I promoted my book last week, on April 13th, with a viral email blast. It was so cool to see the Amazon ranking for The Power of Your Past: the art of recalling, reclaiming and recasting climb all day. I past 156,000 other books and got into the top .05 % of all the titles Amazon carries. Wow! Perhaps 100,000 or more people read about the book.
It was a lot more than cool of course. I am still trying to make sense out of it. Can I ever say thank you enough? Even if I did 3 favors a day for years, I would never catch up, so how can I play it forward? How did I deserve such a huge hit of support? Is it about deserving anything at all?
I am absorbing the power of the network that activated itself on my behalf and on the behalf of Whole Child International (www.wholechild.org, the orphanage improvement non-profit that we supported in the book campaign.) People sent me the tweets they sent, the emails they crafted, the blogs they put out to their mailing lists. People sent me notes on the babies and kids they adopted, the fact that they themselves were orphans, and that they wanted to help an organization like Whole Child. One friend of a friend was in Nepal on April 13thpicking up their newly adopted 2 year old daughter.
I got lots more:
- I got lots of fans on facebook on my book page facebook.com/PowerOfYourPast. I’d like to meet and thank them in person.
- I got delightful words of encouragement on Linked InI got questions from people wanting to write a book on how I got so high on the Amazon ratings, what did I do?
- I got a question from Hawaii on how do you recast old memories (I got this on the book signing tour as well)
- I got kudos from my publisher team at Berrett Koehler
In the promo copy I put a sentence that haunts me. It went like this—“All of us who are networked for this effort hope it is about a lot more than selling books, and is one more step to a fuller realization of our humanity.” Do I really believe that? I think we all do. We know there are many many steps that have to be taken. What will make this sentence true, what will make this day of networking about a lot more than selling books? Sure I will send a check to Whole Child when I figure out what money was made that day, but then what else will I do? What will others do, since I spoke for them—“all of us”?
I will process these questions and accept the p0nderings that come with this day, and I will also simply enjoy it for what it was. A friend of a friend wrote why she was buying the book and getting out the word to her friends. “Very compelling- I love supporting people’s passions :–) “. I hope the promo email blast made a lot of us smile. It did me. Thank you all so, so much.