How to Write a Business Best-Seller

Harvey Mackay, author of Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, tells about the marketing of his book.

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Forget book as art. Forget even book as message. This is book as product. From the annals of shameless, brazen self-promotion: the selling of Harvey Mackay

Harvey Mackay, the self-described "obscure envelope maker from the flyover state of Minnesota," became a publishing miracle when he authored an all-time business best-seller. Why did it happen? Not, by all accounts, because his book was that good. His real weapon was a product marketing savvy the likes of which publishers had never seen. -- J.H.

The way F. Kevin Kurtz tells it, you'd have to believe he was innocent. Just a businessman, he says, trying to pick up a few useful tips on a flight from Denver to Phoenix. So he pulls out a paperback business book. "I like to read this type of thing occasionally," he admits.

And what does he know of this book, the one he has just started? Curiously little. It has a provocative title: Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive. He's not sure, but he may have read about the author, Harvey Mackay, or seen him on a talk show. Back when he was leafing through it at the bookstore, he couldn't help but notice that lots of big shots had endorsed the book, from New York governor Mario Cuomo to Gloria Steinem. So he coughed up $4.95, stuffed it in his briefcase, and forgot about it for more than two weeks, until March 3, 1989.

On that day, Kurtz found himself on a plane with time to kill. He was just a few pages into the book when he heard footsteps coming up the aisle behind him. The way he tells it, it all happened very fast. There was a tap on his shoulder. He swung around to find an impressively tanned man in a dark three-piece suit. "What do you think of the book?" the stranger boomed. Kurtz felt flustered. "I'm just getting into it," he managed, "but so far, so good." He smiled. "Well," the man said, "I'm Harvey Mackay. I wrote that book." To verify, Kurtz dutifully compared this beaming face with the one on the book cover.

Before he knew it, Kurtz found himself on one of the few flights ever to offer live entertainment. Mackay launched into a 20-minute speech, including an impromptu press conference, in which he generously took questions. He talked -- so loudly that everyone within at least a four-row radius could hear -- about the cities he had visited promoting the book, about the great people he was meeting. At one point, he scurried back to his seat, returning with a silver shark-shaped lapel pin for Kurtz. Explaining the commotion, a flight attendant announced who Mackay was and the name of his book over the loudspeaker. "He saw a marketing opportunity," says Kurtz, a Denver real-estate developer. "He truly seized the moment."

And a rare moment it was. For the carefully scripted marketing of Swim with the Sharks left few moments unaccounted for, and little room for unrehearsed coincidence. A first-time author and chairman of his own small business, Mackay wasn't willing to settle for the rotten odds most authors face. Unlike, say, J. D. Salinger, this was not a writer about to let his work speak for itself.

The result? Nothing short of a small publishing miracle. Already, Sharks has sold some 2.3 million copies -- enough books, apparently, to rank among the top-grossing business titles of all time. Enough books to transform Harvey Mackay, anonymous Minnesota envelope maker, into a best-selling, multimedia star.

And that's not even the remarkable part. More astonishing than the magnitude of Mackay's literary success is that it has almost nothing to do with what he wrote. His secret -- so obvious, so effective -- was to approach the creation and launch of his manuscript the way he would approach the creation and launch of any other piece of goods. Forget book as art. Forget even book as intelligence. This was book as product. What mattered most about Sharks was not its negligible content; what mattered was that it could be sold.

Mackay's strategy for self-propelled best-sellerdom? Meticulously study the industry and then go to absurd extremes and untold expense to boost your chance for sales. Simply put, Mackay used the same kind of shrewd and shameless intensity that served him so well in the competitive envelope business. It was in his early days there that he trained himself to bawl in the front offices of customers who stretched out payments; once, before that, he took 300 accounts with him when he quit a job.

Entering the publishing industry, he refused to check his aggressiveness at the big mahogany door. Practices that would have been acceptable, inspirational even, in almost any competitive industry left many a publishing type -- they of the suede elbow patches -- as bent out of shape as a soggy paperback. Like Kurtz, they responded with a mixture of horror and admiration. "Publishers don't like to be told their business," admits Harriet Rubin, an executive editor at Doubleday. "But Harvey has taught us."

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