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The Secret of "The Secret"
Unlocking the Mysteries of the Runaway Bestseller
By Karen Kelly St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2007 Karen Kelly
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3255-4
CHAPTER 1
From Down Under to On Top: How the Secret Spread
It's too soon to tell whether or not The Secret book will make the list of bestselling titles of all time, which is a very high bar to reach considering that those at the bottom of the list have sold nearly 30 million copies. Books at the top of the list include everything from the Bible (50 to 60 billion) and Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (900 million — but he had a built-in audience) to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (107 million) and Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull (40 million). (The numbers are from Wikipedia.com and Amazon.com.) Yet The Secret is heading in the right direction, with nearly 4 million copies in print. People who do not work in the publishing industry sometimes misunderstand what big print numbers actually mean — and what an accomplishment it is to achieve sales of even 100,000, let alone a million. Most books are lucky to make sales in the five-figure range.
"Writers are up against the 200,000 books that are published each year. One year the publishers will say, 'Too many books,' so they cut back to 195,000 a year," explains Constance Sayre, a principal in the publishing consultancy Market Partners International. Added to that, she says, new authors are also facing the fact that independent booksellers "are dying like flies and the chain booksellers' sales are dropping." The book itself is up against various forms of electronic media, which is why Sayre and others in the business say that the The Secret DVD made such a huge difference; otherwise, it is hard to get anyone to pay attention. Indeed, there would have been no book without the movie — it is a direct result of the DVD's popularity and of its actual content (most of the book is a transcription of what the experts said).
Both DVD and book aroused a lot of debate and complaint (which is not to say that the Bible and Harry Potter haven't — of course they have). Yet the story surrounding Byrne's book, its marketing, and the inevitable criticism and discussion that generally follow are what cultural studies professors call part of its "production" — the more people talk about something, the longer it exists. The story of how it came into being, which by now has become a mini-legend, offers lessons in publishing, Internet marketing, convergence culture, optimism, cynicism, collective unconscious, and wishful thinking.
Inspiration and Origins
The law of attraction is not new, and it's been called many different things over the years: positive thinking, psychology, flow, faith, the power of intention, or the law of abundance. It even has an opposite: Murphy's law. So was Rhonda Byrne simply rehashing an age-old idea, one that had appeared several times before in books and even movies? When New York Times reporter Allen Salkin asked Byrne about the Secret business, because it seemed like hocus-pocus, she said, "No, no, no, if you look at The Master Key System, it was very expensive knowledge to buy and was subscription only." Byrne was referring to Charles Haanel's twenty-four-week success program, which was originally published in 1912 and cost around $1,500 — a royal sum at the time. It is widely available in inexpensive book form today, and I even found a free Internet version. Apparently, Byrne believed that although the law of attraction wasn't new, compiling the ideas in an easy-to-digest and readily available format was ground-breaking.
According to the official Web site of The Secret,www.thesecret.tv, Byrne's version, which was first articulated as a DVD, came about "on a spring day toward the end of 2004." This may seem contradictory to those of us in the Western Hemisphere, where winter ends the year, but Byrne's home base is in Australia, which is in the Eastern Hemisphere, where the seasons are reversed. On this particular day, the fifty- something mother of two was in the midst of a personal and financial crisis, which she recounted on an episode of Oprah. According to Byrne, her daughter, Hayley, gave her a copy of self-help writer Wallace D. Wattles's The Science of Getting Rich, originally published in 1910 and still in print today.
Wattles's book explains the secret laws of the universe — and most primarily, the law of attraction — in this way: "A thought, in this substance, produces the thing that is imagined by the thought." Wattles repeats this idea in various ways throughout his book: "There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in turn, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe. A thought, in this substance, produces the thing that is imagined by the thought." But it's not so simple: "To think according to appearance is easy," he writes; "to think truth regardless of appearances is laborious, and requires expenditure of more power than any other workman is called upon to perform."
More about Wattles later, but for now, it's notable that these quotes unmistakably mirror what The Secret says, and the similarities suggest Byrne did indeed read Wattles and drew upon his ideas. However, most books about the law of attraction say generally pretty much the same thing, so there is some debate about whether it was Wattles's book alone that inspired Byrne to create her documentary. And that's where this part of the story becomes interesting.
