. If I had a new age message, it might turn people off, you know, going to Joel Osteen’s church in Texas. So, you’re not going to please everybody, and you just have to confront that. Get over that fear. Really spend time on getting a great title. You know, the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” title came in a meditation. Originally, we got rejected by a lot of people, but that title is now a brand worth almost a billion dollars. You know, there’s “Chicken Soup for the Soul” cat food and dog food. It’s ridiculous what has happened with that, and we actually won a brand management award in Asia for the best brand in books and so forth. I was counseling some people that were writing a book, and it was about how to avoid your children, declaring you incompetent and assigning you to an insane asylum so that they can take your wealth. They had some big, legalistic title that nobody would pay any attention to. We ended up with, “How to Protect Yourself from Your Own Children in Old Age”. So, people are like, “Stop. What is that? I want to know what that is.” Really invest in a good title. Sometimes you might have to pay a consultant to brainstorm with you. Your book is going to be sitting on a table somewhere, or spine out on a shelf. You want something that’s going to grab you. We did a lot of research on titles. You can actually muscle test titles. Put covers of a book in front of somebody and have them muscle test it. If they go weak when you push down their arm, when they’re looking at your book, they won't but it. They will look at that cover, and they won’t know why they didn’t buy it, but they won’t buy it. We had a guy that had a book called Dumpster Diving for Wealth. People were throwing away valuable things in their dumpsters, and the cover was a guy’s butt sticking out of a dumpster. Everyone we tested with that cover went weak. When we took the guy out of the dumpster and had him standing next to it with something valuable, everyone tested strong. Nobody wanted their face in a garbage bin, basically. So, there are a lot of tricks like that you can learn along the way. You’re sending a message to people emotionally, and you don’t even know you’re doing it. That’s, I think, a critical piece of it too. Another thing is to set big goals. You’ve got to dream big. Set a big goal. We set a goal to sell a million and a half books in a year and a half, and our publisher laughed at us. He said, “You’ll be lucky to sell 20,000.” We said, “No. We’re going to visualize it. We’re going to affirm it.” We put mock New York Times headlines all around our office. You know, “Chicken Soup for the Soul Sells 1.5 Million”. We made up fake bestseller lists with our book #1 in the New York Times. Now you can do it on your computer, but then we did it with whiteout, back in 1993. You have to have that big dream, and then visualize it. We used to visualize bookstore windows where the whole window was filled with Chicken Soup books, just like you see them when the new Harry Potter book comes out. Well, three years later there were bookstores with whole windows full of Chicken Soup books. People underestimate visualization. See, you want to live in that dream as if it’s already true. This is basic “Law of Attraction 101”, but it works. Visualizing There are two things that are important:
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- You want to have a vision board where you have some external images. For example, you sitting next to Oprah. You can Photoshop it. I just was on Super Soul Sunday in December; I had Oprah on my vision board for a year before that. I wanted to be on Super Soul Sunday, so I had that, and in September I get a call out of the blue. We weren’t even talking to our editors and producers. Images of a headline with how many books you’ve sold. Pictures of your books you can mock up. You can go on Fiverr and have someone for $5 make all kinds of images for you.
- Then, what you want to do is maybe have 3x5 cards, or index cards, with your affirmations. “I’m so happy and grateful that I’ve sold a million copies of Real Fast Writing,” or whatever it is. You read your affirmation with enthusiasm, close your eyes, and then visualize what you would see from inside your eyes as if you were looking out at the world, with some iconic image that says, “I’ve made it.” So, whether it’s the $1,000,000 check, the headline, your cover on Writer’s Digest. You know, Success Magazine or whatever it might be. Visualize that, and feel the feelings that you would feel if you already had that experience.
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