It would be hard to be much more excited than we are right now.

It’s finally here: Launch Day.

The official release date for Go-Givers Sell More is tomorrow, Thursday the 18th. We’re already hearing about sightings in airport bookshops. The book has plunged to #346 on Amazon (lower numbers are better, #1 is best of all), and dropping.

It’s happening.

Our aim is to make the biggest splash we can.

We don’t just want to release a book — we want to have an impact on the way people do business worldwide. For us, that means hitting the New York Times bestseller list this week. And you can help. How?

By buying your copy this week.

(Ideally, today or tomorrow.)

I promised you a link that would gives you a handful of special bonuses for ordering now. (One of those bonuses, an ebook on “Living, Leading and Leaving a Legacy,” I’m just putting the finishing touches on now — it is not and will not be available anywhere else.) Here is that link:

Many thanks — from me, from Bob, from Ana (and yes, from Benny too)!

One more favor?

Please share this link with your friends — and with anyone you think might be interesting in our new book!

The day is approaching; we’re strapping on our boots, checking our ropes and caribiners, refilling our oxygen tanks.

This week we are scaling the mountain of a book launch, and aiming for the peak. Bob Burg and I (we’re not sure which one of us is Hillary and which is Tenzin Norgay — or maybe we’re both just yaks) are launching Go-Givers Sell More a week from today, next Thursday, February 18 — and looking forward to planting our flag on that craggy, thin-aired summit known as the New York Times bestseller list.

As part of that effort, we’re offering everyone who purchases their copy on February 18 (from a special launch link we’ll provide) a package of goodies, including a number of special reports by Bob and an ebook by me on Leadership that I’ve put together just for this event (i.e., not available anywhere else).

Later in the week, I’ll post that link and tell you how it works.

Meanwhile, a question: Do you have circle of friends, sphere of influence, newsletter list, Facebook Friendlist, personal Twitterverse, where you might help us get out the word?

If you do, write me at jdm@johndavidmann.com, and I’ll email you the materials we’re giving our promotional partners who are helping us get up that mountain!

Think of it this way: Would you like to be part of our base camp?

P.S. If you haven’t yet seen this, you can download a sample Intro and Chapter 1 from the book here.

Ready for some siteseeing? Good — tis the season of premiering web sites. (Cue drum roll …)

A few weeks ago my Go-Giver coauthor Bob Burg and I rolled out our new Go-Giver Award site. In just another week or so, we’ll be unveiling our new web site for Go-Givers Sell More (which hits bookstores and booksites on February 18).

And slipped in between here, we just launched another new site: The Go-Giver Scrapbook.

(… Cue sounds of champagne corks popping …)

The idea behind this new site is to provide a place to highlight stories about how people have used the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success to make made a difference in their relationships, family, business, organization, and life in general.

People, for example, like you.

I hope you’ll take a few moments to check out the site — and, if you have a story to tell, consider telling it.

Why? Because it’s fun — and also because your story will inspire hundreds, perhaps thousands of others to gain new and creative ideas for how they can make a fulfilling and productive shift in their lives, too.

To submit your story, just click on the Your Story button at the top of the site.

Hope you enjoy the siteseeing!

Still a few weeks away from the Big Launch, I thought it might be fun to slip in a sneak peek of what’s actually in the new book.

Go-Givers Sell More is not a parable or actual sequel to the first book. (We are writing a true sequel, but that’s still a year off.) Instead, it is more like a Go-Giver Companion: a collection of short essay-like chapters about applying the Go-Giver principles to real-world situations (especially in the context of sales and selling), punctuated by several dozen real-life stories of people we know who live these principles.

It is divided into (this come as no surprise!) five sections. Here are the chapter titles:

Part I. The Law of Value
1. Create Value
2. MacGuffin
3. Giving
4. Money
5. The Paradox
6. Your Economy

Part II. The Law of Compensation
7. Touch Lives
8. People
9. Rapport
10. Skills
11. Curiosity
12. Maturity

Part III. The Law of Influence
13. Build Networks
14. Fuzzy Influence
15. The Perfect “Pitch”
16. Great Questions
17. Follow-Through
18. Your Serve
19. Posture
20. The Competition

Part IV. The Law of Authenticity
21. Be Real
22. Present
23. Undersell
24. Listen
25. Objections
26. The “Close”
27. Silence

Part V. The Law of Receptivity
28. Stay Open
29. Left Field
30. Crisis
31. Trust

You’re probably wondering either a) what a “MacGuffin” is, or b) what it has to do with sales (hint: it started with Hitchcock, and it’s about your product). Or c), what “fuzzy influence” is supposed to mean, or d) why there is a whole chapter on “silence,” and another on “left field,” and one on “crisis” … or e) all of the above.

Stay tuned — we will answer these questions (and many more) soon: the Big Launch is just 24 days away!

