The World Needs Your Three Principles Book (part 1)

Hello everybody, it's just a few seconds before 3 PM here on the East Coast, so I want to welcome you to this webinar. If you could give me the hi sign in the chat box if you can see and hear me okay, that would be super. I see we have about 15 people who are online right now. Some of your names I recognize and some are new to me, which is exciting. So, um, please feel free to give me a shout out. Hi, Judy, welcome, welcome, great to have you here. I will get started in about another 30 seconds and, uh, just give people a little bit of time to come here and join us for this webinar. Hi, Massimo, Antonio, Juliette. Hi, Judy, nice to see you here. I hope everything is beautiful wherever you are in the world. It's, uh, another hot one here in the city, but that's kind of usual, typical for the summer here in New York. Hi, Claire. Hi, Lori, nice to see you here. Welcome, welcome. Well, I'll go ahead and get started. Um, my name is Mary Schiller and I want to welcome you to this webinar today, which is all about writing and primarily on self-publishing your own 3 Principles book. And I have to tell you, I was absolutely thrilled beyond words to see that we had almost 70 people register for this webinar. And even though I know a lot of them couldn't make it live, they're going to be joining us on the replay. And the reason why this was so exciting for me is because I keep thinking we need more 3 Principles books out there. So to have that much interest in this topic was just really, really wonderful and made my heart sing. So thank you. If you are watching this live, I'm loving having you here. If you're watching it on the replay, Thank you so very much for your interest. So here is what we're going to talk about on this webinar today. Yeah, isn't that great, Juliet? I'm going to attempt to jump over to a little presentation here and let's see if I can make this work. How about that? I think it's actually working. I'll jump back on camera in just one second. So we are going to be talking about writing your own 3 Principles book on this webinar. And this presentation is for you if you want to write a 3 Principles-based book or you already have written one, but you aren't sure what to do next or what the next steps might be in getting it online. If you haven't written a book yet, I'm going to give you some very practical ways to write one. And in any case, I am here to help you in any way that I can. So here's what we'll talk about. The first thing, after I introduce myself a bit more, is I'm going to explain why I love writing and self-publishing books, especially Three Principles books. I will also talk about how to know if you have a book in you to write. I will explain a little bit how a book can help you meet your professional and your personal goals. I'm going to give you tons of secrets for writing a high-quality book quickly. So that'll be sort of the practical side of things. Hi, John. I'll also talk about why it's perfectly fine to write a shorter book. I will help you with the next step if you already have a manuscript written. I will talk for a few minutes about how easy it is to self-publish. I will also touch on ghostwriting if you're curious about what a ghostwriter can do. And then I'll make sure to leave plenty of time for questions and answers. And I'll give you a way to speak with me personally. And I'll talk about a workshop idea that I have. So now I'm going to jump back on camera for just a moment. So just to, uh, explain a little bit about who I am for those of you who aren't familiar with me. Again, my name is Mary Shiller and I am a 3 Principles coach and author. So far I have written and self-published 2 principles-based books. One is called The Joy Formula and the other is called Mind Yoga, and I'll talk a little bit more about that process in a few minutes. I have spent my whole career in communications. I started as a journalist, and when I realized that journalism couldn't really pay my bills, I went into advertising and marketing, and I became a copywriter and video producer. And then I spent some time working in corporate communications, so I was doing some internal newsletters for some of the Silicon Valley firms. And eventually I found my way into teaching writing. I taught writing at the university level for several, several years and have a master's degree in education and another one in online education— in English, sorry, master's degree in English and one in online education. And after that, I moved on to actually working in communications at Columbia University. So So I kind of took all of my skills and decided to funnel them into work that I was doing at the university and did a whole lot of different kinds of communications projects while I was there. I was there for about 8 years and I left there last summer. And just about 2 years ago was when I came across the 3 principles and had a completely life-changing experience as many of us do who come across this understanding of these principles. And really from that point on, my, my professional as well as my personal life hasn't been the same. I started to talk to people about the principles in a very informal way and really realized earlier this year that I had become kind of a volunteer coach. And in the spring, I decided to make this my full-time focus. So I left all of my past career stuff behind and decided to really focus on coaching people in any way that I could to help them have a better experience of life. And one of the things that I did in that was I started writing my own books. So let me jump back over to my handy-dandy PowerPoint here. So I put this picture on this slide because really that's how this feels to me. I really, really love writing and self-publishing Three Principles books, and I'm really happy to be here with you and showing you, you know, what this has meant for me and what I think it can mean for you as well. So before I jump into kind of the nitty-gritty, I just wanted to let you know that at any time you can post a comment in that chat box or a question. I'll have one eye on that and one eye on my slides, so feel free to just jump in at any time. And I'd love to start by posing a question to you, which is, how long has it been since you've been thinking about writing your own book, or have you written a book? I'd like to hear from you where you are in this process. Have you been wanting to write a book for a long time and just haven't done it, or have you already written something and are wondering what to do next? So I'll give you a moment. Hi, Judy. Yes, I actually will send them out afterwards. I will put a link in an email to you. Lindsay has written 10,000 words already. Kim wanted to write one for several years. I think that's like a lot of people. Iris is a bit stalled, also not uncommon. Hi, Shanna. I've been waiting, wanting to write since I was 10 years old and never have. Juliet finished the first draft today. Very good. Intending to write it for 25 years. That's all right. Kim also started only 2 or 3 paragraphs in. Massimo has been working on one or thinking of one. Judy, you've started, but you keep second-guessing yourself all the time. Lori says, I've always wanted to write a book. I did write a book in a month, just a draft of a story. Well, now don't be so judgmental, Lori. It might have been good. You never know. Lori and I know each other, so I can speak candidly with her. Sue