I had the chance to appear on CBS This Morning recently to talk with the hosts about the new novel and my personal journey.

Hope you enjoy it!

Grab your copy of A Man at Arms here.

We are running some exclusive giveaways each week you won’t want to miss.

Shawn’s first article in the series, “Getting the Meeting”, went live December 3, 2010, with an introduction by Steve that stated:

“With Shawn’s post, we’ll establish a “What It Takes” slot on the blog every Friday until publication in June.”

The publication Steve was referring to was his then-upcoming novel The Profession, and, as you know, the column lasted a little longer than June of 2011.

“Getting the Meeting”, is a great read and one of my favorites from Shawn—one of his classic behind-the-scenes views of the book publishing industry.

At the same time, over on “Writing Wednesdays”, Steve was writing about The Profession, from his perspective as the writer. “When It Crashes” and “When It Crashes, Part Two”, are raw, unfiltered looks at what happens when, as Steve wrote,

“ . . . the wheels come off smack in the middle of the project—and you’re left dazed by the side of the road, staring at the smoking wreckage of your work.”

If you haven’t read them before, read them now. If you have read them, read them again. Still each word rings as true as the day it was written.

I came into the mix December 12, 2010, with “The Elephant in the Room”. Steve’s introduction to the article shared a bit of our background together, to include,

“But what really got us working together full-time is this blog. “Writing Wednesdays” was Callie’s idea. Without her, it wouldn’t exist or it would have pooped out months ago. In fact, the blog itself was Callie’s idea. She cracked the whip over me to make me do it.”

In my 13 years of working with Steve, the seeding and then nurturing of “Writing Wednesdays” (ten years old as of July 22 of this year) is at the top of my list of things we did together. “The Elephant in the Room”, opens by touching on that early work, then taps into Shawn’s “Getting the Meeting”, and moves over to a message I’m still repeating today about outreach, and reaching your audience.

In the years that followed, Shawn and I alternated writing the column every Friday, with a few exceptions, when Shawn might go on a run for a few weeks, or I might do the same, or we might feature pieces from the Archives.

Among those messages that appeared within “What It Takes” through the years, reside a few repeated themes that went beyond book publishing insider talk and into each of our lives as and our struggles through our own art and, yes, publishing. They’re along the lines of slowing down and reflecting, learning to say no and learning what no means, doing something and doing something every day, and believing in ourselves when the toxic avengers are on the march. (Baseball and Bob Dylan and the pros from Dover made frequent appearances, too.)

I was thinking about my favorite post, but there isn’t a favorite. When you write over a period of nine years, the articles reflect where you were at that time. There are some I like less, because I know they weren’t my best effort. There were days when I didn’t know what to write and was embarrassed by posting something I wouldn’t want to read myself. Then there were other articles, when I knew the Muse existed outside Steve’s home and was paying me a visit. As I write this now, I can feel her in my head. There’s a soft, calming feeling that comes when she visits. Words just flow. Anxiety doesn’t even try to play her usual games, because she knows I’m on it. I got this. The stomach flip flops leave. The destructive head-talk fades. Frustration flees, too. Just me, the Muse, and my words.

All of the above is a way of saying that, after ignoring that June 2011 deadline, we’re finally hitting it.

This is the last post in the series.

I hope you’ll visit the archived articles. There’s some good stuff in there.

Most important: Thank you for the time you’ve given us every Friday for the past nine years.

You’ve been on my mind this week.

First: Thank you for the comment you posted last Friday.

Second: I thought about sending you a private email or posting a reply to your comment, but thought that maybe someone else might want to read this, who knows that hole that feels so good to hide in, but has room for little other than Sorrow.

My heart twisted and my eyes watered when I read your words. My father, my kid’s father, and my mother are all still with me. I can’t imagine them not here and I can’t imagine the pain you experienced when you lost yours in such a short period of time. I know it won’t change things, but I hope it will make a difference knowing you weren’t alone when you crawled into that hole and stopped writing. I’ve done both in response to things far less painful (see this). Each time, the crawl out of the hole came from small steps done every day.

Please write. Please take small steps.

(For anyone else who reads this, please join me in sending Melissa a smile and cheering her on.)

~Callie

I was working in a small mom-and-pop publishing house just down I95 from Health Communications, the publisher of Chicken Soup for the Soul.

My boss wanted a series just like that.

Think of all the possibilities. Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover’s Soul. Chicken Soup for the 12 Year Old’s Soul. Chicken Soup for the Chicken Soup Hater’s Soul. Chicken Soup for everyone!

