Love Thy Self-Help
Love Thy Self-Help Give us your tired (of being overweight), your hungry (for success), your poor (after a nasty divorce), your teeming masses yearning to be free (of their fears and insecurities), and show them the way to Dallas, where authors like Dr. Phil McGraw have answers for every problem and superagent Jan Miller knows how to sell their books to America.
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"She's talking to a man in Atlanta who wants to write a book about how to inspire children through the game of chess," an assistant whispered to me.
"Tim on line two," said another assistant to Miller. Tim Sanders, a Yahoo executive and motivational author in California, was calling to update Miller on his newest book idea, "The L Factor: The Amazing Power of Being Likeable." "Tim, this is going to be great, just great," Miller said after she hung up with the man in Atlanta. "You know we could sell this tomorrow."
"Tony's office," said Miller's first assistant. Tony Robbins was having a staffer call to see if Miller had received the latest chapters of the new book he was writing, "Emotional Fitness: Harnessing the Primal Forces of Your Life." "Tell him I've got them and I love them," gushed Miller.
The lights on the phone continued to blink. A female author was phoning to ask what Miller thought of her idea of having lunch individually with two hundred millionaires, asking them the secrets to their success, and then writing a book teaching non-millionaires how they can become millionaires too. Another caller, a 25-year-old Harvard graduate, wanted to discuss his idea for a book that teaches students how to land lucrative scholarships for college.
Then a third assistant came through the door and said, "Dominick's holding."
Quickly, Miller waved me and everyone out of her office so that she could concentrate. "Dominick" was Dominick Anfuso, the powerful editorial director of The Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster that is publishing Dr. Phil's The Ultimate Weight Solution. Anfuso wanted Miller's opinion on the book's cover photo. Should it depict Dr. Phil with a big grin and his fist clenched? Or should it show him with a calmer, all-knowing expression and his arms folded? As I watched Miller through a plate-glass window talking intently into the telephone, I kept thinking, "Ten million dollars? Dr. Phil is getting ten million dollars for a weight-loss book?"
"Anyone who doesn't understand why Dr. Phil is important is simply out of touch with mainstream America," Miller said after she hung up the phone. "He's part of our culture, and he's going to be part of our culture for a long, long time. And I'm not going to be satisfied until everyone in this country has his books, because that's just how important he is."
YOU COULD VERY WELL BE THE type of person who is embarrassed by America's self-help movement. You might find it comical that there are people who truly believe their lives will change if they attend a Tony Robbins "peak performance" seminar or listen to positive-thinking tapes. You might shake your head in bewilderment when you walk through the self-help sections of bookstores and see rows and rows of books with such titles as How to Make Love All the Time.
If so, as Miller says, you are out of touch—way out of touch. Americans have been fascinated with self-help at least as far back as Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack. In our constant pursuit of happiness, we have always looked for someone to tell us how to achieve the good life. We determinedly move from one self-help trend to another, whether it's walking down the road less traveled, journeying toward the light, or sipping chicken soup for the soul. We improve our relationships by pronouncing that we are either from Mars or Venus; we discover inner peace by finding our inner child; and we continually remind ourselves not to sweat the small stuff. At my neighborhood Borders bookstore in the heart of North Dallas, as many books are purchased from the self-help shelves as are purchased from the store's vast fiction department. "We get a stack of new self-help books every day, and we've got customers waiting for them," says Farris Rookstool III, a national events coordinator for the chain based at the store. "The other night, a publisher arranged for an appearance for an author who had just come out with a book that taught women how to live like queens and get their men to do things for them. It was titled Mama Gena's Owner's and Operator's Guide to Men, and to be honest with you, I had never heard of it. Yet women were pouring into the store to meet the author and buy her book."
In the world of American letters, these books are never going to be known as "literature." Almost all self-help books are dismissed by critics as drab, predictable, and often flat-out silly with their fortune cookie-like answers to life. But publishers love them. A best-seller can bring in a huge amount of money for a publishing house because it will sell year after year after year.
