Until last year, when they published an enormous bestselling hit by an unknown child poet, Cheryl and Peter Barnes were best known for producing children's books like Nat, Nat, The Nantucket Cat. Haven't heard of it? Well, you're hardly alone. They sell it mainly on Nantucket Island, where they vacation every summer. "If we can sell 2,000 copies of a book in a year, we're happy," says Peter Barnes, who co-founded VSP Books with his wife, Cheryl. Over the past decade VSP (which originally stood for Vacation Spot Publishing) has produced 17 books. The company, which operates out of a cottage next to the couple's home in Alexandria, Va., has posted peak revenues of $500,000, with pretax profits of 20%. "We want to publish what we like -- and make our company manageable," says Cheryl, who devotes herself full-time to the business while her husband works as Washington bureau chief at TechTV, a cable television network.

In part, their small-is-beautiful strategy grew out of the collapse of other bet-the-ranch businesses they attempted along the way. In 1992 they had to sell their home at a big loss after a Jenny Craig diet franchise they bought withered away. There was the cable-Internet venture that Peter joined in 1999; it went bankrupt. Same with the dot-com in which he invested $60,000; then there was the portfolio of plunging tech stocks they held on to during an extensive home renovation. "I was always looking for the big score," says Peter, a former reporter at the Wall Street Journal and CNBC. "I ended up very humbled."

Until last year, that is, when a straightforward act of charity actually granted the couple the home run -- make that grand slam -- they had learned to stop chasing. Since then, Matthew "Mattie" J.T. Stepanek, the 11-year-old poet who suffers from a terminal illness, has sold more than two million copies of his three books. No less than Oprah Winfrey herself held up one of his books on national TV and urged, "If I ever had a book to recommend, it's Mattie's Journey Through Heartsongs."

Heady stuff for Mattie; for his publishers the boy's success came so suddenly that they hardly recognized its magnitude until it threatened to wipe them out. What happened to VSP's founders is every business owner's dream -- but as they found out, the dream of having a hot product bears little resemblance to the actual experience. Helped to recognize this by their mounting debts, the Barneses wisely wrestled with their options. Was there a way, they wondered, to reap the profits without changing the character of their company? "We were not afraid of risk," Peter insists. "But what was the reality? What could we -- in reality -- do?" As the wave was cresting, they found themselves forced to decide.

It all started, implausibly enough, with a good deed. Last June the Barneses drove to Children's Hospital at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., to visit a terminally ill boy who had a final wish they hoped to fulfill.

Marissa Garis, a public relations specialist at the hospital who knew Cheryl, had thought of them. Garis told Cheryl that Mattie suffered from a rare and fatal disease. He might live just days longer. Three of his siblings had already died of the illness, and now he had three wishes. The first was to have a book of poems published. His second wish was to talk with his hero, "peacemaker" Jimmy Carter (a call Garis soon arranged), and the third, to talk about his poems on The Oprah Winfrey Show or The Rosie O'Donnell Show. Mattie had harbored those wishes for five years. Garis made it clear: It was now or never.

The Barneses met Mattie in the intensive-care unit. "He looked very pale and very sick, but he had a great sense of humor," Cheryl says. With blond hair and big, round glasses, he weighed just 50 pounds at the time. Mattie suffered from mitochondrial myopathy, a fatal type of muscular dystrophy. He depended on oxygen bottles and a ventilator to breathe. His mother, Jeni, who was also wheelchair-bound, was diagnosed with the genetic disease after giving birth to all of her children.

A precocious child, Mattie began dictating poems to his mother when he was just three. Two years later he had written his first book, Heartsongs, and started dreaming of getting it published. The poems were joyful and heartfelt, touching on the pure wonder of the world through a bright child's eyes; he felt the presence of God and the wonder of angels, and even at that young age could craft an alluring phrase. Given his condition, the poems held an almost magical power to inspire.

Peter and Cheryl rummaged through a plastic bag filled with his poems. After reading a few, they promised to grant Mattie his wish. "We are people of faith, and we just decided we were going to do it," Peter says. Five days later the Barneses had knocked out a paperback. Two weeks later they returned to the children's hospital for a book-signing party with 200 copies. They charged $11.50 to cover their printing costs (around $2,500), and when those books sold out, Cheryl promised to print more. Those subsequent printings would yield profits, which they made a verbal agreement to split fifty-fifty with Jeni, Mattie's mom.

The Washington Post and local TV stations covered the book signing, sparking more orders. Cheryl asked friends to take calls, added six new phone lines, and bought 3,000 more books. "We were just reacting, and trying to keep up with it," Peter says. In August, C-Span's Book TV ran an interview with Mattie, prompting another 3,000 print run. "We were working nights, stuffing boxes. I brought in my mother and father to work with us," Cheryl recalls.

By the end of the summer Mattie miraculously had recovered from the immediate critical condition. "The book gave me hope," he notes. While the Barneses designed a sequel, Mattie appeared on the Jerry Lewis Telethon. With book sales topping 6,000 copies, Cheryl ordered 10,000 more.

