By Guest Blogger #1 NY Times bestselling author, Marci Shimoff
Love for No Reason
Happy for No Reason
Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul series
www.marcishimoff.com
Giving birth to a book is so much more work than I ever thought. Just when the challenge of writing the book is over, up pops the marketing efforts, which in many ways are even harder. I think it must be similar to how a parent feels when they go through the challenges of raising an infant, only to discover that the hardest years are yet to come – teenagers!.
Well, I didn’t raise just one book, I did it eight times (hasn’t it been said that mothers have amnesia when it comes to having more children?). The only way to be a successful author is to be in love with your baby. You MUST write about what you’re passionate about, because you will be living with the topic for years. You will eat, sleep, and breathe it.
I was very fortunate to have started my career as an author collaborating with three wonderful co-authors: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Jennifer Hawthorne on the first specialty book in the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul. I LOVED working on that book and promoting it.
Jack and Mark taught me that you must be dedicated and consistent with promoting your book or it won’t get in the hands of people who will benefit from it. They were the most persistent book marketers I’d ever met. They had a “rule of 5” in marketing their first Chicken Soup for the Soul book – do 5 things every day to move the book forward.
After a year of persistence, their first book finally hit the NY Times bestseller list and as they say, the rest is history. When the Woman’s Soul book came out, we worked as hard promoting it, never turning down an interview or an opportunity. About 4 years later, I remember being astonished when Jack and Mark would still get up at 3:00 am to do an interview. They had already sold a gazillion books, and yet they were committed to spreading the word to even more people. It was the love of the message that kept them going.
After writing five more books in the Chicken Soup series, I was full of soup and could cook no more! I had lost the passion for it. I did some deep soul searching and realized that I was most interested in the topic of happiness, which led me to write Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps for Being Happy from the Inside Out. The process of research, writing, and marketing/promoting that work has been a total of 10 years so far, and it continues.
About four years ago, the soul searching began again. What was next? Was there anything more important to me than happiness? There was only thing: Unconditional Love. So I began researching and writing Love for No Reason: 7 Steps to Creating a Live of Unconditional Love and it’s been a fabulous journey. I was blessed to get to interview 150 Love Luminaries (people who’ve lived in the state of deep and lasting love) and I’ve learned so much from them. This is a topic I am truly passionate about, and I’m so excited to share the wisdom I’ve gleaned and the practical tools I’ve learned with everyone who wants to experience greater love.
I believe that if you feel deeply moved to write a book, then your message is meant to be out there. But if you’re writing a book for other reasons and you don’t absolutely have a passion for the topic, forget about it. Loving your message is the only way to keep up the stamina required to birth and raise a good book!
By Marci Shimoff., author of Love for No Reason: 7 Steps to Creating a Life of Unconditional Love (Free Press, December 2010). Love for No Reason offers a breakthrough approach to experiencing a lasting state of unconditional love—the kind of love that doesn’t depend on another person, situation, or romantic partner, and that you can access at any time and in any circumstance. This is the key to lasting joy and fulfillment in life. Order Love for No Reason now and receive the Love for No Reason Bonus Package free at www.TheLoveBook.com Follow Marci on Twitter @Marci_Shimoff.