Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. Oh, I'm so happy to do this vlog. I have been waiting to do this vlog for months and months and months, and yes, it is time. Today is the day all the ducks are finally in a row. I can shoot this vlog. Alright, so the backstory of this vlog is some months ago someone wrote in and said, ?Hey, whatever happened to the book ON THIS BRIGHT DAY? I was hearing about it so much, and then everything just stopped and I feel like I've been left hanging. Did it make the New York Times bestsellers list and what happened to that contest? And yeah, I want the follow through. I want to hear what happened.? So yeah, you got me. It is true. I have several weaknesses and one of them is follow through. I am historically, chronically personality wise, really, really terrible at follow through. I'm so good out of the gate, and then it just kind of fizzles.
The book launch did wrap up, and it's true, there was never a vlog that summed it all up for you. The book launch was last October, and the book is out. It's wonderful. I'm sure you know it's out. Here's what happened. It did not make the New York Times list. It sold about 5,000 copies in the first week, which is about half as many as would've been needed to make the New York Times list. One never knows exactly what gets a book on the New York Times list, but 5,000 copies, isn't it. I know that that's about twice as many copies as Rezoom? sold in its first week, and it continues to sell. Well, it's selling well.
The contest concluded, and we had three winners. This was the grand prize contest where the three people who bought the most books would get to come to Rochester, New York to visit with me. My plan all along was to shoot the follow-up vlog after their visit. Then, here's what happened. They were coming from all over the country, the United States of America. They got booked on their flights and they flew in. The night before I was supposed to meet them to begin our epic visit here in Rochester, New York, it was just after dinnertime, the night before I was going to greet them all, and they'd all already flown in and they were in the hotel here right by my house, and I started to feel that feeling, you know, feeling right? Where all of a sudden you have no energy and you feel cold and hot at the same time, and you feel like you've been hit by a Mack truck, and you need to go lie down in bed. It was like six o'clock at night just after dinner. I got that feeling of coming down with the flu. And I called Chris Davis, my best friend and my Chief of Staff, and I was like, ?Chris, that you won't believe this. I think I'm coming down with the flu.? We agreed I would take a bunch of antivirals and some mushroom complexes and all the things that research shows will boost the immune system. I would go to sleep for a solid 12 hours and I would just beat the thing. I crawled into bed at 7:00 PM, and I didn't sleep. I didn't sleep until one or two in the morning. I was hot, I was cold, I was achy, my fever spiked up to a hundred and whatever. It was high. I woke up in the morning, sicker, just sicker. I was so sick. I lay there in bed thinking, what do I do? I've got these. I mean, it was obvious what to do. I call the people and I say, I have the flu. I can't meet with you. But I mean the odds, the timing, I mean, really, I get the flu once every four or five years or something.
I called them all, they were very gracious. JoAnn Campbell-Rice had flown in as well as the co-author of the book. She was there and she was not sick. Rhey all ended up hanging out, the four of them together, and they did some fun stuff. I don't remember if it was later that day or the next day, I put on some flannel things and I drove to the grocery store, and we sat outside at some tables. I was downwind of them and I was eight feet away from them and I was all bundled up. We chatted for a bit. We'd actually had a lovely conversation. We talked for a couple hours. The sweet thing about it is they all bonded in a different way because of this strange turn of events. And they got really close. We planned another trip, and that trip was timed with the 10th anniversary luncheon of Bright Line Eating on August 4th. They came in and we spent time together. They had dinner at my house. We had a lovely time, and they were already now pretty close because of the time that they'd spent together, and they'd stayed in touch.
So yeah, so my intention to shoot the vlog after that visit ended up getting sort of thwarted by the strangeness of having to postpone that visit really for a few more months. But it was lovely overall. I asked them afterwards, did you feel like you got shortchanged? And well, one of them in particular, I asked, and she was like, no. As a matter of fact, we feel like we got extra bonus. It was amazing and it was so sweet to be with them. So sweet.
Okay, so speaking of JoAnn Campbell-Rice, whatever happened with her authorship status? Immediately we got her listed as an official co-author on the book. There's a deep database of books where the ISBN numbers are listed, and the authors are listed. She got added onto that immediately. Then we worked with Hay House to get a new cover made for the Kindle edition, and that got loaded into Amazon right away, a new cover for the audiobook edition. That got loaded right away. We got things rewritten like about the author page and that kind of thing for the paperback edition, which is coming out in October, a commemoration of the one-year anniversary of the book. When the paperback gets printed, JoAnn's name will be on the front. The hardcovers are still selling, and that's from an old printing. The book sold out of its first printing very quickly and a second printing was printed before JoAnn Campbell-Rice could get on the front cover of it. Those hard covers will sell out, and then as soon as they do a new printing of it, if they do, it's possible that they'll just sell soft cover paperbacks after the hardcover sell out. I'm not sure whether they'll do another hardcover printing, but if they do, JoAnn's name will be on that.