But despite the mounting publicity, Peter's previous stabs at the big time convinced him the book was just a fluke: The momentum wouldn't -- couldn't -- last.

Then one call changed his mind. It was from Oprah. "I'm thinking, 'If this is a joke, it's a mean joke,'" recalls Jeni, who answered the phone. Mattie then came to the phone, chatting with her about his poems. "When he hung up," Jeni says, "he screamed, 'Gosh, she called me! She really wants me on her show!'"

Jeni immediately let the Barneses know. "At that point I started to get serious that this might become something bigger than I thought," says Peter. Indeed, Oprah's staff later told Cheryl that Mattie would appear on TV only if the upcoming hardcover, Journey Through Heartsongs, was widely available. That meant the Barneses would need $200,000 to print the books. "Suddenly it was an enormously risky situation," Peter says. "We were wondering, 'How the hell are we going to do this?'"

The Barneses' printer agreed to help, printing just 10,000 copies of the book for $35,000 until the Barnes got the final word on Mattie's TV appearance. "Then we held our breath," Peter says. "Thank God, in a week or so, Oprah loved it. She was going to do it." The printer cranked up to print 90,000 more.

On the show, which aired Oct. 19, Mattie rode down the aisle in his motorized wheelchair. Oprah hugged him. He defined a heartsong -- a deep life calling he felt everyone possessed. Oprah told her viewers that the poems had special resonance at a time when the nation was feeling a sense of fear. "I think everybody who has heard you today has felt just a little quiet sigh of peace," Oprah said. Near the segment's end, Oprah gave her unequivocal recommendation.

Mattie's triumph on Oprah put stress on Jeni's relationship with the Barneses, who struggled to meet exploding demand. "There wasn't one book in stores," Jeni says. The Barneses say the books were available at wholesalers, from which stores could order them. Journey Through Heartsongs made the New York Times bestseller list on Nov. 11, based on sales the week after the show. Heartsongs hit the following week.

To keep up, the Barneses ordered 100,000 more books, raising their total bill to $400,000. Still it wasn't enough. They called their printers again. In all, they printed 300,000 copies of the hardback and 220,000 of the paperback, at a cost of $700,000. With the bills due in 30 days, they got a $400,000 bank loan, secured by their home. Revenues (an estimated $3.5 million) wouldn't start rolling in until January.

Oprah planned to re-air the interview before Christmas. Speaking to Jeni, she stressed that there needed to be at least half a million books in print. (Oprah was not available for comment, according to a spokeswoman.) The Barneses knew of her plans too -- and worried. "Suddenly, we knew 500,000 books were going to get sold. How were we going to do it on our own?" Peter says. When Oprah found out that VSP wouldn't hit those levels, she pulled the repeat, according to Jeni. Then Oprah told her she should think about getting a bigger publisher.

Jeni felt torn. "I knew it had to happen -- for Mattie, we had to go bigger -- but out of loyalty I felt like we should stay with VSP," she explains.

As it happened, Robert Miller, the president of Hyperion, Walt Disney Co.'s publishing subsidiary, had wanted to publish Mattie ever since he had seen him on Oprah. One morning last November, over breakfast with Robert Barnett (the Washington lawyer who negotiated Bill Clinton's multimillion-dollar book deal), Miller mentioned his interest. Barnett got busy. Around Thanksgiving, Barnett called Jeni, who was receptive -- if conflicted. "It was a real emotional struggle," she says. "I know Peter and Cheryl were doing their best, but it wasn't possible for them to do what a big company could do." She wanted her son's message to reach the widest audience, but at the same time "we couldn't just say, 'Thanks for the start. Bye now.'" She insisted that Hyperion give the Barneses a fair deal. For their part, the Barneses had grown increasingly nervous about feeding the phenomenon. Through the holiday weekend, Barnett negotiated with the Barneses' lawyer, Ronald Goldfarb. Although the terms of the final deal remain confidential, the Barneses received a share in Hyperion's revenues -- comparable to an agent's fee of 15% of an author's royalties -- from five books, including the first two they had published, which would be taken over by Hyperion. On the books, the publisher would be identified as VSP Books/Hyperion -- a rare coup that openly recognized their contribution. Obviously the deal represented much less of a risk for the Barneses, who couldn't leverage themselves any more than they had without worrying about VSP's ultimate survival. That's what they kept foremost in their minds -- along with Mattie's best interests. "I would bet most publishers would have been much more proprietary, but that ain't the Barneses," says Goldfarb. "And I wasn't going to push them to be what they're not."

Hyperion took over the books on Dec. 15 and had them in stores a month later when Oprah reran the segment. Journey Through Heartsongs jumped to No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. When Hope Through Heartsongs came out in April, Mattie's sales topped two million. At VSP the manuscripts are piling up. They'll pick and choose, trying to find something they like enough to publish. "We don't want to become a huge company," Peter says. They recently signed a Houston priest who writes spiritual poems about silence. They're not thinking in terms of a bestseller -- but then, as they would be the first to point out, you just never know.

Published in FSB, July 2002