started today and you're up to 7,000 words in a day. That's incredible. You should be teaching this webinar instead. Of me. That's amazing. And Judy, I've written a series of blogs that I think could incorporate into an ebook, and that is one of the things that I will talk about. So excellent. That is so exciting. All of this creative energy is just so— I don't know, it's just amazing to me how much is out there and within us and how much we have to give the world in terms of a Three Principles book. So this is very, very exciting. Wonderful. All right. Antonio, you're working on one right now. Yeah, I remember you talking with me about that. So that's great. Claire, I'm interested in whether I have a book in me. I will answer that question for you and I'll bet you know the answer, but I will talk about that in a few minutes. So thank you so much. Wonderful, wonderful. You're jumping to my punchline, Claire, but that's fine. All right, let me go back to my, my little thing here. Let's see. Oops, hang on. There we go. So my first book that I put out was called The Joy Formula, and some of you may be familiar with this little book. What was interesting about this process and why I think this is kind of fun to share is that I had no intention of publishing The Joy Formula for anyone to purchase. It started as a free PDF ebook on my website, thedailyprinciples.com, and it was just, you know, a gift if someone subscribed. And what ended up happening was I had a few people write to me after they had read the book and they said, you know, This is really nice, this book. You should make it more widely available. And I said, well, how do I do that? And they said, well, you know, you should consider putting it online on Amazon. And I had had some experience with self-publishing before. I had written and self-published a memoir actually under a pen name in 2012. So I had some understanding of the process and I had also written and self-published a novel on Amazon, also under a pen name, which has since been taken down because I'm reworking it. So I was a little bit familiar with the process of— oh, hi Barbara, nice to see you. I was familiar with the process of getting a book online, and I thought, hmm, well, I wonder if this book is long enough because it's pretty short. It was around 8,000 words, I think. So I asked a few people to give me their feedback on that. I said, do you feel like it's long enough? You know, do you think it needs more? Should I put in some more stories of how other people have experienced the principles? And the unanimous verdict was no, that I should leave it as it was. So I, I simply edited it a little bit to to kind of fix it up in places. And then I self-published it on Amazon this past March. I made it available on Kindle and also as a paperback book. And I'll talk a little bit about how to do that a bit later. And it's a little bit hard for me to tell how many copies it has sold because of the way the sales are reported on Amazon. It's a little bit tricky. But because they— really briefly, you may have noticed if you're on Amazon that they have a Kindle Unlimited subscription. And if people are members of Kindle Unlimited and they get your book that way for free as part of their subscription, you're paid per page that is read, not per copy. So it's a little bit hard for me to tell how many copies have sold, but it's definitely been a few hundred. Copies so far, which is really exciting. I just noticed a typo in that, so I'll fix that. Uh, the next book that I put out was called Mind Yoga, and this one I put out in May of this year. I wanted to write a book specifically related to stress relief, so this is what I came up with and how we can alleviate stress very easily Through an understanding of the 3 principles. And because I had received such good feedback on the brevity of the Joy Formula, I kept this one short too. This is a little bit longer, about 12,000 words. And once again, I self-published it on Amazon for Kindle and in paperback. And this one has already sold a few hundred copies. This one has been really pretty popular so far. And I've gotten a lot of really nice feedback on this book as well. So I'm gonna jump to the next slide. So here is the next book that is coming out this month, excuse me, in September. It's about 10,000 words. And this one, I was inspired to write a book about problem solving because it's one of the areas of my life that I've really seen a dramatic improvement in. Since I came to understand the principles. So this is the next one. It's just about ready. And my goal, believe it or not, is to release at least 5 more short books before the end of the year. Many of them are already in process. So I think I should be able to hit that, if not even get 6 out before the end of the year. And the next book I have is called To Love Is to Listen. So let me come out of this so I can be back on camera. And I wanted to just tell you how much it has meant for me personally and professionally to put, put these books out there. And I'm hoping that if you, whatever stage you're in, you're all at various stages of writing and producing a book, I hope that this will inspire you to keep going. Because I have heard from people all over the world who have read these two little books. I mean, they're literally like 60 or so pages and 75 pages. I get Twitter messages from people telling me how much the book has helped them. I get emails from people, I get messages via my website from people, and I figure for every person who is contacting me and telling me how much they have appreciated hearing about the 3 principles through my book, there's probably a lot more who aren't getting in touch with me. And it's not about my ego or about, you know, how great my books are. It's really more about people are looking for answers. They want to feel better in their lives. They want to feel happier. They want to feel less stressed. They want to feel— they want to be living the life that they feel they should be living. And as we all know, everybody who is on this webinar with me today, The 3 principles are really the key to that. And if there is a way that we can get that message to more people quickly and easily, it seems to me that that's through books. Books are inexpensive, and if they are, if they are heartfelt and clearly written, people will grasp onto them and will really be helped by them. So that's my little pep talk to keep going because it's just been an amazing experience for me so far. All right, back to my slides here. And again, please feel free to pop in with a question at any time. See here. So another reason why I decided to host this webinar today is because my clients and my friends are always asking me for more Three Principles book recommendations. So on my website, thedailyprinciples.com, I have a page with books on it, although I don't have all of them there. Certainly there are more. But I'm constantly recommending the latest, you know, books by the big names. And I'm also looking for names for books by people who are lesser known. But honestly, this is something that people ask me all the time. They say, you know, oh, I've already read Michael Neal's book. I've already read Jamie Smart's books. I've already read so-and-so's books. And what more do you have? What more, what more, what more, you know? And I point them to Sydney Banks, of course, and Elsie Spittle and all of those people. And a lot of times they want