Thanks to You, a Lifelong Dream Came True

From the bottom of my heart, thank you! You helped make a really important dream of mine come true.

Ever since I started this entrepreneurial journey in 2008, I’ve always wanted to write a book, and it was my dream to one day walk into a bookstore with my kids and point it out to them. I even published a blog post back in 2012 that said the exact same thing.

After Will It Fly? was self-published and launched in early 2016, something I didn’t think was possible happened: it became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Could this self-published book also be the book that gets into bookstores? It had already surprised me once, and I was determined to see if it could do it again.

Because the SPI audience played a critical role in it becoming a bestseller, I decided to call upon the loyal fans once more to see if this was something we could make happen together. On April 25, 2016, I published a post about an experiment I wanted to run, which I dubbed “Project Will It Fly?,” or #ProjectWIF for short.

I wanted to test something. If we got a bunch of people to order the book through Barnes & Noble’s customer service kiosk within a short time period (a 72-hour window), would that trigger them to actually put the books on the shelves?

When that 72-hour period rolled around, you guys went above and beyond, which literally brought me to tears. Here are some tweets from that weekend:

And this is just the tip of the iceberg!

To those of you who participated in Project Will It Fly?, thank you for doing that for me. I did offer a reimbursement to everyone who had purchased a book in this manner, but hardly any of you took me up on that offer. Amazing. Just amazing. Thank you.

Unfortunately, I heard nothing from Barnes & Noble. Neither did I see the book on the bookshelves when I walked into various Barnes & Noble stores, which was very often, in every location that I could scope out, for the rest of 2016.

I pretty much gave up at the start of 2017 and decided to write my next book, which may be going the traditional route (we’ll see). But, lo and behold, on a date night one Thursday evening in February, I found it!

I couldn’t believe it. I was on cloud nine! The kids weren’t with me though (they were at Grandma’s), so I purchased that book for my own keepsake, and decided to call other Barnes & Noble stores in the area. There was one more in the San Diego area about forty-five minutes away, so my wife and I decided we were going to make a trip there the next day with the kids.

Here’s a video showing you the rest of the story:

I love you, guys. Seriously.

You are amazingly loyal to SPI, and I’m forever thankful for that. You can be sure that I will continue to be here for you, experimenting and trying new things along with you, and together we’ll reach new heights never seen before.

Here’s to the next impossible dream we’ll conquer!