Reporter Allen Salkin, who wrote about The Secret for the Times, said that Byrne was "100 percent familiar" not only with other law of attraction books but also with another thematically related film, What the Bleep Do We Know!?, a documentary about the science of the mind and the power of consciousness made in 2004 by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente. Salkin describes The Secret as "a watered down, Kmart version of What the Bleep; you may think you are watching something similar, but What the Bleep is much more about science," than spirituality, he says.
"The Bleep came out in Australia well before they started to make The Secret," says Bleep filmmaker Betsy Chasse, who interviewed one of the producers of The Secret DVD and asked him whether or not What the Bleep influenced him. "He said it did and it didn't, so obviously it had to have had an effect on the filmmakers. And there's a crossover of people they interviewed," she explained, including physicists Fred Alan Wolf and John Hagelin.
According to the official version of the DVD's inception, published on The Secret's Web site, Byrne dug a little further into the law of attraction and discovered there were people "alive today" who were aware of the information and were in fact writing books and producing tapes and DVDs about it, holding workshops, and traveling around the United States giving speeches about it — rather than hoarding it all for themselves.
Byrne saw a hole in the market, and said she wanted to pull all the bits and pieces of information together in one easily accessible place, first in a documentary — a medium she understood quite well. Part of the secret of the DVD's success is that Byrne is a savvy television producer who knows what she's doing. The Secret Web site includes information on her Australian film company, Prime Time Productions, and lists an impressive roster of highly rated reality and documentary-style programs, including The World's Greatest Commercials and related specials: "Adults Only," "Cannes," "Funniest Commercials Ever Made," and "SEX SELLS." Another program, Australia Behaving Badly, "explores the differences between what Australians say they would do when their conscience is on the line, and what they actually do when faced with temptation." OZ Encounters, a one-hour special made for Australian TV, features unexplained phenomena experienced by "everyday" Aussies that range from UFO sightings by entire towns to one-on-one alien abductions.
Since many law of attraction practitioners are in the United States, Byrne headed into the Western Hemisphere to start shooting footage with a range of self-help gurus, a physicist, and some metaphysicists. "The Secret is the first time anyone has ever put 24 teachers with their own following together in one movie," says bestselling Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus author John Gray, who appeared in the DVD. An experienced television producer, Byrne knows what she's doing in terms of appealing to broad public taste. "They are saying the same things in a very uplifting way, and that, along with good graphics, made an impact on people. We are a visual society and watch TV more than we read books; nothing holds our attention for very long, so she put the ideas across with that in mind," says Gray.
Among those experts Byrne enlisted to participate in the DVD were longtime law of attraction teachers Jerry and Esther Hicks. The Hickses are two of the most widely recognized and popular law of attraction speakers today — the equivalent of rock stars in the metaphysical movement — so naturally Byrne sought them out. The couple has been on the road talking and writing about the law of attraction since the late 1980s. They say their messages come from divine guidance via a spirit named Abraham who speaks through Esther (they do not use the term "channel"). Their books The Law of Attraction, published by Hay House in September 2006, and an earlier volume, Ask and It Is Given, also published by Hay House in October 2005, were both channeled by Abraham.
The Hickses are prolific; over the last twenty years they have produced more than six hundred Abraham-inspired books, workbooks, cards, calendars, cassette tapes, CDs, and DVDs. Byrne sought out the Hickses to participate in the first version of the DVD. In a letter the Hickses sent to friends and colleagues in late 2006 (widely available online by Googling "Jerry and Esther Hicks' letter to friends"), the couple related their dismay with how their participation in the DVD was handled. They consented to participate and signed an agreement with Prime Time Productions, Byrne's company, that would give them a small percentage of the net profits and 10 percent of direct-video sales. Esther's "Abraham voice" ended up being used as narration in the first version of the DVD, but neither Esther nor Jerry appeared on screen.
Raveled Threads
The first version of the DVD was released in March 2006. Something happened between the Hickses and Byrne, and Esther demanded to be cut from the DVD, according to Allen Salkin's Times story chronicling the rift, published on February 25, 2007. Esther was upset by the way she was used in the DVD and surprised that she was completely offscreen. Byrne recut the video, adding Esther Hicks's onscreen interviews back in.
