Part 2: Write & Self-Publish Your Own Three Principles book!

Hello, is anybody out there? It looks like so far we have Doren here. Doren, if you could type a note to me in the chat box to let me know you can hear me, that would be great. Am I coming through loud and clear? Hi there, Doren. And I see Genevieve, June, and Lana are here. Hello everybody. Oh great, I'm glad I'm coming through just fine. You never know with technology, sometimes it can be fickle as we know. So great to hear that you can see and hear me just fine. So I'm going to wait just another 60 seconds or so just to see if people are going to join. And then I will get started. So I'm happy that you're all here. I'm really, really thrilled to be talking with you today. So I'll give it just a few more seconds before I begin. I hope everyone's enjoying their day wherever you may be in the world. That to me is one of the most amazing things about technology is that we're able to connect like this no matter where we happen to be. I'm in New York City. If you want to type into the chat box where you are as of right now, that would be fun to see. I'd love that. So I think I will go ahead and start, and I want to say one thing that, you know, you don't have to wait for a pause in what I'm saying to ask a question. You can just type it into the chat box, and I'll keep an eye over there for any questions that come in. Oh, South Africa, Doran, how exciting, how exciting. That's someplace I'd love to see. I may have the chance to go there next year, so I'm really hoping that I do. So I'm Mary Schiller, and I am a 3 Principles Coach and author, and this webinar is all about how to write your own 3 Principles Book and Self-Publish It. And this particular conversation is a follow-up to a similar webinar I did a couple of weeks ago. And I wanted to do another one for a couple of reasons. One was that I've spoken to several people over the last couple of weeks about their book projects, which was really, really fun. And several questions came up that seemed like they would be helpful to address in another webinar like this because I figured there might be other people out there with similar questions and I wanted to address them. And the second thing is that, um, at the end of this webinar, I'll be sharing a special program I've developed to help you get your book written and out into the world. And that's something that I developed over the last couple of weeks after talking to people about this particular topic. So I'm going to dive right in and, um, I do have a few slides, but not too many, so this will not be like an overwhelming PowerPoint type of webinar. And let's see here. So I'm gonna go to the PowerPoint, and here we go. All right, so as I said, this is part 2 of this webinar. And I will go over a few things that I talked about in the first one as well. But really, you're in the right place if you've always wanted to write your own 3 principles-based book. It's really as simple as that. And after this, I will share the link to this PDF presentation, which also has a link to the previous one. So if you'd like to look at both, you're welcome to do that. So here's what we're going to cover in this webinar today. The first thing is why now actually is the right time for you to write your book, even if it doesn't feel like it is. We're also going to talk about— this question came up quite frequently in my discussions with people— is they were worried about staying true to the 3 principles. In their book. So we'll talk about that. We, I will go over some more techniques for writing a high-quality book quickly. I will share with you my perspective on why I think it's better to write a shorter book than no book at all. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about how Amazon makes something, makes self-publishing really, really simple. I will at the end share details of a personalized program to help you celebrate the new year with your very own book. And of course, I will take your questions. So why now is the right time for you to write and self-publish your book? Well, I'm going to prove it to you. I'm going to do a little exercise with you. So in the next 60 seconds, I'd like you to write in the chat box about something profound that you've seen for yourself related to the 3 principles. So on your mark, get set, go! Type something into the chat box that you have seen for yourself that has made a tremendous impact in your life, transformed something about your life because of the 3 principles. So I'll give you a minute to do that. What has changed as a result of your understanding of these principles? So just type that in the box. It can be a sentence, it can be a few sentences, whatever comes to mind. While you are contemplating that, I will share a brief, uh, example from myself. Oh, June says there is only inside out. Doren says the past is nothing but a memory carried through time and experienced as a thought in the moment. Well, those are Both very profound, for sure. For sure. Yeah, I think for me, the very first thing that I experienced when I came across this understanding was seeing that I wasn't my thinking, that I was much bigger than my thinking. And for so long, I had identified with my thoughts. I didn't realize that they weren't me. So seeing that those thoughts actually weren't me and that I was something much larger and more profound than my thinking was huge for me. Anybody else want to share something that was profound that they realized for themselves? I would love to hear. Because as you may have gathered, my point here is that you have everything you need to write your own 3 principles-based book. If you have seen something for yourself, if you have been changed in some way by your understanding of these principles, then you absolutely have something to share with the world. And not only that, you don't have to feel ready to share this with the world, to take this step and do that. You know, most of my life has been spent in the creative realm, most of it as a writer with deadlines and things like that. And I learned early on that even if I didn't feel ready, for example, to write the story for the newspaper I was working for, it didn't really matter because there was a deadline. And no matter how discombobulated I might have felt, I had to write the story. So most of the time, if I had, you know, any kind of stressed out thinking, I would just set it aside and I would just go with whatever came to me at the time. And since I've come across these 3 principles, this has just become more and more apparent to me that we don't have to wait for some particular feeling in order to feel ready to write this book. If you have experienced something that you want to share with the world, that's all the ready that you need to be. And I really have seen over and over again, even before I got interested in helping people write their own Three Principles books, I've seen in every single person that I have talked to over the last couple of years that everyone