When I was a kid, there was a boy I knew in the class two grades above me (he was two years older). I knew him because we were both faculty kids: his dad was the music teacher, and my mom taught fifth grade, as well as some music and theater. Actually, she had been one of his first music teachers, when he was just five, and I was three.

Today, he’s famous. He is, in fact, one of the finest cellists in the world.

When I was a teenager, I studied cello with him for a few years. Since Mstislav Rostropvich left the earth a few years ago, there is no cellist living I would rather hear. I listen to his playing every day while I write. His name is David Finckel.

Happily, David has made quite a few recordings, both as part of the multiple-Grammy-winning Emerson Quartet, and also as a duo with his wife Wu Han, the phenomenal pianist.

He is also a wonderful teacher, and has a series of online lessons, a delight to watch even if you don’t play the cello. (He calls these little videos “Cello Talks,” and he uploads them from all over the world—it’s worth watching them just to see the locations!)

David recently wrote an open letter to students of their chamber music program, most of it devoted to technical issues — but I was especially taken with a passage near the end, “The Visual Element: Messaging,” and thought I ought to share this excerpt with you.

As you read it, consider this: you may not be a performing chamber musician, but does what he’s saying apply to anything you do in your life? I’ll bet your answer is yes.

“From the moment we walk on stage, the audience is watching our every move and following our lead. They will simply feel the way we look. If we look bored, they will feel bored. If we look terrified, they will be anxious too. If we look happy, they will be happy. This part is simple, but many, many performers do not realize it. Just see for yourself at the next concert you attend….

“Musicians are not actors, nor are we trained to be, yet, what we do is remarkably like what actors do. We are given a script which we must prepare and interpret, and we must truly live in each moment of the musical narrative. If an actor loses focus, or breaks character, we know it right away. We cannot allow ourselves that mistake, and while it is what we do with our sound that is central to our art, we should not allow our work to be compromised by distracting or misleading visual habits on stage.

“In comparison to opera and symphonic performances, there is not much to watch in chamber music. Very little else besides the natural interaction of the group, and the individual absorption of its members, is necessary or even appropriate for a performance of artistic integrity. But because the recipe is simple, one or two bad ingredients can easily ruin the dish.

“Often, players may feel the music deeply but somehow it doesn’t come across that way….

“Sometimes, as human beings, we fall short in the areas of sensitivity and communication — especially interpersonal communication in these days of text-messaging. We can always improve the way we say “thank you,” “I love you,” or simply, “this means a lot to me.” Often that means simply trying harder, doing it more sincerely or vehemently or exaggeratedly than we think is needed.

“The composers — many of them hundreds of years before our time — were trying to communicate exactly those kinds of personal thoughts through their music. It’s our responsibility to carry those messages, to interpret them with unmistakable accuracy and deliver them powerfully.”

“We can always improve the way we say Thank you, I love you or simply This means a lot to me” — well spoken, David!

And thanks for all the years, past and future, of silk-spun acoustic heaven.

Amazon has added a rather cool feature to their book listing format: an actual author’s web site, right there on the Amazon site. Here’s mine:

They are also (contrary to rumor) exceedingly responsive, at least in my experience: I found a few errors and omissions on my site, and let them know through the Author Feedback function — and they fixed them all lightning fast.

This is a company that is not resting on their laurels!

For two years now, we’ve been getting email and tweets and blogs (and all sorts of other odd-sounding words referring to new ways people communicate) telling us about people they knew who were genuine go-givers.

We’ve heard about parents and friends and bosses and coworkers and teachers and coaches and friends and lovers and lawyers and bankers and fitness trainers and insurance agents and siblings and customers and vendors and grandparents and inspiring people of all shapes, sizes, stripes and stations in life.

People love to tell other people about still other people who have meant something wonderful to them.

Last month, we created a kind of cool way to do that: an actual Go-Giver Award, which you can download, customize and present to those special someones in your life:

There is a link to the Award from the home page of the Go-Giver site — and you can also find it here:

www.theGoGiverAward.com

The moment the site was up, I went to the link, filled in my wife’s name, printed it out and gave it to her.

Who do you know in your life who deserves their very own Go-Giver Award?

P.S. Thanks to Thom Scott, Cesar Abueg and Kathy Zader for their ingenuity and creative effort on this one!

I just spent an hour as a guest on a conference call for Spencer Reynolds’s wonderful reading group, Book Readers Club.

Spencer has been leading this group, dubbed “Where Dedicated Learners Come Together Every Week,” for some five years now. Participants hail from all around the nation and meet on a live conference call once a week (though many catch the discussion later via podcast) to read and discuss their given book of choice.

This week was the final week of their reading of The Go-Giver, and they had invited me to join them. I did.