I can’t remember if my boss told me this or if I read it in a magazine or heard it on the radio, but around that time, either Jack Canfield or Mark Victor Hansen said something about doing an interview a day, or scheduling something every day—or just doing something every day. (Murky, I know . . . Getting old is a hateful business).

Point was: Do something every day.

Stuck with me.

Back to 2019. I watched Amanda Seales’ “I Be Knowin’” special on HBO last weekend.

Part of her routine hits on how hard it is to go out in the evenings when you’re older—especially when all you want to do is curl up in bed. It’s a funny bit.

Reminded me of authors.

Very few of the ones I’ve known have wanted to do interviews.

They want to write.

They want to eat in their own kitchen, not in restaurants on the road.

They want to sleep in their own beds, not in hotels, motels, or the Holiday Inn.

They aren’t interested in any of it, but they know they have to do it, and they have to get into the mood.

Back to Canfield and Hansen—or whichever one said do something every day.

Think about interviews, or networking or whatever it is that helps share your book just as you might think about losing weight or saving money.

You don’t have to do a lot every day, but you have to do something.

Something. Every day.

So what is that something?

This is where it gets frustrating—and where I get angry at sites that have all the answers for how to launch a bestseller.

There isn’t one plan that will yield the same results for two different people/books.

I can give you a long list of books that, at their core, were launched the same way (minus some tweaks here and there), and they didn’t all hit the bestseller list. Part of it is the author, part is the topic, part is just what’s going on in the world. I’ve known authors who were wonderful authors but awful speakers, authors who looked the part and had little to say and authors who weren’t “camera ready” and got little play because they were rough around the edges. I’ve had an author bumped because a plane was landing without all of its wheels and another author bumped because, yep, another plane story won out.

A few weeks back, I wrote about what does always works.

That’s where you have to start.

From there, look at what your favorite authors have done and make it work for you.

Adjust it a little every day, but do it every day.

I know. It’s not your thing. You want to write. Trust me. A little every day.

Here’s a small example:

Mary Doyle comments on almost all of our posts. I had no idea who she was years ago, but now . . . When Mary has a book ready to publish, I will buy a copy and let friends know about the book. Why? First, I expect it to be good and second, because Mary always shows up, is kind, and is a person I like. That didn’t come over night.

Don’t think this is just for authors you want to get to know. You’d be surprised to find that your neighbor runs the book club of 1,000 grandmothers at the local mega church, or that your kid’s teacher is a bestseller writer using a pen name. These connections are all around us.

You have to put yourself out there (or hire someone to do it for you).

In a worst-case scenario, that person might just save your life.

True story (though not 100% accurate because . . . memory and age):

A family friend survived the Bataan Death March all because of a cigarette.

He was an officer facing a Japanese soldier. He’d already been captured, but still handed a cigarette to the soldier. The soldier wasn’t high in his chain of command. A regular foot soldier. He couldn’t help the American officer and the American officer knew it. He just had a cigarette and offered it. The soldier took it. Later, during the march, the officer fell. The person who helped him? The soldier to whom he gave a cigarette.

What the officer did was no different from what he might have done on the streets of his North Carolina home, but this time? Saved his live.

Put yourself out there.

A little every day. Might help share your book. Might help save your life.

In the documentary Beach Boys: The Making of Pet Sounds, Al Jardine said Brian Wilson “sees things I don’t think the rest of us see and hears things, certainly, that we don’t hear. He has a special receiver going on in there, in his brain.”

What is that special, indefinable “it” about Brian Wilson? Is it really related to seeing, hearing, and receiving? And, if it is, what’s different about how he sees, hears, and receives? What of the rest of us? Why aren’t we all walking around composing “God Only Knows” or any other Wilson and Tony Asher masterpiece?

What Are You Hearing?

In his book The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity, Dr. Norman Doidge shared the work of Dr. Alfred Tomatis, whose groundbreaking work identified “the ear as a battery to the brain.”

From the chapter “A Bridge of Sound” in The Brain’s Way of Healing:

In the late 1940s Tomatis continued to attack the conventional wisdom that the larynx is the key organ for singing. He showed that contrary to conventional wisdom, singers with bass voices did not have larger larynxes than those with higher voices. Human beings aren’t constructed like pipe organs, in which larger tubes produce lower sounds. Powerful tenors sing at frequencies from 800Hz up to 4,000 Hz but so do baritones and basses; the only difference is that the baritones and basses can add lower notes, because they can hear lower notes. He summed it up by saying provocatively “One sings with one’s ear,” a statement that caused much laughter.