has their own unique spark that can shine through a book. Everyone has their own way of talking about this understanding because we've all had slightly different experiences of what it has meant for us And to me, that is really crucial because everybody, you probably have the experience where certain people in the Three Principles community seem to be speaking more to you than maybe somebody else does. Or at different points in time, you might connect with a different Three Principles voice. Maybe 6 months ago, you were interested in one person, but not another. And then suddenly that other person sounds really interesting to you. So there is so much room in this conversation for more voices and for your voice. I also wanted to address this concern about, and I put in quotes here, the three principles police, because several people said, you know, what if I say something wrong? You know, what if I say that, say something in this book and you know, someone who's kind of big in the Three Principles community doesn't like what I'm saying. And I really wanted to address that because I feel like there's really no way for you to get it wrong. There's no way for you to get your own story wrong because it is the way that you experience this for yourself. And you may say it very differently from one of the big names in the Three Principles Community, but who's to say that the way you're saying it won't affect someone quite profoundly? Does anybody who is live on this call have that kind of concern that maybe you're not ready yet to write this book, or you're, you're having any fears about how it might be received, anything along those lines. If so, I would love to address your concerns if you want to share them in the chat box. And while you're thinking about that, I can say that, you know, the very first book that I put out, which I'll share in a moment, was around the 3 principles was something called The Joy Formula. And at the time, I remember having thoughts like that. I remember thinking, oh my gosh, you know, what if the biggest names in the three principles read this book and tell me I don't know what I'm talking about? And I thought, oh wow, if that happened, you know, what would I do? And then I remember having another thought shortly after that, which was maybe I would just learn something, you know. Maybe if, if I put this book out there and I get that kind of feedback, I will learn something from it and I'll take that into the next book. And suddenly it didn't seem such a, like, such a heavy thing for me to put it out there and just see how it was received. And then of course, that's what happened was a couple of people who were big names in the three principles world actually did read The Joy Formula and they liked it. So I can't say I didn't feel a tiny bit of relief, but I was also ready in case, you know, they had something that they could tell me that would make it clearer the next time. And since I had written and self-published the book, I knew I could rewrite parts of it if I needed to, or I could publish a new edition quite easily. So let me go back here to my trusty presentation, and let's see, here we go. So I would just advise you, if you have any concerns about whether or not your book will be given the stamp of approval by the 3 principles police, that that's thoughts you don't really need to be listening to or concerned about because you really can't get it wrong. At least that's my view. If you are writing from what's true, from what you've seen, from what you have experienced, from what you have just gotten into the deepest part of yourself, you absolutely can't get it wrong. I also wanted to assure you, if you have never written a book before, that I understand what it looks like to want to write a book but to have never done it. It can be a very kind of intimidating place to be mentally, you know. Since we're all in this conversation together, we know that it's not the situation that is creating that feeling of, you know, can I do this? Can I do this? That it's thought, but that doesn't make it any less real. And I definitely remember the feeling of, gosh, you know, could I really write a book? I don't know if I can do this. This seems really big to me. I had been a writer my whole career, but I had never written a book. I had probably written the equivalent of several of them in word count But actually writing a complete book was like, wow, you know, could I actually join that group of people? Is that something that I could actually do? And I remember at the time having a stronger thought come through, which was that I wanted to write a book to help someone in need. So I made a decision that I was going to go ahead and write a book even though I was very scared on a number of levels, which I'll share with you, to write the book and, and put it out there for public consumption. So as I mentioned on the previous webinar, but I thought it might be helpful to repeat it, the first book that I wrote and self-published, I did under a pseudonym. And here's a picture of it. It's called I Am Just a Woman: My Story of Domestic Violence, and I used a pen name of Lucy Johnson to write this because I was worried at the time about my ex-husband finding this book online and creating some sort of disruption in my life. So at that time, 2012, when I put this out on Amazon, etc., nobody really knew much about my past. I hadn't really shared it with very many people at all. And I was not comfortable using my real name to, to put this out for public consumption, but I knew that I had a story to tell that could help someone else. Now, this was written pre-Principles. I didn't come across the Principles until 2014. So I would love to write an addendum or a new version of this book, and it's something that's on the horizon for 2017. But I still knew that I had something that I thought could help another person. So the way that I wrote this book to sort of discipline myself was I started a blog and I used that as a way to write the book. I made a goal of writing 250 words at least every day. When I felt like the story had gotten out of me and onto this blog, I edited and reordered the blog posts and kind of reshaped things to make it into a book. I also, just so you know, this isn't in the presentation, but just so you know, I also set it up so that anytime I wrote a blog post, it would get saved into Google Docs. So I had another place that it was saved. It wasn't just on Blogger at that time. So at that time, I used a full-service company called BookBaby. To, um, to self-publish that book, although I would not use that kind of a service now. So I will explain why in just a second. Let me come out of here. I want to get back on camera. Oops, there we go. So that is the very quick version of my first foray into writing and self-publishing a book. The reason at the time that I used this company called BookBaby to get that done was I really had no understanding of the self-publishing process at all. It was completely out of my realm