A ‘Chicken Soup’ Empire : With Their Feel-Good Book Selling Like Hot Cakes, Two Authors Smell Success

Who can count the fortunes spun from that uniquely American brand of cockeyed optimism personified a century ago by Horatio Alger and today by Forrest Gump?

Topping the New York Times self-help bestseller list again this week is “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” a collection of 101 short, inspirational anecdotes that would do Alger, or Gump, proud.

Compiled and written by two Los Angeles peak-performance gurus, “Chicken Soup” has sold more than 1.5 million copies since its publication in 1993, and its performance still hasn’t peaked, according to the book’s publisher, Health Communications Inc.

Health Communications President Peter Vegso said he believes the feel-good phenom will sell 5 million copies this year, and a sequel, “A Second Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul,” will be in bookstores by spring.

Even though they are planning to build an empire on “Chicken Soup,” neither the publisher nor the book’s two authors, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, can explain what hunger in the soul their book seems to satisfy.

“I think a lot of people just need to be uplifted,” said Canfield, president of Self-Esteem Seminars and the Foundation for Self-Esteem in Culver City. “We thought it would do well, but we had no idea we’d get this kind of response. We tapped into something universal without really knowing it.”

Hansen, who lives in Costa Mesa and is well-known in the business world for his empowerment seminars and video programs, said people can identify with the simple, wholesome messages in the “Chicken Soup” stories--most of which he and Canfield use in their motivational lectures and workshops.

“There is a great power in storytelling, and I don’t think Americans are telling their stories anymore,” he said. “What these stories have done is open up the whole energy of discussion in the home. It helps people to turn on their heart light.”

Grown men in business suits talking about turning on their heart lights? The ‘80s suddenly seem far, far away.

“The ‘90s is the spiritual decade,” Hansen said. “Baby boomers are saying money isn’t it, there is something more to life.”

“Something more” apparently includes heaping helpings of homilies by Robert Fulghum, Gloria Steinem, Tony Robbins, Art Buchwald and others who contributed stories to “Chicken Soup.”

The 101 stories are marshaled into categories such as “Live Your Dream,” “On Love” and “Overcoming Obstacles.”

These distinctions aside, however, there are roughly five types of stories in the collection. There are Horatio Alger-esque rags-to-riches tales, like the one about little Tommy, whose simple idea for a bumper sticker turned into a money-making venture that landed him a guest spot on a TV talk show.

There are tear-jerkers, like the one about a father who finally works up the nerve to tell his son he loves him, only to have the lad break down in sobs and confess he was just about to commit suicide because he felt so unloved.

There are transcendental stories of the Reader’s Digest, I- survived- eight- days- in- a- snow- cave- on- four- sticks- of- chewing-gum variety.

Then there are those stories that in another book, in another time, could certainly be classified as horror. In this category, you’d find the tale of the Hugging Judge, a retired jurist who carries around a Hugger Kit and offers little red hearts to everyone he meets in exchange for hugs.

And, in a category all by itself is the anecdote about a 10-year-old boy with rickets who, on meeting football great Jim Brown, told his idol, “Mr. Brown, one day I’m going to break every record you hold!” The little boy, of course, was O.J. Simpson. (“Chicken Soup” was off the presses before the latest chapter in Simpson’s life was written.)

Those un-Gumped grumps among us might say “Chicken Soup for the Soul” could be subtitled “Oatmeal for the Brain.” Each story can easily be read in one trip to the bathroom, and you could sop up the entire chapter on “Learning to Love Yourself” while waiting in the dentist’s office. “The Bridges of Madison County” is “Anna Karenina” by comparison.

“We didn’t want to write a book for intellectual giants because that isn’t what’s read,” Hansen said.

Both Canfield and Hansen credit the book’s easy-to-read format for its popularity. But the biggest reasons for the book’s success, publisher Vegso said, are the hustle and imagination of Hansen and Canfield, who have been close friends for 16 years.

Indeed, the story behind “Chicken Soup” is as inspirational as anything in it. All the major publishing houses balked when Canfield and Hansen pitched their idea of collecting the amusing anecdotes they used in their seminars into a book.

“No one wanted to touch an anthology,” Canfield said. “The big publishers didn’t catch the vision that we had.”

Needless to say, it takes more than universal rejection to derail two professional motivators. At an American Booksellers Assn. convention in Anaheim, Hansen and Canfield went booth to booth for two days shopping their vision. They found a taker in Health Communications, a Florida publisher that specializes in mental health tomes such as the best-selling “Adult Children of Alcoholics.”

Most authors would have been happy with finding a publisher and seeing their book in print. But Canfield and Hansen were just getting started.

“They were a publisher’s dream,” Vegso said. “Their energy and enthusiasm didn’t end when the book was published. They worked hard on marketing and promoting it everywhere they went.”

Canfield and Hansen talked up the book at their conferences and seminars; Hansen alone does more than 200 speaking engagements a year.

They took the idea of a book tour to previously unscaled heights; in one day they did so many satellite radio interviews, talking to a different station every 20 minutes, that Canfield estimates they reached 12 million listeners.

They placed ads in suburban newspapers away from the big media markets, and allowed the papers to publish some of the stories for free. They are both proud of the fact that they granted every interview request that came their way.

“We didn’t care if it was the East Oshkosh Senior Center newsletter, we did it,” Canfield said.

In a stroke of genius that Canfield credits to Hansen, they began an ambitious “bypass marketing” campaign, offering the books on a consignment basis to businesses that didn’t normally sell books. “Chicken Soup” is stocked at a bakery in Boston, at mortuaries in Los Angeles and at all the Shell gas stations in Michigan.

“In super-stores like B. Dalton, you may have 40,000 books in there to compete against. You don’t have much coverage,” Canfield said. “We wanted to be in places where people would say ‘Gee, what is this book doing in here?’ ”

The unusual strategy paid off. In its first six months, “Chicken Soup” sold 85,000 copies. In the next six months, it sold 240,000 copies. In the past three months, 600,000 copies have been sold.

“Each month we do better than we did the month before,” Vegso said.

Canfield believes a lot of those “Chicken Soups” wound up as stocking stuffers.

“What we’ve found is someone will buy the book, love it, then buy 12 more to give away to friends,” he said. “It’s almost like a chain letter, the way it has been growing exponentially.”

Hansen said his goal is to have six more “Chicken Soup” books on the shelves by the end of the decade. Plans for future editions include “Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul,” “Chicken Soup for the Teen-ager” and a book of humorous stories tentatively called “Chicken Soup for the Funny Bone.”

“We’re building an empire here,” Hansen said.

And, presumably, turning on those heart lights.