But when scientists at the Sorbonne presented their studies of his work to the National Academy of Medicine and the French Academy of Sciences, they concluded that “the voice can only contain the frequencies that the ear can hear.” The idea came to be called “the Tomatis effect.”

Tomatis didn’t stop there. He invented a device called the “Electronic Ear” to help struggling singers. The device blocked out different frequencies, which trained the singers’ ears to hear the frequencies with which they’d been struggling/missing. By exercising their ears, they strengthened their voices, just as they might engage in exercise to strengthen other parts of their bodies.

Among us non-singers, Tomatis found, too, that the frequencies we hear can be influenced by our countries of origin. For example, he found that the French “hear in two ranges, 100 to 300 Hz and 1,000 to 2,000 Hz. Speakers of British English hear in one higher range, from 2,000 to 12,000 Hz, which makes it hard for French people to learn English in England. But North American English involves frequencies from 800 to 3,000, a range closer to the French ear, making it easier for the French to learn.”

More from Doidge:

Arguably [Tomatis’] most important discovery was that the ear is not a passive organ but has the equivalent of a zoom lens that allows it to focus on particular noise and filter others out. He called it the auditory zoom. When people first walk into a party, they hear a jumble of noises, until they zoom in on particular conversations, each occurring at slightly different sound frequencies.

Jardine’s comment that Brian Wilson hears what others don’t hear, might be right. It’s possible that Wilson tunes into frequencies and zooms into sounds/rhythms/conversations that the rest of us aren’t accessing. Even more remarkable is that Wilson is deaf in his right ear, which is the dominant ear for the majority of us. By accessing sound through his left ear, he’s automatically processing sounds outside the norm.

What are You Seeing and Receiving?

In the same Beach Boys documentary, Wilson mentioned that he “copied The Four Freshman singer, the high singer,” when he wrote “Surfer Girl.” He tapped into a musical influence and merged it with interests of his peers. While he didn’t surf himself, he understood—he saw—the appeal of the surfing culture, just as he did the car culture, just as he did the raw fact that the lives of most of his peers revolved around school and dating.

There’s a difference in this sort of seeing, just as there is in hearing as researched by Tomatis. There were millions of other guys Wilson’s age seeing the same thing. Even Wilson’s own bandmates saw the cars and girls and surfing culture, but . . . They didn’t do what Wilson did.

Why?

In the documentary Becoming Warren Buffett, Buffett was asked the following question:

“What are the key indicators you look for in companies before making an investment?”

He replied by talking about Berkshire’s investment See’s Candies:

“If you give a box of See’s chocolates to your girlfriend on a first date and she kisses you . . . We own you. . . We could raise the price of the boxes tomorrow and you’ll buy the same box. You aren’t going to fool around with success. The key here is the response.”

Buffett is right. My godmother introduced me to See’s Candies’ boxes of chocolates over forty years ago. I loved them then—and now she’s gifting them to my kids today. That’s loyalty.

But why does Buffett think like that? Why did he see that potential in See’s Candies? Just like Brian Wilson’s peers could see the response to songs about surfing, cars, relationships, and school, Buffet’s peers could see the response to the gift of a box of chocolates. What’s the difference between Buffett, Wilson, and their peers?

Why do they find creative configurations for random puzzle pieces, when all anyone else sees are mismatched puzzle pieces?

Exposure and Experience

Wilson had to be exposed to The Four Freshman and Buffett to See’s Candies—and to what was going on in the world around them—in order to connect songs and products to cultures. In order to do this, they needed experiences that would allow them to connect the dots. This comes from constant exposure and experimentation—paying attention to what does/doesn’t work in the surrounding world, and learning from it.

This is reading everything you can read, listening, painting, practicing whatever it is you love over and over and over again.

For Buffett and Wilson every song composed and deal made can be filed under practice, which brings more experience.

Internal Engine

To do all the things mentioned above, there has to be an engine, a drive to capture it all.

In a TED talk, Elizabeth Gilbert told a story about how poet Ruth Stone described poems coming to her, on a “thunderous train of air”:

It would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet.

She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, “run like hell.” And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page.

And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it “for another poet.”

And then there were these times—this is the piece I never forgot—she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she’s running to the house and she’s looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand it and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first.”

I love this story. It’s like capturing a dream. You have to write it down the second you wake or you risk it floating off to Never Happened Land.

What powers an engine like Stone’s or Buffett’s or Wilson’s?

I think it’s curiosity.