of experience. And at that point, it was just more important to me personally to just get the book out there. And so I had a friend of mine who graciously volunteered to do the COVID and the interior design of the book. And then I handed it off to BookBaby and they took care of putting it on all of the online retailers for me. And they handle, you know, paying me every time a copy is sold. And it's only available in a digital version. It's not in a paperback version. And just so it's clear why I wouldn't use a service like that now, is because I do not have access to that book. So if I had done the whole process myself, I would be able to go in and upload a new version of it, let's say. But I can't do that. The only way that I could do that is if I literally unpublish that book and take it down from all of the sites and then start the process over again, which is kind of a bummer because the book has a lot of reviews and, you know, it's ranked at a certain level and it does sell a few copies during the month. So I would lose all of that. So I'm, I would not necessarily recommend that kind of a service unless you really just don't want to know anything about that part of this process. So before I continue, I just want to pause and see if anybody has any questions so far. Has anything come to mind as I've been talking, particularly about, you know, feeling ready to write your own book? So I'll just pause for a moment and pet my kitty who is laying next to me here. Any questions? Oh, we've been joined by Liz, Greg. Hi there, good to see you. Good to see you. Any questions so far or comments about anything? I might have said this earlier in this broadcast, but I'll repeat it just in case. I am so passionate about this topic because I am asked all the time by people I work with and my friends and even family members, I want to read a new Three Principles book. Can you recommend another one? Can you recommend another one? And there are quite a few 3 Principles books out there, but in my view, there aren't nearly enough. So I really want to encourage you to think about what it would mean, not just for yourself, but for people in the world to read your 3 Principles book. Greg says, I'm about 10,000 words into writing my first book, but I've lost momentum due to voices telling me nobody will want to read it. Yeah, voices in your head. I kind of figured that out, Greg. So that's kind of what I was alluding to earlier when I was saying, you know, I knew that for my first book, even this is before The Principles, I knew that I had something that I thought might help someone. And I remember having this thought of, you know, if only one person downloads this book and it helps them, then that will have been worth everything. And I still have that same kind of attitude, I guess, with anything that I put out there. You know, I really don't care what the reviews say. I, I love the good reviews, that's very nice, and if you've reviewed my books, that's great. But if, if people don't like it, I, I might look and see if there's something that I'm not saying clearly that I can correct. But I know that there are a lot of people who actually do benefit. So, Greg, I think all that to say is that is a very normal thing to be thinking about when you're writing or producing any kind of creative object is, you know, will anybody read it? Will anybody like it? Will anybody care that I've written this book? And just for me, the notion that if it could reach one person, that was enough. And that's really how I felt when I wrote my book about my first marriage, the domestic violence situation. And it's how I approach all of the books that I'm doing now, is with that same idea. So I don't know if that was helpful, Greg, but if it wasn't, let me know. All right, I'm gonna go back to my PowerPoint here. One second. So the first 3 principles book that I put out into the world was The Joy Formula, which some of you may have heard of. Originally, I had created this just as a PDF in exchange for people's emails when they signed up on my blog, thedailyprinciples.com. And I had so much feedback from people saying that they really enjoyed it. And like one person who I love dearly called me up and said, you know, I feel really badly about this because I want to distribute Joy Formula to several people, and I don't feel right about doing that because they want print versions. So I'm going to— I want to print out your PDF at Staples, but that just doesn't really feel good because I feel like I'm almost taking money out of your pocket. So you might want to consider putting it on Amazon in paperback and Kindle so I can buy it that way. So that was one of the main conversations that's persuaded me to do that. So I, I self-published it on Amazon back in March of this year. It's very short. It's only about 8,000 words and it sold a few hundred copies. I'm not exactly sure how many. It's hard for me to tell at this point, but it was something that was born out of how I first was affected by this understanding of the 3 principles. And it was a lovely thing to actually have paperback copies of it because I gave it out to a lot of people as thank-yous and just as sort of a calling card in my early foray into making coaching and the 3 principles my profession. Uh, let's see, let me go to the next page here. The second book, uh, was Mind Yoga, and, um, this one came about because I see stress as such a major issue in people's lives, particularly chronic stress, that I wanted to address it specifically in a book. This one also has been a pretty big seller so far. I had no idea how people would respond to it. You know, earlier I was talking about the 3 principles police and being a little bit worried about what they might think. And I have to tell you that when I put that book out there, Mind Yoga, it was in May, I believe it was. I was really nervous about that because I, I had so much thinking about it because I brought in, you know, the word yoga into this conversation about the principles. And I thought, oh man, are the biggies in our profession gonna think I've lost my mind? No pun intended. And, uh, it was really— I felt very nervous, felt very, very nervous. And then something kind of funny happened. I went to a conference in Oslo in May related to an initiative called One Solution that you might be familiar with. And somebody who is a big name in the principals community, I won't mention who it was, came up to me and said, mind yoga, great idea. And I was like, whoo, okay, you know, I guess that's all right then. But again, I remember also having the thought of, well, if it's not well received by, you know, the people in the know in the principals community, I will consider, you know, reshaping it or doing something a little bit different. But I kind of wanted to see how other people would respond to it, people who aren't already in this conversation. And that was the impetus for naming it that, was, you know, can I reach people who aren't already in the three principles conversation, and