Evans will never rival Dickens’s literary talents, but he bests him in marketing genius. “The Christmas Box” is the latest of a new crop of self-published best sellers such as “The Celestine Prophecy.” To promote his original edition of the book, the 33-year-old former advertising executive plastered ads on buses, traded books for radio plugs and, when the book began selling, hired an agent who negotiated a $4.2 million hardcover deal. Then there are the Christmas Box plate and mug and the TV movie. No Christmas Box fruitcake. Yet.
Now touring feverishly to promote his story, Evans is pleased but flummoxed by the adulation he gets from readers. “I don’t understand how it heals someone who has mourned [the death of a loved one] for 20 years. It’s mystical in that way.” But lucrative: in a Cincinnati bookstore, a woman who had lost a child three months before waited an hour to meet him. “She said, ‘You brought me peace.’ And when people heard her story–she had 10 books her-self–they were saying, ‘Well, ft you can buy peace for $12.95, I will’.”
