Rule of 5’s

“The Rule of Fives.” – Jack Canfield (Co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul series)

We had a meeting with a psychic by the name of Ron Scolastico, quite a profound being. He said to us, “If you go to a tree with a sharp axe everyday and take five swings with the axe, eventually the tree, however big, will eventually have to fall down.”

So we came up with this idea that we would do five specific things that will move our goal to completion every single day!

  • This could mean signing five books and giving them to people for free.
  • Send out FREE copies to people in celebrity phone book – like

    • Harrison Ford
    • Steven Spielberg
    • Barbra Streisand
    • Sidney Poitier
  • It could be giving talks at churches or
  • Sent copies to a jury sequestered – not allowed to read newspaper
  • Wrote press releases
  • Did Book Signings at any place that would have you
  • Got book into PX for military bases
  • Called corporations and asks for bulk orders
  • Ask other speakers to sell book at their seminars
  • Ask all catalogs to carry it
  • Called in to talk shows – some at 3 am
  • Made phone calls to people who could review the book
  • Give away free copies of our talks
  • Give to ministers to use as seminars
  • Gave free talks at churches
  • Calling 5 MLM to see if they would include as a motivational tool
    for their clients
  • Give seminar to at least 5 people and sell the book in the back of the
    room
  • Sending out free copies to reviewers,
  • Giving five radio interviews.

There were five specific actions we did every day so there was always something happening that promoted the book.

Eventually, I wrote a letter to the publisher of a publication called L.A. Parents. We had a story in the book about parenting, and I asked them to reprint it. In exchange for printing it, we asked that they put at the bottom a little box that said it was excerpted from Chicken Soup for The Soul®. He liked the story so much that he told us there were many more of these parenting magazines all across the country. He helped me to send out this article to every editor and we got 55 copies of it printed. I think that is one of the things that helped the book to take off. Eventually that led to 135,000 copies of the book selling, and by a year and a half’s time we had sold 1.3 million copies. We really didn’t hit a best seller list until September 1994, even though it came out in July of 1993. About a month after that, it was on The New York Times list, and then USA Today, and we stayed on those bestseller lists for almost 4 years. At one point Chicken Soup for the Soul® was number one and A Second Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul® was number two. Eventually we came out with the whole series of books, 32 titles so far. That is basically how it added up–it was NOT an overnight success. What happened, I think, is that one person would read it, they’d tell five others; those five would read it and tell five others and eventually that had a snowball effect that finally reached critical mass, and we had a bestseller.