Jonathan Stanley had been sitting at a Barnes & Noble store for about an hour, behind a stack of his own books, when he saw a 4-year-old girl marching toward him.
“I want to be an author when I grow up,” Ella Dinelli told Stanley, who was at the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, store on March 22 to promote his book about leadership strategy. The girl and her mother, Taylor Dinelli, 29, agreed to use the money they had saved that afternoon for a Starbucks drink to instead buy a copy, which Stanley signed.
“Ella,” he wrote, “the greatest gift you have to offer is you!”
The interaction was brief – no more than a few minutes – but it would change Stanley’s life.
A week after Dinelli posted a TikTok of the exchange, the video has been viewed more than 77 million times, and tens of thousands of people have commented that they had just followed Stanley’s account or bought his book, “Purposeful Performance: The Secret Mix of Connecting, Leading, and Succeeding.” The book shot onto Amazon’s top 20 most-sold list for nonfiction, and publishers from around the world approached Stanley about acquiring the rights to the text. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
“All of a sudden, I’m getting messages from every corner of the globe just streaming through my phone,” Stanley said in an interview. “I was overwhelmed, and deeply moved.”
Stanley’s story is an example of how TikTok’s community of writers and readers – colloquially known as “BookTok” – can catapult relatively unknown authors to newfound fame. Posts about authors sitting alone at their signings have done particularly well on social media: In 2022, authors including Margaret Atwood and Stephen King rallied around a fantasy author who shared that only two people had come to her signing.
After Stanley settled in at the Barnes & Noble store, the first person to come up to him advised him to keep his expectations low. A fellow author, she said she had sat in a chair just like his for four hours and sold just one book.
But Stanley said he wasn’t discouraged: He believed in the importance of his book’s message, which is about bringing humanity back into the workplace.
“I’ve talked to so many people who are disengaged at work,” he said. “They feel unseen, unheard and undervalued, and I believe the American workplace is broken in many ways. Our responsibility as leaders is to empower others, to uplift them and help them reach their full potential.”
Ella may have been too young to understand all of that, but she thought it was “so brave” that Stanley wrote his own book and was trying to share his message with others, her mother said.
“She has always said that she wants to write books, because she loves to make up stories,” Dinelli said as Ella sat nearby, listening to an audiobook recording of “The Wizard of Oz.”
Dinelli posted her video of Stanley to TikTok hours after their interaction. By the next morning, the video had already hit 1 million views.
Stanley, meanwhile, posted about his encounter with Ella on LinkedIn on Sunday. Then a stranger emailed him to say he was going viral. When he opened his phone, he saw he had gained thousands of new TikTok followers – a number that compounded every time he refreshed his page. (Days before, Stanley had just one follower on TikTok: his wife, who is his biggest fan.)
Both Stanley and Dinelli have since received messages of support and encouragement from around the world. Dinelli has even taken out a globe to show Ella how far their video has spread: Uganda, Kazakhstan, France, Kenya, Australia and Turkey, among other countries. She pointed out to Ella all of the oceans and continents between them and the people who had reached out.
The significance of Ella’s interaction with Stanley hasn’t exactly sunk in for her – she’s about to start kindergarten, and she’s only just starting to read on her own – but Dinelli said she hopes Ella will forever remember how such a small act can change someone’s life.
“I hope it inspires people to support one another and be kind to one another,” Dinelli said. “I always tell my kids that that is our goal, and our purpose here is to do what we can to bring joy to everybody.”
Lately, Ella has been talking more about becoming an author one day. She wants to write a book about a mermaid going on an adventure. And she wants to learn how to draw better, too, so she can illustrate it.
Whether or not Ella pursues writing as a career, Dinelli hopes Stanley’s story will remind her of the importance of having faith in herself.
“You could be anything you want to be,” Stanley had told her during their first interaction.
“And when you publish your first book,” he added, “I’m going to be the first in line to buy it.”
(c) 2025, The Washington Post · Gaya Gupta 
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