A few days ago, I was sitting in the center of Barcelona, near the Arc de Triomf, waiting for a friend, when I noticed something that deserved an email.
I was ogling the people, ogling the dogs, ogling the big red brick Arc itself. And then, I noticed a yellow and black construction in front of it.
It was a countdown timer, counting down second, minutes, hours, and days to something. Immediately, I was sucked it, and I wanted to know more.
“What’s gonna happen? And when? Should I be here? I bet it’s gonna be exciting.”
I saw that the construction had the yellow jersey of Tour de France on it.
I checked later. Sure enough, it’s a countdown clock, counting down the time to the start of the Tour de France, which will kick off on on July 4th, from Barcelona, which is not in France, but okay.
(I gotta tell you, there’s nothing more boring to me than watching bicyclists, but this year, I feel invested in the Tour de France.)
The day after that, I was at the gym, also very close to the Arc de Triomf.
I was listening to the latest James Altucher podcast. James was interviewing Amy Morin, author of the “13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do,” which is a bestselling book that spawned a whole series of “13 Things Mentally Strong X Don’t Do” books for Morin and made her a multimillionaire.
The weird thing is, Morin’s original book wasn’t an overnight smash success.
It took a year and a half for it to reach bestseller status.
James asked about that. Because normally, if a book doesn’t sell well straight out the gate, the publisher will give up on it and stop promoting it.
How did Morin’s book not sell well at first, and yet become a bestseller a year and a half later? Morin explained:
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Honestly it was from Rush Limbaugh. He mentioned my book on a Monday.
He said, “Today we’re gonna talk about the 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.” And he never got to it that day.
So Tuesday he said, “Today is the day. We’re gonna talk about the 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.” And he didn’t get to it that day either.
By about Wednesday, the book had literally sold out of every bookstore.
He didn’t get to it until Friday. He plugged my book five days in a row. It sold out.
A year and a half in, where it only sold ok, most bookstores only had one copy. Even Amazon didn’t have that many in stock. So it sold out everywhere by about Wednesday.
It was the next week that I hit Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller lists.
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My point being:
Most marketers are plenty familiar with countdowns to the end. “Deadline in 24 hours! 12 hours! 8 hours! Deadline is here! Deadline! Deadline! Deadline!”
But few marketers are familiar enough with coountdowns to the start. To teasing excitement to the launch of a thing, and not just the disappearance of an opportunity.
But smart people, or some lucky ones, like Amy Morin above, know the benefit of not only counting down to the end of a thing, but the start of it as well.
Let me put that into practice right now.
I published my new 10 Commandments book, “10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, etc.” almost exactly a year ago.
In the meantime, I’ve amassed 99 reviews on Amazon, the majority of them 5 star.
To celebrate the 1-year anniversary of this book, and possibly, my 100th review, I will be kicking off a Tour de Commandments event on May 11th.
I’ll have more details about this exciting, unique, spectacular, historic, one-time, never-to-be repeated event over the next few days, as the countdown to the start gets closer and closer to zero.
Meanwhile, if you haven’t yet gotten your copy of my 10 Commandments book, your copy is waiting for you here: