mind that it was OK for these results to happen and were not
about me personally.
Several things occurred. One was that my seminar and teaching
business expanded almost immediately. Second was that after a few
months, I had customers up and down the East Coast of the United
States buying the books. (This was before the advent of online book
selling.) I increased the number of titles and added cassette tapes to
my line. Third was that, after my manuscript “Money Is My Friend”
received its umpteenth rejection and, my friend, Neil Adams asked
whether I had considered self-publishing, I thought, “Sure, I can do
it. I have money. I know how to sell books.” So I went ahead.
This illustrates how personal content of a product you made
yourself increases the emotional intensity of selling. As I men-
tioned, my (PL) most intense selling experience was with my first
book, which I published myself in 1979—against the advice of many
well-intentioned people who cautioned me of the possibility of end-
ing up with a basement full of books and a heart full of disappoint-
ment. The day the first shipment arrived from the printer was a big
one for me. I was facing the challenge of having to sell all 2,000
books of the first printing. I remember looking outside my house
the day before and seeing my front yard empty. The next day the
books arrived, in my front yard and spilling over on to the sidewalk
were hundreds of people shouting for attention and waving money
at me, wanting my book. The first printing sold out in a couple of
hours, with no work on my part.
Now, if you believe this story, you probably also believe a better
mousetrap will cause people to beat a path to your door.
The part of the story about self-publishing is accurate. I made
up the part about the crowd of people outside my door. The books
required more selling effort than that. I sold them to bookstores
throughout the United States and Canada for about a year and a
half, before and after seminars and while en route between seminar
cities. I did most of the selling in person, some by mail and tele-
phone. I continued until the bookstores were generating volume
significant enough so regional book distributors were willing to
purchase and resell Money Is My Friend. Over its first 20 years in
print, the book sold more than 400,000 copies in 18 languages.
After the first printing of Money Is My Friendarrived, I soon
learned that selling my own book was quite different from selling
someone else’s. It brought the new selling challenge of dealing with
an item with high personal content.218 Learning to Sell the Easy Way