something that's new and fresh. And so that's another reason why I'm so happy that you're all here today, because this is what people are looking for. This isn't just, you know, something that would be fun to do. It's what some— something that really people do want. So to answer Claire's question, do you have a book in you? My answer to that is an absolute unequivocal yes. If you have seen something through your understanding of the 3 principles, then you absolutely have something to say that will help other people. There is no question about that in my mind. As far as I'm concerned, there can never be enough books, period. And there can certainly never be enough books related to The Three Principles. And I believe that every single voice in this conversation is important. You know, when I am coaching people and when I'm talking to my friends about The Three Principles, and I'm sure this is true for you, I'd love to hear this actually. You know, are there certain authors, you can just answer in the chat box if you like, are there certain authors that connect with you or you connect with and certain authors that maybe you don't connect with in the 3 Principles community. I know for myself, I first came across the principles by reading Michael Neill's book, The Inside Out Revolution, and I really connected with that book. I recommended it to other people, and some people, it didn't— they didn't really get anything from it. But Lindsay says you connect with Elsie Spittle. Great, I love Elsie. I got a chance to meet her earlier this year briefly, which was very exciting for me. She's kind of a celebrity to me. You know, I've recommended Jamie Smart's books to people. Sometimes people like him, sometimes they don't. Lori says she has a hard time with Michael's books. Antonio says you connect with Richard Carlson. Juliet, you've connected with Michael's books, Terry Rubenstein, Jamie's, less so with Jamie Smart. Judy, Joe Bailey on addictions. John loves Elsie Spittle. So, and what's interesting too for me is like, I will read, like, I remember the first time I read Jamie Smart's book Clarity, I didn't really get it. His writing style and his voice just didn't really impact me very much. And so I put it aside. And then about 6 months later, I saw it on my Kindle again and I thought, 'You know, maybe I'll read this again.' And that time I heard something very different. So it's interesting to me how, you know, at various points in our understanding and wherever we happen to be in our state of mind, we connect with different Three Principles authors and Three Principles voices. So again, this is an encouragement from me to you that your voice is an important part of this conversation and can impact a lot of people. And I think that this is important too, because as a confession, I will tell you that I have always had a tendency to compare myself to other people. And when I first started to put my books out there, I was kind of nervous because I was like, oh my gosh, I don't write like Michael Neal. I don't write like Jamie Smart. I don't have that kind of platform. I don't know if anyone's going to listen to me. And I've been pleasantly surprised to find out that, like I said, people are hungry for these books. They really want them. And every single voice matters. People are waiting for your book. There is someone out there who can benefit from what you have to say in your voice, in your book. Or books, plural. I hope it turns out to be plural. So I hope that this is, you know, giving you some encouragement to really consider the fact that, that what you have seen and what you have to say really does matter and really can contribute to someone's life getting better. It's an amazing, amazing feeling and an amazing power that we have to take what we've seen and put it out there for people in a book. So let's talk for a minute about what your book can do. And these are things that I didn't really understand until I wrote my very first book back in 2011. Judy says, I think even if it made a difference for just one person, it would be worth it. Well, Judy, you just took the words right out of my mouth. That was beautiful because When I wrote my memoir back in 2011 and I made it available in 2012, it was all about my history with domestic violence and how I came through that. And this was pre-Principles, so I definitely need to revisit that book and write an updated version. But I was amazed at how much even a small book like that by someone with no name at all, no marketing, no nothing, people found the book, they read the book, and it, it made an impact on them. It helped them. And my whole thing when I put that book out there was just as Judy said. I thought to myself, you know, if this book can help just one person who's going through this problem, you know, or has come through it and is wondering if life can be better, then that will be worth all of this effort. And I think that that book, it's called I Am Just a Woman, and the name that I used on it to write it was Lucy Johnson. I think that that book has sold over 2,500 copies, something like that, which in the scheme of things isn't that much perhaps, but for me, that seems like a lot. So that's just been incredibly rewarding. So your book can enrich your life and— oh, you do? Oh, that's great, Shanna, thank you so much. Again, that was pre-principles, so I need to go back and rewrite that with a new ending. So, you know, your book can enrich your life and create a legacy that you can leave behind, which is a beautiful thing. Can help thousands or who knows, maybe millions of people. Oh, I'm so glad to hear that, Shanna, that's so lovely. That's so lovely. Thank you for sharing that. I'm so glad it was helpful. If you can write a 3 principles book, that just gives even more weight to the 3 principles themselves in the self-improvement arena, which to me is a big thing. You know, I've pretty much dedicated the rest of my life to sharing these principles with people, so I want even more voices in the mix. Oh, Sue, it was called I Am Just a Woman, and the name that I used was Lucy Johnson as the author. I used a pseudonym. And again, remember, it was pre-principles, so it ends before I found the principles. So just keep that in mind as you read it. Barbara says, does anyone in the group see the need for a fresh look at rediscovering self after decades of being the helper and descending into the pit of depression? I think, Barbara, that people are hungry for help, period. And certainly help with depression is a big one, no matter what the person's social role has been. That's right, Sue, I did have the principles, I just didn't understand them. But Barbara, absolutely, there's room in this for every kind of book and every kind of conversation. You know, obviously a book can raise your professional and personal profile. It can be a beautiful calling card. I had something sort of funny happen yesterday where we're trying to sell our apartment here in New York City and a realtor came by to look at it. When I had spoken to him on the phone earlier, he asked me what I did for a living. So I told him that I was a coach and a writer and he said, "Oh, when I stop by, let's chat about what you do." So as he was leaving, he said, oh yeah, I wanted to talk to you about what you do for coaching. He says, you know, I use a coach every week. I meet with a business coach who helps me with my real estate business and gives me, you know, a