luckily that has happened and it's gone quite well. So that's fun. And the third book that just came out this week is this one, which I hope is frontwards for you guys. When I'm looking at myself on the screen, it's backwards. But this book just came out this week. I released it on Kindle and in paperback. Aha. How to Solve Any Problem in Record Time. And this book also has been really fun to, to see how it's been received. It was another one where I again had some thinking about, I wonder how this is going to go over, but luckily it's been kind of given a stamp of approval. I was very excited yesterday as this is airing. It was yesterday on yesterday's show that Michael Neal has on Hay House Radio. I was able to go on there and talk about the book a little bit and also share my experience about how I came into Three Principles. So that was very, very exciting for me to have that opportunity. So let me go one more time over here. The Mind Yoga book, I should also mention, has been really great because it's, uh, kind of been a springboard for other offerings. So I've been able to deliver a class like very much like this on webinars, and I've also done two so far workshops, one to an organization, nonprofit organization, and one for a company on opposite sides of the world. One was in Wales and one was in LA, but I delivered them via Zoom. So that's been really fun. A couple more things related to the Aha! book. The The plan, I guess, I hate to use the word plan because my plans never seem to work out the way that I think they will. But so far, this is sort of actually happening is I really want to write several more short books like this for the rest of this year and into 2017. So the next book that's going to come out probably early October is called To Love Is to Listen. I'm just about finished drafting that right now. And there are a few other topics I'm addressing in short books this year: work burnout, forgiveness, productivity, and living life with a sense of abandon. So I'm really finding this to be a wonderful creative outlet as well as a way to reach people about the 3 principles in various different ways. So here's my funny slide. I hope you're all laughing when you see this picture of me. That was taken by my daughter when we were in Hawaii. It was actually a still frame from a video. We did our own version of that tune, Happy. We did— made a happy video, and that was a still from it. And so I wanted to kind of grab your attention with a phrase that my mother used to say a lot when I was kind of slow at getting started. She'd say, "What are you waiting for, an invitation?" So this webinar is your invitation to get started or keep going. If you're like Greg and you already have a book project started, this is your invitation personally from me to make someday today. I wanted to also reiterate some things that I said in the previous webinar about what your book can really do. You can help more people than you ever could reach personally. That should say help more people, but you get the idea, than you could ever reach personally or even in a group setting. You can give people a super affordable way to hear your message, you can spread the 3 principles around the world even faster than you could through one-to-one coaching or any kind of conversations that you can have. You can raise your professional profile. As I mentioned, I was able to be a guest on Michael Neal's Hay House radio program yesterday, which was amazing. Having a book gives you some credibility that, um, can really— for me, it's like you're willing to put your name to something in print, and that means something to people, as the Mind Yoga book has done for me. Your book can become the basis of new offerings. It can also make money for you, of course. And really, the sky's the limit. You know, having a book can do a lot for you personally and for you career-wise. I'm going to jump off of here because I see there is a question. So Doren says, uh, it feels to me that most of my stories, insights that have shifted me, have already been told by other 3P authors and would like mine to be unique and not a kind of copy of others. Yes, that makes sense, Doren. I think that, uh, that that's probably something that is holding a lot of people back. That's my sense from some of the folks that I've talked to in the last couple of weeks about their book project. So I'm really glad you asked about that. I'm trying to think of the right way to phrase this. I think that when we start to either talk more about the principles verbally or we start to write about them, there is a voice that emerges that is solely your voice, Doreen, and everyone on this webinar or watching this replay. No one's voice is the same. No one's story is the same. And even though it might look like, um, how can I say this, even though it might look like everyone is sort of saying the same thing because we're talking about the same foundation, I know for myself that I hear things differently from different people. So You know, one, one week I might really be engrossed by something I'm hearing from Elsie Spittle, let's say, and then another week I might really connect with something that Jamie Smart is saying. Now those two people are very different individuals, but they're talking about the same thing, but they're talking about it using that voice that's unique to them. And so I hear it differently, I experience it differently. So I think that I would just encourage you to continue exploring the ways that you describe these principles. And the way to do that is to simply talk or write, and I'll show how those two things can intersect in a moment. And just keep developing that unique voice that you already possess. So let me know if that didn't answer your question. Right. Greg says, tell it from your camera angle. That's a very succinct way of saying what I just said, not so succinctly, Greg. So thank you for that. Yeah. You know, the way that, for example, the way that I have written the last couple of books in particular is from a more practical vantage point. I'm not mentioning the principles specifically in the body of the book. I definitely always mention them in a chapter of the book because I want to give Sydney Banks credit for his expression of these principles. But I'm kind of a practical person in a lot of ways, and so that's my camera angle, as Greg says, is I'm approaching this conversation from the angle of how can I help people to see the principles at work in their lives already in sort of a practical day-to-day way? You know, oh great, Doren, thank you. I appreciate that. You know, your vantage point, your camera angle might be much more spiritual, or, you know, the people that I spoke to these last couple of weeks were all different in terms of how they planned to write about these principles or how they already were based on their own life experience of them. So even though it might look like it's all the same, it's actually not. It's actually not. And the fact that we're all