People are modifying their books in cute little ways. I've got a little heart with ?JCR, JoAnn Campbell-Rice,? on my book. We also have designed covers if you want one or title pages. If you flip to the inside of the book, the title page, we have ones with JoAnn's name and you can download it and print it out and get it onto your book if you want to at onthisbrightdaybook.com, onthisbrightdaybook.com. We'll put that link down below this vlog as well, you can click on it if you want to, on that website, it's really fun. You'll see that there's all sorts of people like you, people from the community with pictures and fun things from?that's an Instagram feed. If you post on Instagram and use the #onthisbrightday, #onthisbrightday. And (is it on this? Yeah, it's just ON THIS BRIGHT DAY) your post in Instagram will get automatically loaded onto that website, which is so fun. Then everyone will see your picture on our website.
I think that's all the housekeeping stuff I needed to say. What I want to follow up with is just a little bit about what makes a successful book, what it's like as an author to put a book out into the world, and what's really soul satisfying about this book in particular? This book is really helping people live the Bright Life. It's a daily reminder in so many ways, 366 ways of what it takes to break free from the tyranny of addictive eating, to live Bright and clear and sunshiny and free and grateful, and to do the inner work and to live in community with other people who eat this way. It's such an inspiring way to start the day and learning things like that.
In the UK, they've got this little Accountability Call. It's not that little 20, 30 people are on it each day, each morning, and they start off their call by reading the reading from that day, from ON THIS BRIGHT DAY. They say every single day, every day, someone shares that the reading hit them between the eyes. That it was exactly what they needed on their journey, that it helped them course correct. It helped them see something they needed to see.
JoAnn Campbell-Rice and I just had a private conversation just a couple days ago as I was preparing to shoot this vlog, and we both said the same thing. We said we both read this book every morning and it feels new and miraculous and special and magical to us every morning, right? Because nobody purely authored this book. There was my contribution, there was JoAnn's contribution, there was our writing coach, Nicola Kraus's contribution, and the community's contribution. It was a community effort, a group effort for sure. This book is just the book that keeps on giving every single day. We feel so, so good about it. I don't want to say an everyday basis, but certainly at least once a week, someone texts me or reaches out to me, messages me on a private platform and says that the reading really spoke to them, and it was exactly what they needed to hear.
I want to end by pulling back the curtain a little bit and letting you in on a little publishing house secret. I want to relay a private conversation that I had with Reid Tracy before the first book was published. This was before Bright Line Eating, the book, ever came out. We were having dinner together, and I was asking, because my first book was about to be published, and I was a nervous new first author. I said, ?What is it going to take to make this book launch a success?? And he said that people get book launches all wrong. They focus on the launch of the book and they forget what's really important to launch a successful book out into the world. He said that the key is to write a really good book. And he said that once you've launched your book into the world, you'll know it's a really good book. There's one thing that publishers look for one thing, let some time go by a couple years and then look on Amazon and see how many reviews it's got because there is no book launch in the world with an author with a big email list or a big social following that can get a thousand reviews on Amazon for a book based on a book launch that's fancy and glitzy and glammy and successful or whatever. You'll get a few hundred Amazon reviews that way you won't get a thousand. The only way to get a thousand reviews on Amazon is to write a book that actually impacts people, because people will be motivated to write an Amazon review only if they're actually motivated to write an Amazon review. You'll get some people who will write an Amazon review because you asked them to, but by and large people will do, the rest of the people will only do it if they loved or hated the book. I've carried that with me always, and it's really deeply gratifying to note that the book Rezoom, which was by far the weakest book launch we ever did. We launched it January 1st when we were also doing a Boot Camp launch. It was a very stressful time. I was going through an interpersonally hard time. I couldn't wrap my head around doing those two launches at the same time. The book Rezoom basically flopped into the world. It was not a solid book launch. I feel terrible about it because it's a great book. I checked the other day, and the book Rezoom has something like 966 Amazon reviews. It's a good book, and people are discovering it still, and it's creeping up there in terms of Amazon reviews. Now, the book, ON THIS BRIGHT DAY, has something like 355 Amazon reviews, but it just came out. It hasn't even been out for a year, right?
I guess I just want to end by inviting you to reflect on this book, whether you read it, whether you enjoy it, and if you do, might you be motivated to go write an Amazon review? I would be so grateful. I suspect, my prediction is, that in the fullness of time, this book will creep up to a thousand Amazon reviews as well, because I really do think it's forming part of the foundation of a solid Bright Day for so many thousands of people. It really is. It's a powerful, powerful, sweet, sweet book. I feel very deeply proud of it. I know JoAnn Campbell-Rice does as well.
Thank you for your patience with me as I took months to get this follow-up vlog out to you. It's a treat to share with you some of the stories behind the scenes of this book. All is right with the world. This book is in so many hands. If you don't have it, obviously go get yourself a copy. If you're trying to do anything different other than the mainstream, the standard American diet with your food, this book will support you every day in sticking with that intention, aligning yourself in integrity with the food you put in your mouth and feeling ever better and ever brighter because of it. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
