How a Car Salesman Became a Bestselling Author

When I was an assistant, I was given a handful of reissues to work on. 

You probably have read or bought a reissue without even realizing it. 

Reissues are often slightly updated versions of books that have consistently sold year after year, decade after decade. The publisher might change an outdated cover design, for instance, or update language. Like changing “answering machines” to “voicemails.”

Recently I was doing some research for a client about sales books and remembered a reissue I had worked on way back in the day. Joe Girard’s How To Sell Anything to Anybody was originally published in 1977, and I worked with him when I was just starting out as an assistant in 2006.

For fun, I looked up Joe’s sales numbers. That book is still selling 300 copies a week.

And because Joe was elderly when we worked together, I wasn’t even sure Joe was alive. (He passed in 2019, at the age of 90.) 

You might expect me to say that Joe sold thousands of books because he was the ultimate salesman. He did literally land in the Guinness World Records for selling 1,425 cars in 1973! 

But his success wasn’t entirely due to that. Instead, it’s because he wrote a book that remained relevant. People needed to learn sales techniques in the 1970s. And the 1980s. And the 1990s. And the 2000s. And the 2010s. And still now, in 2023.

How to Sell Anything to Anybody wasn’t trendy. 

Instead, it was a solid book that taught readers something that people need to know, consistently, no matter what is going on in the world. That might be why I’ve worked on personal finance books the most during my career; we always need to manage our money. 

When thinking about your book and your impact in the world, I encourage you to ignore trends. Whether it’s quiet quitting or hybrid work or [enter your buzzword here] most of the time it’s better to focus on what you have to share that is perennial. That will last for years.

And if you’re lucky — decades.