talking about the same thing, to me, um, doesn't, doesn't negate the need for more voices saying the same thing, just in different ways. And, um, and giving other people the opportunity to connect with a voice that they can hear. So super. So let me jump back over here. Let's see what I've got next. As you can tell, I'm a real pro with these, uh, presentations. Not so much, but I do my best. Okay. So for the next little bit here, I wanted to give a little bit more practical tips on, a few more practical tips on how you can write a high-quality book quickly. This is a little bit more than I talked about in the previous webinar, a few more ideas for you. So if you already have some material, like if you have a blog that you've been writing, or you give presentations, or you give talks, or anything at all, if you have anything to start from, this slide is for you. So I, I put this on here because I was really shocked about the statistic, but Did you know that you can speak about 6,000 words in 45 minutes? So think about that. My books have ranged in length from, I forgot what I said, about 8,000 up to 12,000 words. So that's like 1 to 2 hours of me speaking. So if I took this webinar, which is an hour, and used it as the basis of a book, I would have the basis of a book. And I have done that. In my second one here, I say transcribe presentations you give and shape them into a book. That's what I have done. But you can also simply talk. You can talk as if you're speaking to another person or actually have another person there. And talk to them and record it using something like Dragon Dictation, which I highly recommend. It's an incredible tool. And it's very, very easy to get a draft going from speaking. And it has the added advantage, in my point of view, of sounding conversational, of sounding like a person talking to another person instead of someone sort of sitting on high and speaking, you know, to no one. It actually— talking your book, at least as a way to get it started, it still needs to be edited and shaped into a book, but it's a beautiful, beautiful way to, I think, write about the 3 principles in particular. If you have materials, you know, look around at what you already have. How could you use it and how could you shape it into a book? Leave no stone unturned. This is another thing that I have done is I look at what posts on my blog get the most comments or views and I see if I can look for any themes there. If you're wondering what your audience really wants to hear from you, this is a very easy way to see that in black and white is to look at what they're already paying attention to. I didn't on here, but you could, if you send emails to your list, you can also look at those statistics. You know, what emails have seemed to get the most response or, you know, the highest number of opens and things like that. Those statistics can be incredibly valuable when you're trying to figure out a theme for your book if you're not sure exactly what you want to write about yet. If you are starting from scratch, there are a few suggestions I can give you to get started, and one is sort of what I was alluding to at the very, very beginning, which is what is your personal story of discovering the 3 principles? If you are looking for something that is like what no one else has, that is certainly it. And even if you just started writing that story You might start to see themes emerging there. It's a great way to get started because it's something that you know how to write about or talk about if you're using dictation to write your book. Another idea is answer this question: I wish someone would write about blank related to the principles. And now go write that book. If you have something on your mind chances are a lot of other people do too. So don't ignore those thoughts. They're there for a reason sometimes, and it can be great inspiration for you to write your book. Another thing you can do is if you're a coach and you have clients, you can ask their permission to use their stories in a book with or without their names. People's stories can be incredibly powerful and can really connect with people. Another thing that I think we don't often think about is, you know, what do people often ask you to talk about or help them with in particular? So if you are a coach and you find that your clients are generally coming to you about one specific problem, even though we know usually what the underlying problem is, you know, if they're coming to you with relationship issues or they're burned out at work or whatever it is, if you see a trend, that's another possible area for you to write your book about. And this is something that I think might seem a bit odd, but I look at the popular titles of self-development books. I also look at magazine covers, and I see, you know, what are people thinking about, what's on their minds, you know, how could I address those same topics in a book using the principles as the basis instead of whatever the the regular self-development book is doing. Because those topics are foremost on people's minds, and there's a reason why those books are selling. And because we write about the principles, we have a very unique and incredibly helpful and powerful way to help people who are looking for it. I also wanted to mention something about writing a short book. Now, when I was on Michael Neal's program yesterday, he made sort of a funny joke about my book, Aha, being, you know, a very quick read. He was very kind about it. And he actually sort of intimated that that was cool, that it was short, you know, because it was very accessible to people in that way. So I really hope that you don't think your 3 principles book has to be, you know, 250 pages. I think mine range from 60-something to 75 or 80-something in that range so far. And I've gotten a very good response based on that. So, you know, if you're feeling like you want to write something short, go for it. It's better to have written a short book and get it out there than no book at all. All right, before I jump into this part about why I like self-publishing and all, talk about that in one second. I just want to pause here to see if any questions have come to mind as I've been talking. So let me just take a quick breather and see if you have anything on your mind that I can address at this point. Greg, I like the idea of multiple short books. My original goal for my book was 50,000 to 60,000 words, Yeah, 50,000 to 60,000 words is a pretty hefty book. You know, I think, trying to think, I ghostwrote a book for someone last year. It was not a 3 Principles book. It was a marketing book, actually, and it was around 40,000 words, and that was a pretty hefty book. So I have no problem with the idea of writing books around 10,000 to 20,000 words. That's perfectly acceptable. And, you know, you can't maybe charge as high a price for them. And because, well, maybe you could, I don't know. Who am I to say? Actually, who am I to say? But, you know, I forget, somebody told me