boost in confidence and all of that. And he says, so are you a coach, you know, like Tony Robbins, or, you know, what do you do exactly? So I said, well, I'm not exactly like Tony Robbins. So I gave him a copy of each of my two books. And said, you know, they're really short, why don't you take a look at them and if you'd like to chat later, you know, give me a call and we'll talk about it. So it's really fun to be able to give them to people as a gift and I've given them out to many people that I know as gifts. Obviously a book can also earn money for you. I don't think that this conversation would, would be complete without mentioning that. I can share with you that the two books that I have put out there right now, for which I do almost zero marketing, I should say, I don't buy ads for them. I don't really do anything specifically for them at this point. So right now they're basically being discovered via Amazon search engine from people coming to my website and things like that, are starting to earn me several hundred dollars a month, which again is not going to make me a millionaire, but it's certainly more than I ever expected them to earn. So I'm approaching the $1,000 a month mark, which would be amazing. So that's kind of fun. Certainly a book can become the basis of coaching programs and courses that you create. You can spin off into all kinds of different workshops and things like that. It can create speaking and partnership opportunities. That's one thing that's been really fun for me too, is that I've been able to appear on several webinars and podcasts and other programs based on the fact that I've written a couple of books and people have heard of me. And honestly, the sky is the limit with this. Anything is possible with books, and I can only see this growing. With the, the popularity of self-publishing now and, and just how easy it is to get a book created. So I'm going to just stop there for a quick second. Let me come back on camera here. I'm going to stop there for a quick second before I jump into the next section and just see if anyone has any other questions or comments so far. I will pause to give you a second to, to think about that since we're about at the halfway point. What's coming up next is I will share some ways that you can write a book quickly, because I think a lot of us can get stalled, as somebody was saying earlier, and feel discouraged. And that's the last thing I want for you. I want you to have some tools at your disposal to get your book together quickly. So any questions? Sue, why haven't you promoted your books and just left them to be discovered? That's a great question. I think it just never really occurred to me. I know this sounds crazy, but it never really occurred to me to really focus on promoting them until recently. And I'm not sure why that was, except that I think I wanted to just see how they had been received and, and to see if people were really getting something from them before I put some muscle behind promotion, meaning some cash perhaps in advertising on Facebook and things like that. So I just recently launched two websites, one for each of the first two books. They're just for the sites, and I will show you one of them in a little bit. So that was kind of my first step into doing something promotion-wise. Lindsay says, so excited, had the belief that my book needed to be 50K words. No, you don't need to have it that long. Barbara, do your books open the opportunity for free online courses or coaching? I'll come back to you in a second, Judy. Yes, I have. In the books, I say, you know, people can get in touch with me and I let them know where to find me. I certainly have had conversations with people as a result of them reading the books. So it is a nice gateway if that's how you'd like to use it. Absolutely. I recently also taught a course in a setup just like this called Mind Yoga Live, where I had 4 90-minute webinars where I walked the participants through the poses, the poses of mind yoga related to the principles in a live webinar setting like this. So absolutely, that's a great idea. And Judy says, I saw someone asking for funding to publish a book and they were wanting to— was that $10,000, which was a bit scary? Interesting. Maybe they were looking for someone to help them get their book published by a traditional publisher and needed to pay someone to create the proposal or help them write a draft. I'm not really sure because it certainly hasn't cost me hardly anything to do this. I'll talk about that in, in a few minutes. Oh, I'm glad you like that class, Judy. Yeah, that was a fun class. Mind Yoga Live was really fun. I enjoyed that. So let me go back to my presentation here. And now I'm going to talk with you a little bit about how you can write a high-quality book quickly. Lori says Hay House has a self-publishing department. You have to pay depending on what you want to do. Yeah, Lori, there's a few different ways to do this, so I'm going to come back to that question because that's a biggie, and I'll compare and contrast what I did with the memoir, the I Am Just a Woman that I self-published back in 2012, versus what I've done with these books. So that's a great question. So here are some of my secrets for writing a high-quality book quickly. The first one is the biggest for me, and that is dictating your book. I use a tool called Dragon Dictation. I don't know if some of you have heard of that or you may have it yourselves, but I find it to be absolutely indispensable. It is an incredibly accurate tool, I have found. Gradually gets to know your voice the more that you use it. Don't ask me how they do that. I find that really incredible. It's a little spooky. But the more you use it, the more accurate it takes down what you say. It also has a feature that if I have recorded something on an audio, I can drop the audio into Dragon and it will transcribe it from an audio that I've already recorded. So for example, if I were to take the audio from this webinar and drop it into Dragon, it would transcribe that. So you can either speak directly into it and have it type out what you're saying live, or it can take an audio recording that you've already done and have it transcribed, which is an incredibly amazing tool. I can't remember what the cost of it is. I want to say it's around $200. It's been worth every penny. I use it all the time. Kim, wow, that's cool. I have a series of podcasts I'd like to make into a book. Yeah, you have to check out Dragon Dictation. It is awesome. And it's for both PC and Mac. I have a Mac and it works really, really well. So as I said, you can transcribe presentations that you give and then shape them into a book. The next, the actually the book that is coming out that I mentioned this month called Aha! About problem solving started as a talk that I gave. I had a free call where I invited people to come and talk about problem solving. And then I exported the audio and I put it into Dragon and got it transcribed in there and shaped it into a book. I added a couple of chapters to it and kind of switched things around a little bit. But it was a huge, huge time saver and it was something that I wanted to do anyway. I'm now looking at creating courses or webinars like this on different topics that I know people are interested in, getting them transcribed, and using those as a basis for the books that I'm working on the rest of this year. The next point also has been