Forty days after his fiancée disappears she is found, “badly injured on a mountain road near an abandoned amusement park where her younger brother died.” When she asks him to return a sealed envelope to someone at the park he enters a world where the rides “mystically comes to life.”
Yes this is a novel and yes it mirrors the author’s real life story of redemption, Life’s Golden Ticket. 
What role do you want to play in other’s lives over the next chapters of your life story? Well author Brendon Burchard is determined to leverage his value to others through speaking, vivid storytelling in the style of Mitch Albion – and by partnering with causes to help them flourish, and you can too.
If you become a valuable partner for non-profits as Brendon is, you may gain these benefits:
1. Expand the ways, times and places that people hear about you.
2. Create a new reason for people to buy from or otherwise support you.
3. Cultivate strong friendships by acting for the mutual benefit.
4. Inspiring others to propose ways to partner – perhaps with you.
Here’s some of the ways Brendon acts from the sweet spot of mutual benefit (for his partners and for himself) that you could adapt to your situation – whether or not you are an author:
1. Giving a portion of book profits to three respected non-profits that serve his main constituency – young people and the people who care about serving them.
2. Give those non-profits visibility on his web site, in his blog and on his book tour.
3. Inspires others to volunteer for these three non-profits, calling on them to become “miracle workers” like the ones featured in his novel.
4. Offer an “in-person” triple benefit for any non-profit:
• Speak for free at their fundraiser that ties to the book
• Offer books at a discounted price for them to sell
• Provide “a two-hour staff training session on online marketing and fundraising.”
5. Host a sweepstakes timed around book launch where one does not have to buy a book to have a chance to win. When the grand prize is “roundtrip airfare and three nights accommodations for two to a destination of their choice anywhere in the world” Brandon was sure to attract people to his web site, his novel and earlier books, his partnering non-profits and the companies that gained visibility by donating to them.
Here’s two more ways you can partner to boost your visibility and value – and that of your partners:
1. Write positive mini-book reviews (under 50 words) related to your book or your expertise. At the end of the review include your name, book title or name of your business or other organization. Offer these to your local bookstores to tape on the shelves underneath the book you reviewed.
2. Offer to conduct an in-bookstore mini-seminar (that spurs people to buy your book or your product or service). Agree to mention three to five books as follow-up resources and to provide an idea-packed handout for the bookstore to give away for the month prior to your seminar and during it. That handout also lists the recommended books. The seminar is promoted in the store’s newsletter and online.
Not surprisingly, in his earlier book, The Student Leadership Guide, Burchard quotes from George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, “I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
