They're baaaack.
That's right, three contributors to The Secret phenomenon have wasted no time penning books of their own.
They're building on the success of the Oprah-endorsed DVD and book, which some estimate have now reached a billion people worldwide.
Some people might say they are milking it -- a term which makes the books' Canadian publisher Sanjay Burman, director of the Canadian College of Hypnotherapy and owner of independent Toronto-based Burman Books, laugh.
CREATING A FAD
One might expect him to bristle, but not only is he a guy who believes in the main premise of The Secret -- the law of attraction -- he's a practical businessman, and one with a good sense of humour.
"Absolutely, it is," he says. "I think to jump on board a fad is sort of lame, but to create a fad is a totally different thing. I think we're creating a fad in that we're taking these speakers, we're taking them into their own kind of path they've been wanting to go on and built their careers around."
The three books -- philosopher Dr. John Demartini's The Gratitude Effect, Feng Shui consultant Marie Diamond's The Very Simple Law of Attraction and Bob Proctor's It's Not About the Money -- will be released tomorrow in a public event at Toronto's Manulife Centre Indigo store.
With their release, Burman is capitalizing on much of the predictable backlash to The Secret -- mostly based on the pure, some say ridiculous simplicity of its premise. At the same time, he gets why people made fun of it.
"The initial reaction was what everybody else said, you know, you can't dream of a Ferrari and then tomorrow it ends up in the driveway," he says.
Don't get him wrong, says Burman. Dreaming big works, but you have to follow through, and that's where The Secret left off.
After all, he spent six months chasing down Demartini, Diamond and Proctor, calling, e-mailing and faxing until they agreed to go with an unknown publishing outfit with just three years in the business for their inevitable follow-ups.
All three, he says, have a similar view that things aren't quite as easy as what The Secret suggested.
THE NEXT STEP
"It was edited to be that way, but that's not exactly what they meant," he said. "Now they have come out with their own books to talk about what to do when you face adversity and why things may not be happening the way you want, when you want."
The follow-up method Demartini is offering -- thoughts on gratitude -- seems to have worked for him. He was already giving 362 speeches a year before The Secret boosted him up to 425.
Demartini's been keeping a gratitude journal for 35 years -- jotting down everything, including the chance to do an interview with a print journalist, in a list that's now tens of thousands of items long. Secret or no Secret, he would have written another book.
"I think there's a wave that people are riding, I think there's some truth in that," says Demartini. "But I've been writing books, at least once a year, since I was 23 ... I'm calling it the gratitude effect because every book I've done has been on gratitude."
Burman, having scored his authors, is back to dreaming big. He's now hoping all three will land on North American best sellers' lists in the same week.
And yes, he says, Oprah is the one he's chasing next.