a huge time saver. Do you have an audio or video course that you've already created? You can get it transcribed and edit it into a book. So the book that I am working on next about listening actually started as an audio course. So I had recorded a series of 7 or 8 audios about how to listen in a new way, and I was realizing that that would actually make a really good book. So again, I took that transcription and I'm now shaping that into a short book. You can also have someone interview you, record the interviews, and then transcribe them. So if you're feeling like you're not sure if you can just speak your book or, you know, talk in a way that's, you know, fluent, you could write out a series of questions, give them to someone, and then have them interview you, like by Skype or There's a recording device you can use with Skype. You can record that and then get that transcribed. If you want to have your audios transcribed professionally, you can do that as well. Oh, thank you, Judy. That's nice. I've been wondering how I could do that sort of efficiently. I have so many audio recordings on thedailyprinciples.com now. It would take me a while to do that. If I wanted to have somebody transcribe something for me, if I didn't want to do it myself, there are lots of services available for that. One of the ones that I have found to be quite good is called Rev, rev.com. They charge $1 per minute of recorded audio. If you had a 1-hour audio, that would be $60. It's pretty reasonable. And I found them to do a good job. Again, it's Rev.com. I'll type that in here. All right. So I have another whole slide of secrets right here. So do you write a blog? Use your blog post as a basis, as the basis for a book. I am all about repurposing. So when I was working in communications, like at the university, for example, we had to send out a lot of emails to people all the time, marketing types of emails, and we repurposed everything all the time. We took blog posts that professors had written and we turned them into emails, or we took videos and put them in the emails. So Really, if you look around, you actually have a lot of material already available to you. If you have any sort of blog that you've kept or other materials that you've written or prepared, there's a wealth of stuff in there for a book. You can also start writing your book using your blog. Now, for those of you who earlier said you kind of get stuck stalled, this could be a really great tactic for you. So this is what I did when I wanted to write my memoir. I had really struggled to write that book for several years. I just couldn't seem to get going. So what I decided to do was create a blog, and I said to myself, okay, every day I'm going to write 250 words on this blog, and that's going to be how I'm going to write this book. So every day, whatever was on my mind about my experience with domestic violence and that whole relationship, I just wrote a minimum of 250 words on a blog post and published it. When I felt like I had written everything about that experience that I thought would work well in a book, which was several months, it took several months to get enough, I took all of the blog posts, I exported them, And then I edited them into the book. And surprisingly, it really didn't take that long to do that part. That actually went fairly smoothly. So if you're looking for a way to, to write something, but you don't feel like you have the motivation to do it, just setting a daily goal of sharing a blog post a day, writing a blog post a day, that was really, really helpful to me. And again, search through everything that you've already done because there's probably a lot more than you realize. One other thing that I do is I set a deadline by naming the release date publicly of the book. So this really helps to get things moving. People are waiting. I had meant to release the Aha book in August, but as some of you may know who follow my blog, my father-in-law passed away a couple of weeks ago. And so we had a lot of things going on in the family, so a lot of things got pushed back on timelines. So now the book is going to be coming out within the next couple of weeks, but it really is a good, uh, how shall I say, prod if people are waiting for your book. All right, next. So I mentioned that I had originally thought I needed to write a long 3 Principles book in order for people to take it seriously, I guess is what I thought. You know, I looked at the books by the other major 3 Principles offers, authors, and they were all kind of the typical length for a book. And when I got that feedback that people actually really appreciated appreciated the brevity of The Joy Formula and of Mind Yoga. That showed me that there was a gap in the marketplace, as they say. So if you're feeling like, you know, you need to write 40 or 50,000 words or even 25 to 35,000 words for a book to really convey what you think people need to hear, You may be surprised to find out that people are actually very, very appreciative of something that's concise. Kim, I had never considered brevity either. You know, the first book that I put out there, the I Am Just a Woman book, I'll put that name here in case you guys are curious about it. That was a more typical book length. Book. And it just never occurred to me that I could take something that was, you know, 8,000 words or whatever the Joy Formula is, something like that, and put that out as a book. But I did, and I have it in paperback as well. And actually, a lot of people buy the paperbacks these days, so that's an important thing to consider. So I feel like there is, um, uh, right, exactly, Lindsay. The Missing Link's only about 6,000 words. That's exactly right. And look how much is in there. I mean, you know, so if, if you have a singular message that you want to convey, you know, especially if the topic is very focused, I think a short book is absolutely fine and acceptable and actually desirable in a lot of cases. I wanted to also just chat with you for a couple of minutes if you already have a manuscript and you're not sure what you should do with it next. So if you already have a manuscript, I think some of you said you already do, which is great. I know Juliette said you finished writing yours today. That's wonderful. Self-publishing can be a good alternative to traditional publishing unless you really want to try to get an agent for your book. I have decided personally that at least for now I have really no interest in publishing with a traditional publisher. With a traditional publisher, of course, I would have more promotion oomph behind me. But I also feel like for me, I like having the control over my books. I like being able to make additions and subtractions to them and putting up new additions whenever I feel like it. I like the ability to self-publish a book a month if I feel like doing that without a publisher telling me what I can and can't do. And I don't think, and this is just my impression, so I may be wrong and maybe you have a different take on this, but I don't really think that if somebody, I don't think people are really looking to see anymore, is this published by, you know, Random House or Hay House, or is this a self-published book and maybe a self-published book isn't as good quality. I don't really think people are all that concerned about that anymore. Amazon themselves have made some tremendous changes, I think positive changes, towards raising the quality