How Does Your Book Get National Attention?

Look what Shellie found in Cracker Barrel! 

Earlier this week, my friend and writing bud, best-selling author Shellie Rushing Tomlinson ("Belle of All Things Southern"), sent me this phone photo of her own coy eyes peeking over the top of a pretty pink and teal book in Louisiana.

Boy was I surprised!

It was my own Too Blessed to be Stressed Journal. Now this was fun in itself, to see someone of Shellie's celebrity holding my humble book (she's hugely well known in secular as well as Christian publishing for her hilarious southern-genre books like Sue Ellen's Girl Ain't Fat, She Just Weighs Heavy), but the thing was ...

The surprise wasn't just WHAT the book was, but WHERE it was.

Gift bundles, anyone? 

Yup. My very first book to hit Cracker Barrel. Woohoo! The big time! And Shellie's local Cracker Barrel was apparently one of the first to grace their shelves with my baby blessing. 

Later in the week my daughter-in-law sent me another photo of my book in the central Florida Cracker Barrel she just happened to stop in for lunch. Not only were copies of Too Blessed to be Stressed Journal in the window, they'd wrapped some in this nifty gift wrap packaged with some cool bookmarks and other Cracker Barrel-y stuff for your shopping convenience.

Then other messages and photos of my book in Cracker Barrels across the country began popping up from my faithful reader friends. (THANK YOU if you're one of them!)

A glorious event for any author. But how did it happen? How does a book make it into a highly trafficked, nationwide consumer outlet like Cracker Barrel? My writer friends are clamoring to know.

Well I must tell you in all honesty that it was none of my own doing. The sales force employed by my super duper publisher, Barbour Books, is responsible. When Barbour decided to print a hard cover version of Too Blessed to be Stressed, they wisely made it upscale and beautiful and turned it into a journal (meaning inside it's basically the same as the original  paperback Too Blessed but with additional lined pages to answer the reflection questions at the end of each chapter and for the reader to journal her thoughts.)

And journals are IN these days. As are gift books. And gifts, of course, are what Cracker Barrel is all about.

Barbour knew this, of course (because it's their business to know what's hot and where it's selling), and when their sales team pitched a list of possible purchases to the Cracker Barrel home office marketing people (as they routinely do to Walmart, Sams, Target, LifeWay, B & N ... you name the retailer), even though the Too Blessed to be Stressed Journal was a few dollars more than the original paperback, they bit.

Why? Because it fit their before-Christmas-gift book criteria and seemed to be a good fit for their store.

I only wish it was easier for self-published and small press books to be considered for distribution by these national chains, and perhaps it will be one day with the ever-changing face of the publication industry, but for now, it's one of the benefits of going to all the trouble of getting your manuscript professionally edited to a glaring shine and enduring the angst of trying to interest a literary agent to represent your work.

That's the path to hooking a traditional publisher and the traditional presses seem to be the ones in the queue.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't keep spit-shining your manuscript with detailed editing or consider self-publishing. The two should go hand-in-hand. That's the way the glass ceiling will shatter ... good quality books by good quality authors will be chosen by good quality retailers. Regardless of their birth.

And I truly hope it's your book that leads the way!