Have you watched the new National Geographic series, Genius? In the first episode, a young Albert Einstein is driven by a need to know. Curiosity is at the helm, pushing him for answers.

Why Does Any of this Matter to You?

Within the first few minutes of the Beach Boys documentary, David Marks said, “People think ah, I can do that, but they can’t. It’s only something Brian could do.”

Wilson, Buffet, Williams, and Stone had/have a gift for connecting the dots. Their ability to bring together all the information coming their way—whether in dreams, Muse-driven trains, or cocktails parties—is extraordinary.

Do I think we can all do what they do/did? No.

Do I think we can tap into what I’m guessing to be qualities existing within their creative process? Yes.

We talk about hard work on this blog all the time.

What we don’t talk about as much is what we see and hear. Sometime you have to lift your head from your work and process what’s going on around you. What do you really hear and see? And of what you’re receiving, is it the full experience or are you missing out on an entire cocktail party?

The other part of lifting your head is this:

Big ideas aren’t necessarily a sign of genius, but of someone with the capacity to make connections between all the dots swirling around them.

How often do you hear about those ideas happening after an all-nighter of working?

They arrive during a hot shower and in the seconds before you go to sleep. They float in on a song, or a well-crafted sentence—and come along just when we least expect them—sending us flying like Ruth Stone to capture them.

We can do all the work and practice in the world, but minus the mental gifts Wilson, Buffett, Einstein, and Stone were born with, I think the thing we need most is to really see and hear the world around us and within us. Just as Tomatis helped improve the voices of singers, I think his same methods of tapping into different frequencies can help guide our creative endeavors. And when I say frequencies, I’m not necessarily talking just about traditional “sound.” Remember, Beethoven composed even after losing most of his “hearing.” (Maybe he did this by relying on “bone conduction?” *Read Doidge’s book.)

Are you tuned into all the frequencies possible?

• Hard work has always worked.
• Being honest has always worked.
• Doing the right thing has always worked.
• Keeping promises has always worked.
• Being transparent has always worked.
• Creating something of value has always worked.
• Starting small has always worked.
• Communicating in more than 140 characters has always worked.
• Picking up the phone or meeting in person, instead of only texting or emailing has always worked.

A correction:

These always work with the first audience, they often work with the second and fourth audiences, and rarely work with the third audience.

Here are the four audiences:

1. People with You

2. People on the Fence

3. People Against You

4. People Who Don’t Know You

People with You

This group is in your corner. If you have a new release, they’ll buy it.

Because we all create duds from time to time, this group is essential when you make a mistake and/or create something not so wonderful. They won’t turn their backs on you. This is your home team. An example? Imagine post-Babe Ruth and pre-2004 Boston Red Sox fans. They kept buying tickets and showing up to games. Yes, they complained, too, but they stayed with the team.

People on the Fence

This is the group that knows your work but only buys it after reviews are released. They might know you’re an extraordinary chef, but that new restaurant you opened? They won’t show up until someone else confirms its worth, whereas People with You are there opening night.

Best way to get this group off the fence is to run through that list above. Will it get all the fence straddlers on board? No, but it’ll get some of them there, which means you’re growing the People with You category.

Example: Earlier this year I bought flowers from www.FiftyFlowers.com. I was in the market for cherry blossoms to send to my godmother, who always misses the cherry blossoms during her visits to Washington, D.C. I ran into a wall finding live blossoms for sale. Lots of the fake silk variety. Fifty Flowers, which I ran across during my search, had the real deal. I bought the flowers and then received an email from my godmother, with a picture of a plastic trashcan full of cherry blossom branches. She wasn’t throwing them away. She simply lacked something large enough to contain all of the cherry tree branches, so she cleaned out the bin, added water, and then waited for them to bloom—and then, since there were so many, she shared them with friends and at the school where she volunteers in Los Angeles, where cherry trees aren’t something the kids had seen in person either. She even tried transplanting one at the school. Didn’t work, but the kids got behind the effort, so this one gift to her just kept on giving. The customer service was extraordinary, which led me to buy lilies for my aunt this past week. Once they arrived, she couldn’t stop talking about them. Beautiful. Fresh. Gorgeous packaging. AND: A human called her to share how to care for the flowers, so they would last a long time. Will I buy from them again? Yes. I was on the fence, but the quality and kindness and personal care made me decide to step into their corner.

People Against You

Doesn’t matter what you do with this group.

They don’t like you and they don’t want to like you. It’s personal. There’s something about you that gets under their skin.