of the books that are self-published. That's why they pay now per page read instead of per purchase, because the more pages read indicates that people believe it's a higher quality book. And so I just personally am not interested in going the traditional route, at least not at this time. The one thing that is absolutely essential is having an editor. There's really no way around this part of the process. If you have a manuscript already or if you're working on one, you, you simply can't move forward towards putting it out for public consumption without having somebody read through it. And give you their impressions. So, you know, there's a couple of different kinds of editing. There's somebody who edits for content, so they will tell you, you know, I think this chapter needs more examples, or I'm not sure that this chapter is necessary, or things like that. And then there's also somebody who can edit for the writing and grammar and things like that. And then there's also a proofreader, of course, who looks for errors. But this is one part of the process of putting a book together that is an absolute must. So on this slide, I have a list of the things that I do to get my books published and online. So I wanted to just run through this because it's actually a lot easier than you might think to self-publish a book. Before I launch into this, let me just ask real quick. Has anybody watching this today, have you self-published a book before? Has anybody tried this either using Amazon directly or going through another service? Antonio says, 3. Antonio, did you do them yourself or did you use another service? For example, when I did the I Am Just a Woman book, I used a company called BookBaby to handle everything for me because I, at that time, I wasn't interested in learning about self-publishing. I just wanted someone to deal with everything. So I gave them the manuscript and the COVID that a friend of mine designed and they took care of everything else. And in retrospect, I wish I had not done it that way. I wish that I had taken the time to learn how to do it myself because it's a lot more— you have a lot more flexibility when you do it on your own. So for example, if I wanted to upload a new edition of I Am Just a Woman, I would actually have to unpublish the book as it is now, take it down, and redo the whole thing and republish it myself. So BookBaby won't allow me to just give them a new edition. I actually have to take the book down and start over, essentially. Antonio says, "2 you did by myself, the first one with a publishing company." Oh great, excellent. So my personal recommendation is that because it's so easy to do this yourself, I really suggest that people learn this process and have complete control over, um, the book editions and how it's being distributed and everything, because it's just not that hard. So I do all my own writing. I don't use a ghostwriter. As I mentioned, sometimes it's a brand new idea, but sometimes it's repurposed. I'm lucky that my husband is my editor. He's also a writer. And we both do the proofreading. So after he has gone through and edited the book, we'll set it aside for a couple of days and then we'll go back and do a proofread. So I use CreateSpace, which is owned by Amazon, for the paperbacks and Kindle Direct Publishing for the Kindle version. And for these books, I only publish on Amazon. I have I have tried publishing on some of the other platforms like Barnes and Noble and things like that. And the sales are so meager on those other sites compared to Amazon. And Amazon gives you so many opportunities for promotion within the Amazon platform that it just started to seem kind of silly for me to publish on those other sites. So I am exclusively with Amazon. I do the interior design myself. I do not know how to use any fancy design software, so I use a simple Microsoft Word template. And I think I might have actually downloaded that from CreateSpace. CreateSpace is an incredibly helpful website with just so much, so many wonderful supportive tutorials. And great customer service. So you can basically learn everything through CreateSpace. And I do the COVID design of the paperback using their guidelines. They're very, very simple. I do the covers themselves using an online tool called Canva. And I use royalty-free artwork that's available on Canva. I do have a paid subscription to Canva in order to do that, but it's like $10 a month, something like that. Then for promotion, as I mentioned, I haven't really done much so far. I just signed up with booklaunch.io, that should be a dot, not a comma, for a landing page for each book. If you go to either of those sites, you can see an example. I'm not sure if I can show you. Let me see if I can. Let's see how tricky this is. Oops. Looks like I can't show you that very well. Let me, let me try. I love technology. Hang on. No, it's not letting me. Okay, no worries. So let me just take a pause there for a quick second to see if you have any questions about what I just went over. In regards to self-publishing. Let me go ahead and put that list back on the screen. That was a very, very quick overview, I realize. And you'll probably have more questions later, which is why you can email me. But honestly, it probably takes me now about, um, maybe a couple of days to lay the book out on the interior. And depending on how complicated I make the COVID that that maybe takes me another day to put that together. The, the process of uploading the books onto Amazon could not be simpler. I really can't speak highly enough for Amazon's services in this regard. They are incredibly, incredibly helpful. In fact, I'll give you an example of something where I had uploaded a slightly revised version of Mind Yoga. I had found a mistake in it that I wanted to correct. And I noticed that when I uploaded it, something wasn't looking quite right. So I emailed— excuse me, I called CreateSpace. Someone actually picked up the phone and talked to me and got it fixed within about 15 minutes. They have really, really good customer service. Really good. Okay. I'm going to keep going, and then I'm going to pause for some Q&A. What about ghostwriting? Has anyone on this webinar— Yes, Laura, CreateSpace is through Amazon. Yes, it's an Amazon company. They distribute your book for you. It's a print-on-demand service, so you don't have to buy a bunch of copies of the books. They print a copy every time someone buys one. And they do it quickly. If you've bought any of the paperbacks in that way, it doesn't take long at all. It takes 2 or 3 days for it to get to the person. It's really, really quick. Let me just chat for a second about ghostwriting. Ghostwriting can be a good choice if you're not confident in your own writing ability. Lindsay, no, they're not just a US company. They operate throughout the world. The books that I self-publish are available on every single Amazon website. They're all, all of my books are in English, but they're available everywhere. And I get book sales from all over the world, including Japan and all of the Amazon sites. So ghostwriting could be a good option if you're not confident in your own writing ability. Ghostwriting doesn't come cheap. For a professional ghostwriter, you're gonna pay several thousand dollars for them to ghostwrite your book. And in a Three Principles context, it could be a little tricky if they're not familiar with the principles, depending on their skill