how many words are in Sydney Banks's book, The Missing Link, and it's somewhere, I think, around 10,000, maybe something like that. I may be misquoting that. But, you know, size does not equal quality, as we know. So, you know, there is nothing wrong with, with taking, you know, an idea that maybe could be in 50,000 words and splitting it into 2 books. Yeah, you know, I don't know, it can be difficult to sustain a book of that length if you're not used to writing often, and it can sort of seem very, very daunting. So that's why I'm really big on this idea of writing smaller books, just to kind of get your feet wet and get something out there and get some feedback on it and see how it— how the experience was. You know, if— if I keep thinking, you know, if everyone who has registered for these two webinars would write a 3 Principles book, a short book under 20,000 words. Just imagine how great that would be. That would just be like the coolest thing ever. You know, suddenly Amazon would be flooded with 3 Principles books. So, um, all right, I'm going to jump back over to my presentation here. I just have a couple of slides left that I think might be helpful to you. Let's see. Okay. So why I like self-publishing. It's totally liberating and it's totally fun. You know, I can't really speak about how it compares to being published by a traditional publisher because I have not had that experience. But I love the fact that I can change my book cover if I feel like it. I can change the entire book if I feel like it. I think it was, it might have been, was it? No, was it you, Greg? Maybe it wasn't. Somebody pointed out a small typo in the latest book and I went and fixed it right away and uploaded a new version. And there you go. I also changed the COVID slightly on Aha. Because I got a print proof and wasn't quite happy with the way it looked, so I just changed it. So everything is up to me. It's up to me to decide how long it is, how short it is, you know, what, what the content is, what the COVID is. I don't have the engine of a publishing company behind me, but that doesn't bother me. So I, I think that there are a lot of pluses to self-publishing. And I haven't had anyone complain about my book being self-published. Nobody has seemed to care or notice. Just a quick kind of rundown on what self-publishing is. It really isn't that complicated and it's totally doable. So I've just put the steps here and I'll run through them really quickly with you. Essentially, you start by preparing your manuscript. You write it yourself or use a ghostwriter. You have it professionally edited and proofread. You come up with a title or a subtitle. And since this, you're self-publishing it, this is totally your decision. A lot of people don't realize that in traditional publishing, the publisher gets the final say on your title, not you. How you come up with the title can be very interesting too. If you aren't sure what to title it, you could do a poll of the people on your email list. Or, you know, you can ask people in the Three Principles Community, you know, which title do you think grabs the attention more? You know, you have lots of leeway when it's your book that you're self-publishing. Then you can have the interior and the COVID designed I do this myself because I'm writing and self-publishing a lot of books. I've learned to do this process very simply myself. I don't use complicated page design, as you've seen if you've purchased any of my paperbacks, but it does the job. CreateSpace, which is owned by Amazon and is how you get the paperback out there, has a service for each of these. Interior design is very reasonably priced as as is the COVID design, I think. You can hire a private designer for a bit more money. And CreateSpace also has a free cover creator tool, which I haven't used but I understand is quite good too. So then CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing are the two services to get your book out there. This is just to have it on Amazon, which is what I prefer myself. Each step in this process is so clear, you really can't make a mistake. If something doesn't look right, they will stop you. They will call it to your attention and say, you know, something isn't right about the way this is formatted. Can you redo it? Promotion, you can do in the way that works well for you and is fun. I haven't done a lot of this yet, although it's something that I'm doing, thinking about doing more of. I recently signed up with a company called Book Launch IO so that I could have a nice landing page for each book. This is just a little screenshot of the top part of the landing page for the most recent book. That page has a sign-up for my email list and now has a video on it. It's just a really easy way to create a very professional-looking landing page for the book. It's not expensive. I think it's I want to say around $15 a month for up to like 20 sites. So it was very reasonably priced. And if you decide you don't want to do any of that, you can just write the book and or have it ghostwritten and then pay a company like BookBaby or AuthorHouse to do the rest. Although, as I mentioned earlier, you do lose some autonomy that way. And before I go into my closing, I want to ask for any more questions. I want to say the world really needs the gift of your book. Your message about the 3 principles will absolutely change someone's life. You know, I get messages from people all the time who I've never met from all over the world. Who thank me for what I have written in these books. And as we were talking about earlier, you know, my whole thinking was, well, if I could just help one person, that would be great. Well, when you, when you start to multiply that by tens and twenties and thirties and hundreds and maybe eventually thousands, it's really amazing the ability we have now to put our message into a book and self-publish it and give it to the world. I, I really feel like self-publishing in particular is just now really starting to come into its own. It's certainly not too late to, to do this. It's just, I think, the perfect time and For me, there's no more important message that we could get out there than what we've all seen with the 3 principles. So I'm ready to take a few more questions from you. There was a question that somebody wanted me to answer before, and she couldn't attend, or I don't know if she's on there. No, I don't think she could attend, so I'm going to answer that. It was about, you know, do you need to have an audience first before you release your book? You know, do you have to build an audience and have people waiting for your book? I know that some people suggest that, and that's a fine approach if that's what you want to do. I have no experience in doing that. I just put my first book out there and just kind of threw caution to the wind and said, you know, whatever happens is whatever happens. And I just didn't really worry about it. What I've noticed though is that my audience is growing with each book that I