Around the time the first Harry Potter book was released as a movie, I was on a listserv for writers. One of the writers spoke out about J.K. Rowling. She said that Rowling had created unrealistic expectations for other children’s book writers. Rowling’s success was a fluke and she was bad for all other writers in that genre because she raised expectations, so that if your book didn’t have movie potential, it wouldn’t be published. She didn’t say it, but she was jealous and instead of seeing Rowling as someone who energized the children’s/young adult genre, she saw her as a negative. I don’t think Rowling could have done anything to change this writer’s mind.

However, my friend and mentor Bob Danzig once shared a story with me about kindness flipping a volatile situation on its head. At the time, Bob was the publisher of the Albany Times Union. One of the paper’s employees, who was also head of one of the printers unions, was a vocal critic of management and tensions were high. At an annual event for the paper, Bob was introduced to this man’s wife. A few weeks later, Bob and the wife ran into each other at the local grocery store and she burst into tears when she saw him. Her husband injured his back and feared that he’d never return to work. She told Bob that her husband could use a special chair, which made sitting up a few hours a day doable, but he couldn’t work full time. Bob called the man’s doctor and arranged to have one of the chairs installed in the newspaper’s composing room, where the employee could work as a copy editor a few hours a day. However, there was still the issue of the union. The union president didn’t want to change the agreement to allow for an individual—even an individual who had been on his side—to work non-approved union hours, and said he’d call for a strike if the employee did less than a full shift. Bob called the employee’s wife and arranged with her for her husband to arrive at work and meet Bob. When he arrived in his wheelchair, Bob pushed him up to the front of doors, where the other union members could see them. Instead of walking off, they clapped—and Bob and the once-critical employee became friends.

There’s a lot more to the story, and I know I didn’t nail every detail, but that’s the gist of it.

I’m guessing that the employee and others in the union saw Bob as a fat cat management type, which made it easier to be critical of him—easier to create an us against them scenario. However, once he got to know Bob, he learned that Bob grew up in the foster care system and was in his fifth foster home by the time he was 12, and that Bob graduated high school at age 16 (during a transfer from one home to another, they made a mistake about the grade he was in, so he was placed in a grade higher, and Bob just went along with it, since his focus was on survival and not school), and then after he graduated, he worked every day to support himself and then eventually a family. Nothing was ever given to him. He earned his role as publisher the hard way. He worked for it. Started as office boy and then spent two more decades rising. No nepotism or anything of the like. He knew Pain and knew the power of Kindness and Communication. Life changing.

This personal touch is often the only thing that will change the minds of those against you. There’s usually a personal reason behind their opinion of you. Has nothing to do with you, but with their perception of you.

People Who Don’t Know You

This group is just as they sound. They don’t know you exist—or they’ve heard of you, but don’t know anything other than your name. Once they’re turned onto your work, they love you or they hate you or they land on the fence.

For years I heard the names Haruki Murakami and Kazuo Ishiguro. Did’t take action—not even when Chris Guillebeau personally recommended Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to me. Then I picked up Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Remains of the Day and found myself hooked on both. Didn’t read anything from any other authors for a long time.

Did they reach out to me? No. Any personal kindness? No.

I liked their work and then I researched them and enjoyed reading interviews with them.

Go back to the Fifty Flowers example above for an example of personal contact with an unknown. I took a chance on buying the first time—and then they provided extraordinary service and I returned. And, I’ll go back again—and I’ll recommend them—all because 1) they provided something of value and 2) extraordinary customer service. They made it personal. There was no pre-printed card presented with the flowers. They picked up the phone and spoke with my aunt. Told her who the flowers were from and how to care for them, and, knowing my aunt, I imagine they were on the phone answering a few other questions, too.

Kindness. Personal contact.

How to Reach Your Audiences

You don’t need an expensive marketing campaign to do this. No need to purchase the next big platform or program or anything else.

Go to CVS or Staples or Michaels or the Dollar Store and pick up some stationary.

All you need is some thank you cards and/or a phone—and time. Lots of time. This won’t happen overnight, but the connections you make have the potential to be with you forever.

Get personal.

It won’t work with everyone, but it will always work with a specific group of everyones.

And those people it won’t work with? Why are you focusing on them anyway?

Think about history.

Civil Rights changes, as one example, didn’t occur because all the opponents’ minds were changed. They happened because the people for Civil Rights and the people on the fence came together, and pulled in people who weren’t previously in the know. They suffocated the fire of the opponents. Didn’t change their minds, but they were able to create change.

