When distributing books, especially in commercial districts, we are going to find basically two types of persons. One is those who work around or pass there every day. You can easily recognize them because they usually look tense and busy, and walk in a very fast and focused way. Since they pass there every day, there is nothing new for them, they are all business. I call them “regulars”. 

The second type are the “visitors”, persons who are just passing by. They came to buy something, to visit some place, as tourists, etc. They are easy to distinguish from the first group: they walk more slowly and look more relaxed, they look at the showcases of the stores. It’s a new place, therefore they are in exploration mode, open to new things. 

While you can also distribute books to the first group, they are much harder targets. Not only are they busy and generally in a bad mood, but they probably saw you many times already. It’s much easier and more effective to focus on the second group. Naturally, people can be divided into many different groups, and each one can be most effectively approached in a particular way, and ultimately each person is unique, but this simple distinction between regulars and visitors can already help a lot on our distribution. 

While the people in the first group may be more numerous, they are a kind of finite resource, since it’s more or less the same persons passing there every day. The second group, on the other hand, is an almost infinite resource, since these are people who are going to pass there only one or a few times, therefore every day there are going to be new people. A lot of times we focus too much on the first group and get the impression that a place is “burned” after going there for only a few times. The first group may already know you, but you are going to always meet new people from the second group, and many of them are going to take books. There are cases of devotees distributing books for decades in the same spot, and every day distributing a considerable number of books to new persons.

Actually, the main factor that distinguishes a “good” sankirtana spot from a “hard” one is exactly the proportion of persons from the first and second groups. Places where there are a lot of regulars and a small number of visitors tend to be difficult places to distribute and get “burned” quickly, since once all the regulars already know you, there will be not many people to talk to. In comparison, places where there are more visitors tend to be the easy and sweet places, where you can distribute for a long time and still every day find new persons. While selecting sankirtana spots, it’s important to take this into consideration. The best places are not necessarily the busiest ones, but the ones where there is a steady flux of new people every day. 

In Brazil, I travel through a number of small cities, trying to visit each one for a few days every year or at least every two years. There are cases of cities with 250.000 inhabitants where more than 40.000 books were distributed in recent years. Still, every time I go there I find new people and distribute a number of books.

Normally, we “burn” places when we use bad or unfair practices on book distribution. If people walk away with a bad impression from the book distributors, they are going to react in impolite or hostile ways when we try to approach them again, making the distribution progressively more difficult. During a certain period in the United States, devotees were using some unfair and aggressive sales practices, and as a result, a great number of persons became hostile to the devotees, to a point where book distribution almost stopped. A similar case occurred in Germany in the 1970s, where devotees were collecting large amounts of money in the name of the food relief projects in India, but actually keeping the money in their projects in Germany. Eventually, the scheme became public and devotees got a very bad reputation amongst the general public, which made book distribution extremely hard in Germany for a whole generation. 

If we use all kinds of cheating and unfair techniques, we are going to always burn places very quickly. On the other hand, when we treat people well and they walk away with a good impression from the devotees, usually the opposite happens: people actually start to become more interested and favourable over time. Even people who already got a book will take more on subsequent encounters if they get a favourable impression from devotees.