CHICKEN-SOUP NATION.(Jack Canfield, Mark Victor and their series of self help books)(Interview)(Biography)

In the fall of 1991, one of the book proposals being shopped around New York was a big sheaf of materials from a young literary agent named Jeffrey Herman, who was specializing in popular business books. Herman had already represented some reasonably successful nonfiction--a book by one of his writers had sold more than two hundred thousand copies--and this new proposal was the most ambitious package he had ever seen, with a lengthy manuscript sample and a lot of exuberant marketing ideas, such as selling the books in venues like gas stations and Amway sales conventions. There were pledge forms on which people had written their names and phone numbers beneath a promise to buy the book. "I also promise to buy a copy for everyone who works with me," read the pledge forms, which referred to the nonexistent book as a best-seller, "for a total of ______ people."

A dozen publishers turned Herman down, and then a dozen more. Herman says that they were all polite but dismissive, and that the meetings he arranged for the prospective co-authors, two motivational speakers from Southern California, did not appear to be bolstering his case. "Big gold rings and major tans," Julie Merberg, who was then at Ballantine and now co-owns the book-packaging company Roundtable Press, recalls. "My boss at the time had more highbrow taste." The publisher Ron Fry, who owns a house called the Career Press, remembers exactly how big an advance the authors wanted--fifteen hundred dollars--and that he didn't think the book, an anthology of what were characterized as quick-read inspirational real-life stories, was worth it. "Kind of treacly," Fry recalls, adding sorrowfully, "Thank you so much for reminding me." For five months or so, Herman kept on sending the package off to houses of ever-diminishing size and stature, and when more than thirty had passed on it he called the co-authors to tell them he was giving up. Perhaps they should self-publish, he said, or go on shopping without an agent.

The story continues with the co-authors driving to the American Booksellers Association meeting in Anaheim and walking all day from booth to booth, thrusting proposals into the hands of dubious sales representatives; and the publisher of a struggling Florida addiction-and-recovery-books company eventually volunteering to take a proposal home with him; and the publisher pulling out the proposal in an airport waiting lounge and reading about a judge who went around hugging people and a little boy who was kind and resourceful even though he had a crippled leg; and the publisher starting to cry right there in the airport, "tears running, blowing my nose, people looking at me kind of funny"; and the publisher deciding to give the writers a chance; and Jeff Herman feeling so bad finally about the tiny amount of profferred advance money that he waived the usual agent arrangement, which would have cut him in for fifteen per cent of everything then and for the duration of the relationship, and agreed to look over the contract as a courtesy. When I asked Herman whether he had ever figured out what that fifteen per cent might have added up to, he said quickly and firmly, "No. I'm not that much of a masochist."

Because this is the creation narrative of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series, which has become one of the biggest-selling nonfiction franchises in the history of American publishing, it may be worth noting the qualities that make it the right sort of material for a Chicken Soup book. It's short, or at least condensable, so that it could be read in its entirety by someone without much available time or attention--in the bathroom, say, or in the car-pool pickup line. It's uplifting. It involves obstacles overcome and dreams undeterred. It expresses a touch of satisfactory populist revenge while avoiding both social controversy and bad words. It's true, pretty much, although some of the details wobble in the verification process (memories differ, for example, about whether the exuberant marketing plan was written into the proposal or on hundreds of Post-it notes stuck to a wall in the authors' office). It contains elements of humor, surprise, or grief--actually, it contains all three, if you consider the situation from Jeff Herman's point of view--and it lends itself nicely to what is generally referred to, around the Chicken Soup headquarters, as a Moment. "A Chicken Soup Moment," Kathy Brennan-Thompson, one of the efficient young employees at the company's editorial office, in Santa Barbara, told me as she waited for her computer to begin displaying the hundreds of weekend Internet dispatches from people eager to contribute their own uplifting real-life stories to a "Chicken Soup for the Soul" book. "Something in there that touches you, inspires you, gives you goose bumps. That's what we look for."

The cumulative numbers for "Chicken ...