But according to their letter, the revised DVD was distributed differently than originally promised (on television and via video sales): Byrne had asked them to revise the contract they had signed to allow for different streams of distribution. Byrne had indeed originally planned to go the traditional television broadcast route, but several sources told me that the programming of the 2006 Winter Olympics got in the way, and she decided instead to make the DVD available online for $4.95 per download view. This turned out to be brilliant marketing.
The parties could not come to an agreement, and Byrne recut the DVD a second time, completely removing Esther's voice and image along with any acknowledgment of her intellectual contribution. To make up for the loss of Esther Hicks, Byrne enlisted Lisa Nichols, an author featured in Chicken Soup for the African American Soul (part of the series of books made famous by Jack Canfield, who is also featured in The Secret) and Marci Shimoff, a contributor to Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul. (Byrne does thank the Hickses and the teachings of Abraham in the acknowledgment section of the book.)
None of the other participants were paid for their contribution, although they have certainly reaped benefits from being in the DVD, as I describe later on. According to the Times, the couple said they earned about $500,000 from sales of the original "Hicks version" of the DVD, but receive nothing directly from sales now that the DVD has been recut.
In their letter, the Hickses maintain that they feel very joyful when they watch the movie, and believe it represents Abraham's law of attraction in a very simple way that allows many people to access it. The Secret does offer up the law of attraction's most basic fundamentals, and its optimistic explanation is one aspect of the book that has received criticism by those who have long been familiar with its principles.
Kristine Pidkameny, editor in chief of the One Spirit Book Club and an expert on metaphysical literature, draws a distinction between The Secret and the Hickses' work. "The difference is that the Hickses put out pure content — you can listen and watch one of their [video] talks many times and get different things out of it with each new viewing," she says. "Ask and It Is Given, Amazing Power of Deliberate Intention, and The Law of Attraction are straightforward but multilayered with information. The Secret is slicker. During my first viewing, I had to stay open and just say to myself, 'Let me not say this reminds me of other things, and evaluate it clearly.'"
More than one source has told me that the Hickses are not actually as magnanimous as their letter implies. If it is true that they are angrier than they are letting on, and it certainly seems credible, it's hard to blame them; their dignity in being so self-restrained is admirable. Allen Salkin says they are sensitive because they may have felt used by another author, Lynn Grabhorn, who they thought borrowed too liberally from their work without giving them enough credit. Grabhorn was a former advertising professional in New York. She also founded an audiovisual educational company in Los Angeles before moving to Washington state, where she ran a mortgage brokerage. At any rate, she had attended a Hickses seminar sometime in the 1990s and was so impressed with what she heard, according to Allen Salkin, that she approached the couple afterward with an idea. She asked them, "Do you mind if I take this material and turn it into a book?"
It's unclear how the Hickses responded to the question, but Grabhorn felt confident enough to follow through with her idea, and the result is Excuse Me Your Life Is Waiting: The Astonishing Power of Feelings, which she originally self-published in the late 1990s and then eventually sold to a small publisher, Hampton Roads, who issued its edition in 1999. Ancillary products and workshops followed, most notably her Life Course 101. "She plagiarized the Hickses, and this is why they were upset with Rhonda. They feel everyone is taking from them," says Salkin.
Grabhorn died in May 5, 2004, so while her Life Course 101 is no longer being offered (according to her Web site) for obvious reasons, her online presence is still active, and Grabhorn's books and products can still be purchased. Since the law of attraction isn't new, the concept is free for anyone to use and interpret. Still, Grabhorn does give a nod to the Hickses in the introduction to the book. In the beginning of the two-page section she describes her spiritual quest to get more out of life. She describes encounters with "learned professors of physics," and of studying "esoteric sciences."
What she writes next is important in understanding why the Hickses, or anyone in their place, would take offense:
Naturally, with my vast knowledge on the subject, when I came across some provincial teachings from this unlettered, unscientific family of teachers, my first impulse was to pooh-pooh the information because of their enormous oversimplification of what I considered to be a rather formidable topic. So it was more than a tad begrudgingly that I agreed to investigate this taped malarkey that a well-meaning friend had ungraciously shoved in my face.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Secret of "The Secret" by Karen Kelly. Copyright © 2007 Karen Kelly. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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