Focus on the people who love/like you. Let them be the evangelists. Reach out to those on the fence and work on connecting with those who aren’t familiar with you. Those groups alone should keep you busy for the rest of your career.

So, no, there isn’t anything that works 100% with every single person on Earth.

However . . .

There are truths that work 100% of the time with the audiences who should be your focus.

In my mind, it’s always Fall and always the golden hour before sunset. A thick layer of leaves blankets the ground and yet every tree is full, as if not a leaf has fallen.

This image has been bubbling up uninvited these past few months. One minute I’m working and the next I’m leaning back in my chair as my mind wanders through a mashup of Van Gogh yellow and Klimt gold and a wee bit of Hudson River Valley, all bathed in amber.

“The road not taken” is the phrase spoken by the unknown voice for the image, kin to “if you build it they will come” for cornfields. Always the same thing. My mind wanders, fighting Frost’s “nothing gold can stay” and thinking about that very golden road.

The teacher who introduced me to “The Road Not Taken” taught that it was about being an individual and taking risks, and marching to a different drummer—and I drank the Koolaid and believed her. Never occurred to me to ask if “all the difference” made by the road taken was really a good thing.

Go back to the poem, and both paths are equally trodden. The one taken wasn’t better or worse. It was different. Nothing in the poem indicates that the other road would have been a bad one to take, yet . . . There’s this notion that not taking it was the right decision.

I’ve been thinking about the roads we travel to share our work and how hundreds of years ago the road was clear, less cluttered vs now, with so many distractions. Is one better than the other? Both are equally trodden, but with different versions of the same problems.

Think about two roads.

One road is post Gutenberg, but also pre-mass communication, before the phone and TV and computer and everything else we have today.

The other road reflects today, with smart phones and smart TVs and smart shoes and all other sorts of smartily smart things.

Road one is rather clear. As time ticks, maybe a billboard starts to pop up. Maybe a car passes and a rest stop appears on the horizon, and other people start to travel the road, and those people share one by one.

The other road is cluttered and noisy. All people on that road do is share and talk and jabber. It’s like navigating through the fog, but on a clear day, with fog replaced by people and images and tweets.

Road one dictates that there are fewer interactions, but when they occur, there’s meaning and they’re remembered.

Road two dictates millions of interactions, but when they occur, they’re insignificant and forgotten. You have to work harder to give and receive meaning.

The road I keep going back to is road one. Less communication. Less clutter.

That road worked for a long time, yet there’s this push to go down a different road. Don’t do what’s been done in the past. Keep looking to the future, to the road yet to be taken.

Why?

Maybe instead of traveling toward the next big thing, the better choice is u-turning toward the past and tapping into what has always worked.

Hard work has always worked.

Being honest has always worked.

Doing the right thing has always worked.

Keeping promises has always worked.

Being transparent has always worked.

Creating something of value has always worked.

Starting small has always worked.

Communicating in more than 140 characters has always worked.

Picking up the phone or meeting in person, instead of only texting or emailing has always worked.

For 2019, I’m looking toward a road of doing less of what’s on the cluttered road and more of the clear road, the old road, the one that worked for years. I want to travel both roads, worn really about the same. I don’t want to sigh somewhere ages and ages hence.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And then cut through the woods and traveled the other road, too,
And that has made all the difference.

Now 15 and 11, they know the fat guy in the red suit is an echo of their childhood. Still there, and still nice, and still happiness-and-laughter inducing, but not the same as before the veil was lifted.

How could it be the same? Once you know, there’s no going back.

Maybe it wasn’t Santa for you, but maybe there was someone or something that you believed in so strongly, and then you got to Oz and realized the wizard was just Oscar Diggs from Omaha, Nebraska.

For my kids, Santa could really be a guy named Harold, who works at the tax office next to Pizza Hut the rest of the year.

We’d still show up because it’s tradition.

The kids don’t believe in Santa, but they believe in the experience.

It’s not even about Santa at this point. It’s about us and reliving the memories (and about pretzels at Aunt Annie’s on the way back to the car).

This year, though . . .

There was a long line. It didn’t move for a good half hour.

The camera broke.

The time for Santa to head back to Ms. Claus arrived and the line was still out and around the Santa display.

The teenager in charge asked each person still in line if he or she would come back the next morning. We all said no. Kids had school the next morning and we’d invested a few hours at that point.

He decided to pile on. “Santa’s been complaining about not getting out on time and we’re trying to close.” Little ears around him heard this. Santa complaining? Really?

When a parent asked if Santa would still see everyone in line, he replied, “I guess I could try to make the line move faster.”