Is it pure coincidence that Dallas produces so many self-help authors? Or is Dallas the perfect environment for self-help authors to flourish? Longtime Dallas boosters love to tell the story of the city's founder, John Neely Bryan, who built his cabin in a spot where there was no great river, no lake, no forest, no fertile land, no minerals, no ocean—nothing. Yet by staying focused on his priorities and refusing to quit despite unexpected setbacks—these are all phrases, incidentally, that you will find in almost every self-help book—he and his successors built a city. Since then, one overachieving entrepreneur after another has come to Dallas to make a fortune, where there is little else to do except make a fortune. In interviews, speeches, and in their books, the most successful of these entrepreneurs talk about the joy of beating back their fears and taking chances and believing in their dreams. Social critic Wendy Kaminer, the author of I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, a 1992 study of the self-help movement in America, went so far as to call Dallas' Ross Perot the first self-help candidate in politics. "As a self-made billionaire, he embodied expertise," Kaminer wrote. "Perot was the positive-thinking personal-development guru as presidential candidate; no wonder he started a movement."
On the other hand, it could well be that Dallas produces so many self-help authors because of Jan Miller, who looks like the kind of woman who has spent her life studying all the diet, beauty, personality, and positive-thinking advice that her authors dispense in their books. Authors like Maria Shriver who called me to talk about her used words like "ebullient," "deeply loyal," and "willing to go the extra mile" to describe her. "She does what a good self-help book is supposed to do," said Stedman Graham, Oprah's boyfriend and the author of You Can Make It Happen. "She inspires you to bring out the best in yourself."
RAISED IN DENVER AND EDUCATED at the University of Colorado, where she majored in history, Miller moved to Dallas in the late seventies to work for the Zale Corporation, which owns the jewelry chain. She wasn't interested at all in the book business; she hadn't taken a single English class in college. But she had a natural eye for the self-help business. "Jan and I used to lie out every weekend at my condominium pool, lathered with Hawaiian Tropic number four," says Miller's close friend Iris Krasnow, who was then writing fashion stories for the Dallas Times Herald. "One day we were talking about how so many young Dallas women we saw were like doughnuts, beautiful to the eye but with a hole in the center. And Jan, just out of the blue, began telling me that I needed to write a book teaching women how to be strong and whole and spiritually and emotionally alive. She said it should be titled 'Women Come of Age.'"
In 1979 Miller heard that Arnold Schwarzenegger was touring the country to promote his new book on bodybuilding. Miller was aware of the growing fascination with fitness, and she also knew that Schwarzenegger had developed a huge audience that didn't visit bookstores. She persuaded his publisher, Simon and Schuster, to have him sign books at the chain of sporting goods stores that Zale then owned. At one Dallas store he sold three thousand books but only a couple hundred at one of Dallas' traditional bookstores. A Simon and Schuster executive told Miller that she ought to get into the book business. She had a feel, he said, for knowing what people wanted.
But it wasn't until 1984, when she was running her own small marketing-and-public-relations company, that she decided to make the move. She had been hired to publicize the Dallas appearance of a little-known 24-year-old motivational speaker from California named Tony Robbins who, as part of his weekend workshops, had his audiences walk across beds of hot coals to demonstrate the power of concentration. Miller sensed that Robbins was about to become a star. She called a friend at Simon and Schuster, who connected her to Bob Asahina, one of the company's more respected editors who was known for his work with intellectual writers like Allan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind. "I picked up the phone," Asahina recalls, "and this young woman started talking to me a mile a minute, saying she had just met the most amazing man and that he walked on fire and that he was going to become more and more famous and change lots of people's lives. I finally had to say, 'Please, please—will you take a breath and tell me who you are?'"
Miller and Robbins flew to New York to meet the Simon and Schuster staff. Instead of presenting the publisher with the usual written proposal detailing everything that would be in the book—"I'm not sure I knew at that point what a proposal was," Miller said—she simply had Robbins do his high-energy shtick about how people can reprogram their brains to achieve success. By the end of the meeting, she had persuaded Simon and Schuster to purchase Robbins' completely unwritten book for around $200,000. "Jan might not have known much about the book business at that time," says Asahina, "but I realized she was picking up on trends that we weren't necessarily seeing. And she had a knack for picking books that could be sold. She talked about huge marketing plans involving infomercials, audiotapes, sold-out speeches in convention centers—all stuff that was brand-new back then."
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