3 Lessons from Football Star A.J. Brown for Authors and Readers
You might have missed the media hubbub this week over Eagles wide receiver A.J. Brown reading a book on the sideline in the middle of a playoff game. That’s right, he was seen on camera, sitting among his teammates, reading intently from a paperback book. During the game.
The media — social and mainstream — were quick to pounce, speculating that Brown was ignoring the game, pouting about not having many pass catches.
But it turns out that Brown does this frequently, throughout the season. In his post-game interview, he explained his purpose is to find “a sense of peace … to make sure my mental game is good.”
“It’s something like how I refresh every drive, regardless of if I score a touchdown or I drop a pass, I always go back to that book every drive and just refocus and nothing matters, nothing happened, just really back in.”
His teammates confirmed that the book is part of Brown’s game-day rituals and have taken to calling it “The Recipe.”
As you might suspect, the incident had an impact on the book, Inner Excellence, by Jim Murphy, driving it to the #1 ranking among all books on Amazon overnight.
But we’re not here to talk about football, nor to delve into the mysteries of Amazon’s ranking system. So, what lessons do we authors and readers draw from this?
“Overnight” Success for an Indie Author?
The first lesson for indie authors comes from understanding that Jim Murphy self-published Inner Excellence under his Academy of Excellence imprint in 2020. That was five years before it was spotted in Brown’s hands in a national TV spotlight.
What did Murphy do for those five years? He ran his performance coaching business under the same name, that’s what. And the book, I have no doubt, was a big part of his marketing plan for the business.
As I’m fond of telling our nonfiction book clients and anyone else within earshot:
“You are not there to sell your book;
your book is there to sell you.”
As Murphy explained to the media regarding his sudden rise to #1 on Amazon,
“I just looked at Amazon last night and it got to No. 1, so that was a surprise. It had probably never been higher [in sales rank] than probably 8 or 9,000. In the thousands, somewhere.”
In fact, NFL.com reported that prior to being seen on Sunday’s game, the book was ranked #523,497 on Amazon!
It appears that Murphy’s coaching business was doing well enough over those years, based on the testimonials from existing client athletes across a range of sports on his website. Murphy himself was a professional baseball player before turning to performance coaching.
As evidence that the book was a key factor in his past success, he published another book last year, The Best Possible Life. Both books are given prime real estate on his website’s homepage.
In a reversal of what usually happens, the flurry of interest in Inner Excellence appears to have driven The Best Possible Life up the Amazon rankings to #698 in all books and #1 in multiple categories. More commonly, it’s the release of a new book that triggers renewed sales of an author’s previous title(s).
Neither direction of boosting can happen, however, until the author publishes more than one book, right?
How much could this mean to an author in terms of royalties? Let’s say Murphy’s KDP royalty amounts to $5 per copy of the print editions. Say also the A.J. Brown “endorsement” drove sales of 10,000 copies of Inner Excellence, along with 5,000 copies of The Best Possible Life — wild guesses based on their rankings.
That would mean having a second book brought in an extra $25,000 when lightning struck!
Yet another piece of this lesson: indie authors can and must produce quality books that impact readers powerfully. A.J. Brown picked up Murphy’s book because a teammate suggested it to him at the beginning of the season.
Not a splashy launch. Not an ad campaign. Not the marketing efforts of a big publishing house.
Word of mouth.
That teammate was impressed enough by Murphy’s writing and ideas to share it with a friend. And Brown found so much value that the book became part of his life. The New York Times article about all this is entitled, “The Book So Helpful That the Eagles’ A.J. Brown Read It During a Game.” Indeed, as we’ve noted, he reads it during every game.
Every author should aspire to a “book so helpful.” You can never predict who it might end up helping or how that karma may come back to you.
Reading Books Benefits Everyone
Brown’s role-modeling of a reading habit is another big lesson. I loved this quote when a reporter asked about the theory that Brown was frustrated about his play:
“I wasn’t frustrated at all. I figured that’s what y’all probably thought. … Dang. I like to read.”
Brown uses reading to “lock in and refocus” during games, but as a Fast Company article noted, there’s a lot of research showing how frequent reading provides longer-term benefits like lower stress levels and improved decision-making.
The evidence keeps mounting since I published Read ‘Em & Reap: 6 Science-Backed Ways Reading Puts You on the Road to Achieving More and Living Longer in 2019. One of my stated hopes for the book was that adult readers would pass on their reading habits to the children around them.
A July 2024 paper in Frontiers in Pediatrics, titled “Reading for life-long health,” opens with:
“There is a strong, positive relationship between childhood literacy and physical and mental health outcomes in adulthood.”
A 2021 study explored the benefits for children of being read to by an adult, but the title of the paper tells you the perhaps less appreciated benefit: “I Feel Less Blue When I Read With You: The Effect of Reading Aloud With a Child on Adult Readers’ Affect.”
And a 2023 Medium article raised the ante on my six benefits with, “10 Brain Reasons To Make Reading a Habit.”
Let’s hope Brown’s declaration, “Dang. I like to read,” gets repeated everywhere.
Keep Fiction in Your Reading Mix
While the story begins with a nonfiction book, my quick review of the latest research on reading takes us to the other side and the benefits of reading fiction. I covered some in my book, including how the U.S. Army Field Manual on Leader Development identifies reading fiction as a key tool for acquiring skills in empathy, social tact, perspective, and more.
These benefits flow from studies showing that when we’re reading stories, our brains “actively simulate the consciousness” of the characters. We are transported to places we’ve never been, even to ones that exist only in the author’s imagination until we step in through the page.
One 2023 study adopts an intriguing name for this experience: “storyworld possible self (SPS).” The researchers examined how people felt transformed in their real-world selves through their storyworld experiences.
A British medical journal article in 2020 entitled “Reading fiction: the benefits are numerous” includes the ancient wisdom inscribed on the library at Thebes,
“House of healing for the soul.”
And at the other end of the life-long benefits of reading by and to children discussed above, a 2022 study compared two groups of older adults (aged 60-79), one reading novels, histories, and biographies for 8 weeks (labeled the sustained literacy engagement group) with another actively engaged with doing puzzles for 8 weeks. The researchers found a significant increased benefit for the reading group, suggesting increased brain “plasticity” (neural growth) and the potential for offsetting age‑related cognitive impairment.
May A.J. Brown’s, “I like to read,” become a mantra for all of us that includes reading fiction.
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