Aiming High

It was our intention to make a movie, not write a book. In the end, we did both. In January 2006, our father died in jail. He'd been homeless for the last 15 years, battling alcoholism. On the day he died, we vowed to make our autobiographical movie, Touching Home, as a tribute to him—in one year.

And we did—with no experience, no degrees, no contacts, no money and 17 credit cards. When we were finished, we had four-time Oscar nominee Ed Harris playing our father and a cast and crew with 11 Academy Awards and 26 nominations.

Friends and family encouraged us to write a book about this miracle. Once again, we set out to do something we'd never done before: write a memoir. With no experience—and still no money—we wrote Either You're In or You're in the Way, which was our mantra during the making of Touching Home. When we finished the book, another miracle occurred: we got an agent. Then another miracle: HarperCollins bought our book. And now we need yet another miracle: our book on the bestseller list.

We called our editor and asked him, what's the best way for a couple of no-name first-time authors to get on the bestseller list. He said, “Pre-orders.”

“How the hell do we do that?”

“Get people to buy the book before it comes out.”

“Right.”

So we approached Book Passage, our local independent bookstore in the Bay Area, with a fund-raising idea. We asked them if they would remit a percentage of pre-order sales to local schools. They said yes. Then we had teachers read the book to make sure it was suitable for their students. The teachers said yes, and their students started selling the book to raise money for their schools.

Then we rallied our friends and family to help us with pre-orders. We assembled teams of five and called these teams the “Fab-Fivers.” They've been e-mailing and calling everyone they know for weeks, begging them to buy our book. We printed 15,000 postcards with our book cover and Web site on it and papered the town with them. Not quite littering, but close to it.

But we needed to do more.

We called our publicist at HarperCollins and asked her how we could get our book on the list. She gave us another one-word answer: “Buzz.” We hung up the phone and asked ourselves: how do we create buzz? Get arrested. Been there, done that. Hell, our dad died in jail. What else? Drugs. Alcohol. Been there, done that, too. What else? Do something really stupid or say something inappropriate about the developmentally challenged. Or do something really big, something that involves lots of people.

About a month before we sold our book, the San Francisco Giants had invited us to play our movie at their stadium, AT&T Park, which has the largest HD screen west of the Mississippi. Now that we had a book coming out, we started thinking about how to use our movie and the stadium to get people to buy our book. Here's what we came up with: show Touching Home at AT&T Park and make our book the ticket to the event. Draw viewers in with the stadium and the movie, and hook them with the book. We decided to call the event Bookstock. One book admits two adults; kids 12 and under are free. Bookstock, which will take place June 6, will have live music, art, two no-name first-time authors signing a book nobody has ever heard of, capped off with a screening of a movie nobody has ever heard of called Touching Home.

Here's what we've learned along the way: just like first-time filmmakers, first-time authors are fighting a battle for awareness. Nobody knows who you are. You can have the greatest book in the world, but if people don't know about it, nobody will read it. We don't want to rely on the publisher to do all the heavy lifting. They only have so much muscle—and they're lifting tons of books.

Will all these efforts get us on the bestseller list? Who the hell knows. We just hope we have a few more miracles up our sleeves.