put out. More people are waiting for the next one, and I've been able to start to connect with people who aren't in the Three Principles community. So for example, I had a management association, they contact me about Mind Yoga and shared it with their newsletter subscribers. And then I said, oh, I have another book coming out about problem solving. And she said, well, as soon as that's out, I want you to get back in touch with me and I'll share that with our subscribers. So we're working on, on that for their next issue of their newsletter. So there are all kinds of different opportunities for promotion that start to arise once you actually have a book that you can't really predict ahead of time. So what other questions can I answer? We're just about at the top of the hour, and I want to be mindful of time. If you would like to book a complimentary call with me, I would love to hear about your book project or your book idea. If you go to the Offers tab below my screen, you'll see there's a blue button that says you can click here to schedule a complimentary call. And there's a green button that says click here to learn more about the 90-day program to celebrate the new year with your book. So I'll talk about that for just a couple of minutes and then see what other questions you have. Oh, Greg says, what's a typical price for printing a 10,000-word book? Great question. So when you use a service like CreateSpace, you don't have to buy the books ahead of time. They're printed on demand. So they are printed every time someone purchases them, and then you earn a percentage of each book sale. If I want— so I usually have a few copies of my books on hand. If I want to purchase this, it's, I think, around $2.15 a copy for me to buy them for myself to hand out to people. But otherwise, they're printed on demand, so You don't have to worry about that. That's really nice. Yeah, it's not like the old days where you had to buy them and stick them in your garage, right? So it doesn't really work like that. So any other questions? Yeah, very affordable, very affordable. So if you click on that green button on the offers tab, or I also have the link in the PDF that I'm gonna send out with you to you with this recording, you'll go to a page where I describe a 90-day coaching program where we will, I will really be right at your side as you get your book written. I will do the editing. I will have it proofread for you. I will walk you through the entire self-publishing process from beginning to end, getting your book designed. I'll project manage that. I'll help you get the COVID designed as well as the interior. We'll decide on what service works best for you. And I will also have, um, unlimited email access to me and 12, a minimum of 12, uh, 1-hour calls during the 3 months. So it's a really comprehensive, really thorough service because I want to get these books out there into the hands of the people who need them. So for me, it's not just about helping you get the book written. It's about getting it online and getting it out there. So that part of the process is as important to me. Hi, Darrin. The Kindle version too. Yeah, the Kindle version. When I use Amazon, what I love about Amazon, I should mention this, is that if you sell it with them exclusively, and you sign up for this one type of promotion they have, you can put it in their Kindle Unlimited, which is really cool because anyone who's a subscriber to Amazon Prime can read your book for free. But Amazon pays you anyway per page read. So anytime someone flips a page in their Kindle book that they've downloaded for free for Kindle Unlimited, you still get paid, which is really cool. June, hi June. Is it always necessary to refer to the 3 principles specifically? Not in my opinion. I don't mention the principles so far in any of the books that I have written. I have not mentioned them specifically except in a frequently asked questions chapter at the end. For me, it's only important that I give Sydney Banks some explicit credit for expressing this as the 3 principles. So I always include that line somewhere in the book. But so far, and even the book that I'm working on right now, the main body of the book does not mention the principles at all. It's really, um, and talking in a little bit less— oh, what do I want to say? You know, the 3 principles are simple, but they can sound complicated. So I'm trying to take them out of that kind of heady realm and bring them down into kind of people's more day-to-day life way of looking at things. So that's how I've approached it, but it's really up to you. You know, it's totally up to you. I hope that answered your question. If not, you know, let me know. So what other questions do you have for me? You know, if nothing else, I really just hope that listening to me has been somewhat inspirational because I just, oh, I don't know, I have this vision in my head of the whole self-development section on Amazon being overtaken by 3 principles-based books. And if I can do anything to help that happen, if I can help you to get your book on there, and, you know, that would just be an amazing experience for me to assist you in that way if I can. Whether you decide to work with me on a one-to-one basis or, you know, simply reach out to me from time to time and ask for some help. You know, any way I can support you in that, I will. Yeah, it's so cool, Greg. I love that. What a great Christmas present would be to have a self-published book. Now, you know, you may look at that timeframe and go, wow, it's the end of September. Could I really do it in 3 months? Well, I say my coaching program is 90 days because I absolutely know it's possible. Now the way that it sort of breaks down, it depends on the person of course, but I would reserve maybe the last 4 to 6 weeks for the kind of design nuts and bolts part of getting it online. And the first 6 weeks to editing something you already have, or if you're starting from scratch, writing a short book of, you know, 10 to 15,000 words, something like that. And believe me, it is completely possible for that to happen. Completely possible. I know you might think, gosh, 90 days from start to finish, how could I ever do that? Well, you know, you can, you have the capacity, as we know from our work in the principles, to do so much more than you actually think you can. And it doesn't take, you know, changing your mindset or anything like that. It's just about realizing that we all have the resources we need to do whatever we really want to do. And luckily, I personally have developed some systems that have made this easier. And if you do decide you want to work with me, those are some of the things that I'll share with you during that 90-day period, some things that will shave time off of the whole writing, editing, shaping the book process, and then things that will definitely save you time in terms of design and getting the book actually available to be sold and printed and things like that. So that's kind of where my, my