level. But as for an example, I've done ghostwriting for people in the past, and probably the minimum I would charge for What I would call a typical length book of about 30,000 words would start at around $8,000 for ghostwriting services. So an alternative to ghostwriting is to work closely with an editor or coach who can guide you through the writing and self-publishing process. Or another idea is to join a writing workshop class or group. Um, there are lots and lots of those online and locally, and I'm considering starting one myself. For all of those of you who are interested in pursuing this. So that may be something I'll offer in the near future. So where are we? Final slide before I jump into Q&A. The world needs your book. And I was thinking, like I said earlier, imagine what could happen if everyone who registered for this webinar, 70 people, wrote and self-published a 3 Principles book. I mean, that would be just so amazing. Think of all the new voices that would be online and available to people. That just gets me really, really excited. So Q&A. So Lori says, do you start with an outline when writing your book? I am not good with outlines. I never have been. Never really liked them in school. So no, I don't. Usually what I do is I, I write everything out, usually not in the correct order, and then I kind of swish things around and figure out, you know, where I might need to fill in some gaps and what order things should go in. But no, I don't, I don't use an outline, much to my dismay. I've just never been able to do that. I'm trying it with some fiction fiction that I'm writing, but I have yet to be able to do that for nonfiction. Let's see, one last thing here. Oops. So if you are interested in talking with me about your book project, if you go to the little place underneath this video, it says offers. You can click on the button there and schedule a complimentary call with me. And that will also be, that link will also be sent in a follow-up email with this webinar replay in case you miss it. But I would love to offer you a complimentary call to see what I can do to help you get your book project off the ground or into the next stage. Sue says, "How much should I expect to pay someone for editing?" There's a really, really wide range of, of what people will charge depending on their experience. The typical hourly rate for editing is probably somewhere between $50 and $100 an hour. And it also depends on how quick the person edits the book. But Somewhere in that range, which is kind of a wide range, I realize, but it depends on the person's experience, um, should be about right and will probably get you the quality that you're looking for. My husband and I were just talking about this the other day, that with things like ghostwriting and editing, it's one of the few areas in life where you really do get what you pay for. I've learned that the hard way, and I know for myself, being on the other side and being on the professional writer and editor side that people don't often appreciate what they're receiving until they hire someone who's not up to snuff, and then they'll come back to me and say, I should have listened to you. But really, it's something that is worth what they're earning because it can really make the difference in the quality of your book. So it's not something to, to try and skimp on, is what I've seen. What other questions does anyone have? We're just about at the top of the hour. I'm happy to stay over a little bit longer. I'd love to hear any questions that you have. And again, I will, I'm more than happy to speak with you personally. You're free to schedule a call with me. Anytime this month. I think that calendar link goes all the way through October. I really was so thrilled to see the interest in this topic that I'm thinking that I want to make this more of a focus of what I'm doing professionally as well, is supporting those of us in this community who really want to put our understanding of the principles into book form. And Juliette, how did you arrive at the prices for your ebooks and paperbacks? That's a good question. Luckily, Amazon helps with that. So for the paperback, they will suggest a price when you upload the book and it reads like how many pages it is and what categories it's in. It will algorithmically compare your book to those and it will suggest a price that you can take or leave. And generally I've taken the price For the Kindle books, the reason I have them at $2.99 is because anything $2.99 and over, um, I earn a 70% commission on each sale. If it's under $2.99, that commission drops to 30%. So you'll pretty much always see people trying to price their Kindle books at $2.99 or above. That's another thing that's really nice about self-publishing is that the book is set, the book price is set by me. It's not up to a publisher to decide how much my book should be sold for. I have control over that, which I really like. And I've actually thought about, you know, trying a slightly higher priced one for the next one, maybe trying it at $3.99 and seeing what happens because it's all a fun experiment. But for now, they're at $2.99, and the paperbacks, I think, are around $5.99 or something. The price varies a little bit depending on which country site you look at. So what other questions? More questions. You know, really— oh, great, Monica, that's— I'm glad that was helpful to you. You know, My daughter, just before I came on, she says, now, Mom, don't make this a 3 principles webinar, you know, make it practical. People need practical ideas. So I said, really, it's— it is a lot of the practical stuff, but it is also to me about understanding that we have— Lindsay says no, make it a 3B. You know, we have so much to share with people and we all have whatever we need to share that. We have the resources to get a book written. We have the resources to get a book online. You know, as Michael Neal sometimes has said, you know, there's— thank you, Antonio. There's all kinds of, what does he call them, invisible giants around who are waiting to step in when we need help. And, and offer that kind of support. And I really want to reiterate that I want you to use me in that way. I was, you know, a writing teacher for a long time. I love helping people to get their ideas onto paper. And now that I have some more understanding of the self-publishing part of things, I would love to be a resource. Let's go back. Judy, can you change the prices? Yes, You can change the prices anytime you want. If your book is exclusively with Amazon, you can set the price for free for, I forget what it is, 5 days per calendar year or something like that. I forget exactly what the parameters are, but yes, you can give the books away for free for a period of time. So that's fun. Judy, yes, I am so enthusiastic. It's hard for me to hide it. Claire, glad this has been a bit demystifying of things. Oh, thank you, Kim. That's so nice. Juliette, glad this has been helpful. And John, yes, I hope this was informative. It really is not as hard as it looks. You know, you kind of see all these moving parts and you're like, oh my gosh, you know, could I really do this? Could I really come up with a good idea and then get it on? Paper, you know, get someone to edit it and, and all of that. And it really isn't as complex as it looks. It's kind of one step at a time. And there is so much support and help even outside of me. There's so much out there that is