Jeffrey Mason thinks everyone has an amazing life story.
His belief led the Elk Grove resident and retired state employee to build a $12 million-a-year business that started from a personal place.
“I took for granted that my mom and dad would always be in my life,” Mason says. “We would visit a couple times a year and talk on the phone a lot, but distance still happens. I was in my 50s when my dad started feeling the effects of Alzheimer’s.”
Mason suddenly realized he only knew part of his father—the dad part, not the man people outside the family knew, not the man who was once a child, teenager and young adult. Mason wanted to understand the full picture before the disease destroyed his father.
The answers came in questions that filled Mason’s notebook, simple questions about childhood and youthful experiences, questions that filled in the gaps of his father’s life story.
“I talked to my mom, my aunts and uncles,” Mason says. “And the more I knew my dad as a person, the more I could let him off the hook for being clunky or not perfect as a dad. I ended up feeling more connected now than when we could talk.”
When friends started asking for copies of Mason’s questions, he decided to make it easier for people to follow his lead. He published his notebook inquiries on Amazon in 2019. “Hear Your Story” family keepsake journals were born.
The pandemic gave the book a sales surge, but it was social media that made “Hear Your Story” take off. His daughter convinced him to join TikTok, where he posted a video in March 2024. The video showed him flipping through the book in his garage.
The video gained 700,000 views in one day. Then 3 million. Mason was suddenly getting 7,000 to 8,000 orders a day.
“At first, I thought, we can do this! But can I do it tomorrow and the next day?” he says.
In a panic, he enlisted the help of Acutrack, a packing and print-on-demand business in Livermore. Mother’s Day sales were bananas. Father’s Day was even bigger. “Mom, I Want to Hear Your Story” and “Dad, I Want to Hear Your Story” landed as the Nos. 4 and 5 books of 2024 across Amazon.
When Sourcebooks reached out, Mason formed a joint partnership with them to take the project to the next level. “Hear Your Story” is now distributed at retailers and overseas in Poland, Brazil, South Korea, Greece, Britain and Canada.
“I’m just excited that more people are finding the books,” Mason says. “I hope more folks are sharing and preserving because they bump into our book at a store.”
Building connection is Mason’s goal, whether that’s through stories or recipes, as with his newest venture, “Learn Your Recipes” family cookbooks.
“I believe so feverishly that the more we know about each other, we’ll see how alike we are,” he says. “This is what I’m supposed to be doing: helping people share their one-of-a-kind life stories, and, hopefully, the more people learn about each other, they’ll start talking a little bit more.”
For information, visit hearyourstorybooks.com.
Jessica Laskey can be reached at jessrlaskey@gmail.com. Follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram: @insidesacramento.