After we made it through the picture line, his stellar salesmanship continued. I requested half a dozen frames and then he looked at my son and asked, “She your mom? If she was my mom I wouldn’t let her buy those frames. Why are you letting her buy all those frames?” My son smiled. Didn’t know what to say.

Yes the frames are overpriced. Same with the pictures.

Yet, I show up every year—and I spend a lot of money because those pictures and frames get sent to two sets of grandparents, a great-grandmother, a few other relatives, and I want one for myself, too. For them—and for me—those pictures are echos of our own childhoods, and the childhoods of their own kids and grandkids, and great-grandkids. They mean something. The same Harold has been Santa for the last 14 years. He stayed the same, but the kids went from babies to teenagers in their pictures with him—and I remember every single one of those pictures, picking their outfits, running combs through their hair, if it was raining or a clear drive. I hold tight to every day.

And the teenage salesman unknowingly tried to stop it.

He didn’t understand or believe in the experience he was selling.

It was a product not an experience—and it wasn’t a product he wanted himself.

That’s okay.

Santa isn’t everyone’s thing.

But if you don’t believe in Santa, or at least in the experience, you probably shouldn’t sign up to be one of Santa’s helpers.

I put a few hundred dollars down and he tried to get my son to stop me—even though I wanted to pay the money. Harold is worth every penny, and my hope has always been that some of that money gets put in his his wallet end of season. The more I buy the better he does, so yeah, I’m okay with spending more on this experience.

Years ago, one of my jobs included sales conference duty, at which books were pitched to the sales reps, who were then tasked with pitching the books to B&N and Borders and Books-A-Million and all the other now non-existent bookstores.

I hated going. I was never convinced that the sales reps believed. It was just their job. The books were products to be pushed or ignored. The reps got excited by co-op dollars and large advertising budgets, but the books alone? Many went unread by the reps. They didn’t understand the power of all the books. Yes, some of the books were real stinkers, but many were extraordinary – and they were more than words on pages with nice wrappers. They were experiences. Both fiction and nonfiction could transport the reader to different worlds and leave them better off for the experience. They just needed someone to believe in them.

That’s what Black Irish Books has always been about. Believing.

Believe in yourself.

Believe in your power to create.

Believe in your creation.

Earlier this month Black Irish Books launched a subscription series titled Black Irish Jabs, which are bite-sized books by Steve, delivered almost once a month for the next year, which pack a powerful punch..

The series feeds into the power of believing and creating—and we believe in its power ourselves.

You have to believe in what you’re selling to make a go in this world, to achieve any sort of success.

So, if you find yourself working a seasonal job as Santa’s helper, if you don’t believe in what’s being sold, find another job, or at least don’t ruin the experience for paying customers.

But, if you do believe . . . If you happen to see a lady with the oldest kids in line to see Santa, and she wants to put a few hundred down on overpriced frames and pictures, let her do it. Show her the best frame you’ve got and show her the picture snow globe too. She might not be one to spend money like that the rest of the year, but this means something to her family. Help her. Make the sale. She’s been at this for 14 years and will back again next year.

Let her have her experience.

Believe in what you do.

It’s the setup for other punches—that seemingly small thing that serves you well in the ring.

“It is their most important weapon. Fighters throughout time have spilled blood and sweat attempting to perfect it—to make it fast, to make it sharp, Every punch, heavier than the last.

“Is is the single most significant punch in boxing, both offensively and defensively . . . Its importance is undeniable. Every fight, every fighter, the very fabric of the sport, starts and ends with the jab.”

—Robert Aaron Contreras, via Bleacher Report

Master the jab first, all other punches second.

That’s the philosophy of the Black Irish Books JABs by Steve.

Small. Pocket-size small.

Basics. Do-this-first type of basics.

Powerful. Knock-you-out powerful.

JABs are books that are small in size, powerful in messaging, and which teach the basics.

If you signed up for the print version of the JABs subscription, you should receive your first two books any day, if you haven’t received them already.

They are truth.

Bare-bones.

No fluff.

Straight to the point.

Titles and subjects of the first two are How Does A Story Start? and What Is A Story About?

The third brings with it a two-word title: Why Write?

We hope you’ll join the subscription.

At whatever point you join, you’ll receive all the previously released books up to that point. For example, if you join in March, you’ll receive a box with the two December releases, the February release, and the March release. (No new release in January.)

You’ll be sent a coupon code for a free digital subscription, to share with a friend, too.

Our hope is that Black Irish Books’ JABs will become the most important punch in your arsenal, too.