expertise might be very, very helpful. Uh, Dora, what is some of the passive income you look at from a self-published book? Wow, you know, that really runs the gamut. I can share my figures with you if you like. And keep in mind that I don't do any real promotion for my books. I haven't yet. And nor am I a, you know, a big name in this community. So my books had been generating a few hundred dollars a month in sales. I think in August, they were at around $600 to $700, something like that. And it's really interesting because since I published this third one this month, that number has gone way up. So I think that this month I'll probably crack easily the $1,000 mark, if not quite a bit more, more than that, based on how things are trending and the fact that I really haven't I haven't done a whole lot to promote the book yet. So, you know, that doesn't seem like a lot of money. But if you, if you decided you wanted to actually invest in marketing, which I haven't done, I think it could be much more than that. And also you have to think about the fact that a book can give you revenue from all different kinds of avenues. You know, having a book could land you a lucrative client assignment. You know, it can get you publicity, which can bring in coaching work. So while I wouldn't necessarily say that, you know, income from books is, is the thing to shoot for, it's definitely there. But for me, the book has given— books have given me more credibility and have raised my profile. In this world that we're in. And I hope to continue to publish books that will help people and also help me, you know, keep doing this for a living. So did that answer your question, Dorn? So I'm happy to stay on here for a few more minutes if there are more questions, and You know, like I said, in the Offers tab, there's a couple of buttons you can click if you want to schedule a complimentary call. I would be thrilled to talk with you and, you know, hear about your book idea and really devote that hour to giving you as much value as I possibly can. And if you want to hear more or read more about the coaching program, you can click the green one and it'll take you over to that page on my website. Oh, you're welcome, Doren. You're welcome. What else is on people's minds? Anything about, you know, the, the actual process of self-publishing, I'm happy to answer, or any other questions you might have. I have to share with you that You know, yesterday was a day that I won't forget, and I wouldn't have had, um, a day like that. I'm glad that answered your question. I would not have had a day like that if I had not just ignored any thoughts I had that told me I shouldn't be writing these books. If I had, if I had not gone forward, I wouldn't have had the experience of being able to go on Michael's radio program and share briefly my own story, realizing that he has a very large audience and that I might have been able to help someone in that audience. It was just incredible, not to mention the fact that The way that I came across the principles was by reading Michael Neal's book. That was the very first thing that I came across and reading what he said absolutely changed my life. And the fact that he then invited me on there to talk about my book was just like, what? It was just one of those moments like, is this really happening right now? Kind of crazy. And it just showed me that we, we can do so much more than we think we can. And you have something unique to share. If you have seen something through these principles and you have been impacted by this understanding, then you have everything that you could ever need to write a book that would help someone see that for themselves, that would, as they say, gently tap them on the shoulder and wake them up to what's really happening in their experience. So I guess with that, I will— oh, let's see, June says, thoughts about the thought police have been a big factor for me. Thanks for addressing that. Yeah, June, you know, oops, sorry about the bobble there. I, I had sort of forgotten that that had been on my mind until a couple of people asked me about it, and then I definitely remembered having those thoughts myself. And like I said, just realizing, well, if that's what happens, then it'll be a learning experience for me, and I'll, I'll fix it. That's all. I'll deepen my own grounding so the next time I write about it it'll be clearer, or it'll be, you know, less outside-in, or whatever it might have been. And, and just realizing that in the end, I think this is really important, if I could leave you with this. In the end, what we're trying to share through a book isn't about us, right? It's not. It may be our story, but it's not about us. It's about— to me, it's about being in service of truth. It's about being in service of this understanding of these principles and how we can impact another person's life by being the vehicle for this understanding, for this message. That has the power to transform individuals and therefore transform the way the whole world works. And that is not an overstatement in my view. It's just not. And I really want more of us in this community to enter the conversation in this way because it's the way that a lot of people can access it. It's affordable. And makes it very, very easy for people to hear this beautiful message of the Three Principles. So I guess with that, I will, I will bring this to a close, and as I said, the PDF will be sent to you. Oh great, thank you Greg, thank you Doren, thank you everybody. The PDF of the presentation will be sent to you along with the replay, so that will go out probably about an hour, I think, after this ends. And I just want to thank you so very much for being here with me, whether you're with me live or you're watching this on the recording. It means so much to me that you have an interest in this topic of writing your own 3 Principles book. And I, oh, thank you, Greg. I'm glad you think I relit the fire. That's so cool. I am here as a resource for you. I really want to help in any way that I can. So please feel free to email me, mary@thedailyprinciples.com or mary@marieschiller.com. I'm at both places. Or, you know, book a complimentary call with me. That link will also go out in the email and I'll have it all over the place. Or take a look at the 90-day program. Whatever way that I can help you, I will help you. That is my promise. You're so welcome, June. And if anything comes to you after this webinar, because that happens to me a lot, like I'll attend a presentation and then a little while later I'll be like, oh man, I forgot to ask them that. Just email me, you know, just send me a note and I'm happy to respond. Or if we're friends on Facebook or something, you can ping me on there and, and I'll answer. I'm usually pretty quick at getting back to people. So thank you very much, everybody, for being here. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and go get writing that book. Okay, I'll talk to you all later. Thank you so much. Bye-bye now.