After reading a selection (we took turns; two members read Chapters 12 and 13; I got to read Chapter 14 and thus close the book!), we discussed the book for a good half hour. They asked all sorts of intriguing and excellent questions. The one that I did not have a good answer for was the very last:

“What is your favorite book?”

Geez. You’d think I’d know.

At first I gave a lame answer (“That’s like being asked to pick your favorite child, and I have four kids”), but then mentioned two that I love: A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving, and John Steinbeck’s great sweeping classic East of Eden. Then I followed that with another lame answer: “It keeps changing; I guess my answer would be different depending on what day you asked.”

After hanging up, I thought, Hey, that’s not true.

The books that have had the most impact on me are timeless, and they don’t change from day to day. I still remember the very first book I read on my own: Little Bear, by Maurice Sendak. The impact of that one will never go away. (I think I have modeled my life, more or less, after Little Bear’s.) The Narnia series and The Odyssey (as well as the Bible) I encountered as a child, and their impact has been huge and lasting. (No single book has had a more earth-shattering, life-changing impact on me than The Last Battle, the last of the Narnia books, which I read when I was ten.)

What is true is that the list keeps growing. I read East of Eden only recently (five or six years ago), and all of Neil Gaiman’s writings more recently still.

So, after some minutes of reflection, here is the Director’s Cut of my answer to that question: not one but ten favorites, the books that have had the most impact on me thus far, as a writer and as a person. These are listed chronologically, according to when I read them, longest-ago first.

It’s kind of a weird mix, but there you go.

The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis
The Bible
The Odyssey, Homer
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, R. Buckminster Fuller
As a Man Thinketh, James Allen
Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Coraline, Neil Gaiman
Stardust, Neil Gaiman

What are your favorites?

You knew it was coming sooner or later; I’ve been dropping hints here and there. But with the New Year upon us, we (Bob Burg and I) thought the only gentlemanly thing to do was provide something more substantial than hints — so here it is:

(Note to the romantically inclined: that’s four days after Valentine’s Day.)

Here is a link to our secretive, highly classified sneak preview site, which is so secretive at this point that it doesn’t even reveal the book’s title. We could tell you, but then we’d have to … well, you know.

What it does give you is a link for preordering your own copy on Amazon. (At which point you will of course see the title. Okay, perhaps “secretive” is not what we do best.) You’ll also see a few of the nice things people like Spencer Johnson, David Bach and Marshall Goldsmith are saying about the book.)

The new book is not a parable or story — that is, not exactly a sequel to The Go-Giver. (A “real” sequel to the story is also in the works, but that’s going to be a surprise for 2011.)

Instead, this book is more like a Go-Giver Companion. Just a bit longer than the first book, it is a set of short, essay-like chapters about applying the Go-Giver principles to real-world situations, especially in the context of sales and selling. The book is also punctuated by several dozen real-life stories of people we know who live these principles.

In other words, by several dozen of you.

So, ready for the surprise?

For New Years Eve, we decided to put up a link where you can download the complete Introduction and Chapter 1.

So, break out the champagne, noisemakers and funny hats, pull up a chair, and have a little read (while you stay indoors avoiding the loopy traffic on the streets out there). Hope you enjoy it!

Have a fabulous — dare I say, stratospheric — New Year! May 2010 be your best year yet.

Some of you will remember a post I wrote last summer, when Ana was traveling the globe and I sat at home on our deck in central Massachusetts, eating good meals and watching the garden with Ana’s mom, Sylvia.

The post was about a story Sylvia told me one evening, about one of her early experiences as a nurse.

I say “Some of you will remember” because that one post got more comments from you than any single post I’d written since I posted our wedding pictures the previous summer!

In fact, here is Sylvia on that particularly auspicious day:

So, I wanted to give you all an update on Sylvia and how she’s doing this holiday season.

A few weeks before Christmas, she fell ill and went into the hospital. Surgery followed, which went swimmingly, and so did convalescence—for a few days. Then complications ensued, requiring a second surgery a short week after the first.

This second operation was tough, and the docs were glum about her prospects. We got quite a circle of friends sending her prayers, fond thoughts and good vibes. Amazingly, she blew away everyone’s projections and came through operation #2 with flying colors, albeit recovery has been excruciatingly slow. As I write, she is in the ICU, recovering her health and strength by inches, every increment a cause for celebration for her assembled family (that’s Ana, Kaia and me here at her home in Florida).

For a few days following the second operation, she had a breathing tube in her throat and couldn’t talk. One day, she seemed to be urgently trying to say something. It was impossible to make out what it was. Ana asked if she wanted a pad and pen to write with. She did. Ana fetched a pad, gave it to her, and she scrawled a short sentence. It wasn’t easy to make out, but when Ana deciphered the words, here is was it said:

Tell everyone, Thank you.

Keep those prayers, fond thoughts and good vibes coming. And, from Sylvia, Thank you.