Fitting in with Black Irish’s boxing glove logo, the subscription features “JABs” from Steve—mini-books that pack a punch—starting with two books from Steve this month, and then one a month starting in February.

We’re excited about this new offering, but also exciting is the production model.

This marks the first time Black Irish Books has launched a product available only via Black Irish Books (No Amazon or B&N or anyone else)—and the first time it has done a print on demand (POD) project without going through Amazon.

When Black Irish Books launched, it was doing print runs of 10,000 copies at a time. This kept the per book production costs low. However, it brought up the cost of warehousing. Those books have to live somewhere—and until they take up residence on someone else’s shelf, savings from large print runs are lost to warehousing costs.

In a perfect world, those 10,000 books sell out right away—except that with every year more individual sales go to Amazon. We haven’t flown through books on the BI site as quickly as needed to offset the warehousing costs—and then the printer stopped handling distribution, which led to relocating all those books to a new warehouse.

As we ran through print runs for individual titles, Shawn set up the books for POD on demand via Amazon’s Create Space, instead of going back to print for another 10,000 copies. This is why some books on Black Irish’s site aren’t available in print on the BI site. It was proving less expensive to go through Amazon than to go through the process of reprints and paying for reprints and warehousing.

Amazon provided a solution to allow for distribution without high warehousing costs. However, the per book cost is more with Amazon and we don’t have connections with customers.

The Amazon model makes bulk discounts challenging, too.

While Amazon’s share of individual titles increased, Black Irish’s share of bulk orders has increased. When BI first launched, we received pushback from bookstores that wanted to 1) order through wholesalers instead of BI; 2) wanted BI to cover shipping costs to them; and 3) didn’t want to adhere to BI’s policy of no returns and prepayment. The prepayment and no returns were big sticking point since bookstores were used to being able to order books without having to pay for them right away—and then having the ability to return them at no penalty. Not great for a publisher since no sale is ever final. The bookstores—especially the university bookstores—came around. The 55% discount off orders of 10 or more copies of the same title beats the 40% discount most publishers offer (which usually goes into play at a quantity much higher than ten copies)—even if they have to cover shipping themselves. BI now has return bulk customers, placing orders of hundreds of copies every few months and/or thousands at a time.

However . . . It’s challenging to make a profit off bulk pricing when the books are printed one by by one, vs via the 10,000 print run model.

There’s also the fact that there’s an entire customer base at Amazon, with whom BI has no contact. We don’t know their names, addresses purchases, etc. Nothing.

How to keep costs lower and have a connection with customers?

Find a competitively-priced print on demand printer that can handle distribution and warehousing as needed.

We found just that—a printer that beats the per book POD pricing of Amazon.

This affords BI the option of providing exclusive print projects, without having to give Amazon or anyone else a slice of the pie, and helps keep warehousing costs down and direct connections with customers up.

Ever since Penguin Press provided quality books at affordable soft cover pricing, instead of the traditional hardcover premium pricing, publishers have been challenged to innovate in more of the same ways.

Ebooks, many thought, would be the wave of the future, and eliminate the need for books, but that’s not been the case. Enough of us still prefer print books.

With POD, though it has been around a while, it wasn’t accessible (or even available to) everyone—and it’s been looked down upon, partly because self-publishing wasn’t respected and the thinking that there must be something wrong with books that go straight to paperback.

This is the same thinking that brought us “it-must-be-bad-because-it-skipped-the-theater-and-went-direct-to-DVD thinking. And yet . . . Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House” is one of the best productions I’ve watched this year—created and distributed by Netflix, direct to consumer instead of the traditional theatrical release, and cut into bite-sized viewings instead of film length. Todd Jacobs, a film guy and former high school classmate of mine, called “Haunting” the future of film. I agree.

Same with POD.

This idea that a book has to be hardcover is dated and unnecessary—and prevents a wide-range of individuals from having the means to purchase and/or manufacture it.

The softcover opens the market. The POD version rocks the market—and the printer that does POD and distribution is the future.

For publishers—traditional, indie, and the guy next door—POD kills warehousing fees. POD with distribution kills the need to rely on Amazon. POD with distribution and competitive pricing is a win win for everyone. Author makes money. Printer makes money. Customer and authors/publisher have an opportunity to engage.

All good—and exciting!

(If you’re interested in learning more history about the paperback, and in being inspired by publishing innovators, check out Smithsonian Magazine’s article “How the Paperback Novel Changed Popular Literature” and Mental Floss’ article “How Paperbacks Transformed the Way Americans Read.”