really, really helpful and good information about, about creating your own book that it's, you know, there's really nothing standing in our way anymore. Oh, thank you, Barbara. I'm glad you liked it. Sue, yeah, it's really, you know, I am not trying to say anything disrespectful about traditional publishers. I still think they have a tremendously important role culturally and all of that. I really do. I also feel though that the time is now for self-publishing. I had originally thought that maybe I was sort of catching it on the way out, you know, that it sort of reached its peak, but I think that I was wrong about that. I think it's really actually just starting to come into its own, and I've seen, and I have personally read extraordinarily high-quality books that have been written and self-published. So I think the quality is just going to continue to go up. Let's see. Ivana, can you do a course on how to get better at writing? I can try that, certainly. Antonia, what can you say about being a perfectionist? You know, there is no book published that is without errors in it, even by the traditional publishers. So if you're worried about publishing something with a mistake, you know, like a typo or something, don't— that's not something to even be concerned about because every single book has a typo or more than one in it. And if you self-publish, as soon as you find the typo like I did, you can just fix it. It's not permanent. I also feel like it's really great to put something out there and get feedback on it first. So that's what I did with The Joy Formula. You know, I put it out there thinking, you know, maybe I'll make this into a longer book. And I got great feedback from people. And then I felt more comfortable about putting it out there for general consumption. So that's a way to sort of get around your perfectionism, is to share it with people early and see what they think. Oh, thank you, Linda. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. Oh, Judy, that's so nice. Copyright issues, that's a good question, Barbara. So, you know, whenever you write something or produce something, it's automatically copyrighted. So even this webinar that I'm doing right now is automatically copyrighted. So there's nothing, no extra step that you have to take to copyright your work. As soon as you have created it, whether you've put it into, you know, book form or not, it's already copyrighted. So that issue is not really something that I've had to deal with. If I'm missing something in your question, Barbara, please let me know. Sue, do you need ISBN thingies? Yes, but CreateSpace makes that very simple. So as you're going through the process of putting your book on CreateSpace if you want to do a paperback version, which I recommend that everybody do because they're very popular still. That's part of the process. It's very, very simple. They have a few different options, but they're very clearly explained and it's very easy. Same with if you just did a Kindle book, it's all part of that process as well. Lindsay, do you need people's permission if you quote them? That's a good question. If I were going to do a book where I included, let's say, client stories, you know, as case studies, I would definitely have their permission in writing for me to use their story in the book. And I might even offer them a percentage of the sales of the book or something like that as a thank you. Or if they didn't care about that, then we would just make sure that that was part of the arrangement. If you quote someone minimally, in a book, you know, like, I forget what the actual parameters are, so don't quote me on this, but if you use just a very short, you know, a couple of sentences, you don't need to get their permission for that. That's considered fair use. But anything that's more lengthy, you absolutely would have to have written permission, not just verbal, but written. Barbara, I was referring to materials might use— oh, right. Okay, so that's what I was just saying. Is that if I were ever going to, let's say, want to use something from one of Michael Neal's books, I would definitely have to have his written permission to do that. I couldn't just take, you know, a full paragraph from his book and use it without asking his permission. So the books that I have written so far, the only thing that I have ever used is maybe a sentence from someone else. I've used a couple of Sydney Banks quotes and things like that, but nothing of any real substance. So I can— I'll hang around for a few more minutes if anyone has more questions. I'm happy to answer. And again, if you want to schedule a complimentary call with me, click on the little Offers tab and you'll see you can click here where it says click here, or you can click on the blue button and we can have a conversation specifically about about what you would like to do with a book, where you are in the process, you know, anything that I can do to support you, I would love to do that. You know, and not to put too fine a point on this, but you know, the 3 principles has just, has just been that This whole understanding of the principles has made such an impact on so many people, and I feel like one of the areas where we're not being heard yet is in this arena of books, that it'd be— it would be just lovely to have more and more books available for people because they are so easy for people to access. You know, it's a little bit harder for people to access presentations like this, but it's easy for them to go on Amazon and do a search for stress relief or whatever it is that they're dealing with and find a selection of books. And I would love for more of those to be 3 Principles-based. Uh, Judy, thank you, glad this was helpful. Um, uh, Barbara, in academia would get around the permission thing by referencing the publication page numbers, etc.? It would— I think it would really depend on how much you were quoting. I just am more comfortable with asking for someone's permission if I'm going to use anything more than about a sentence, is kind of where I come down on that. I would just rather ask someone's permission first and have them respond yes or no. But it really depends on how much you want to use of someone else's work, I think, is what it comes down to. Any other questions about— I know I went through the self-publishing part rather quickly, but really that was just to kind of give you an overview of what's involved. I can also do another webinar that goes into that in more depth if that would be helpful. Judy, you never quite know what impact a simple sentence can have for someone. Look at Sydney Banks' initial insight. Yeah, exactly. Right, Judy? Exactly. Antonio, I'm so glad this has been helpful. I will hang on here for like 2 more minutes and see what other questions come through because I know we've gone over our 1 hour. And I have just so appreciated your attention and participation and your questions. And I will send out the the presentation as well in a link, so expect that. I'll fix it up in this PDF and make it look all nice so you can have that for reference. And feel free to— you can also email me if you would rather get in touch with me that way. I have a couple of different email addresses. I'll put them here: mary@marieschuller.com Oops, if I could type, or mary@thedailyprinciples.com. You can reach out to me that way. Um, oh great, Sue, I'm excited that you booked a session. That's awesome. I can't wait to hear, uh, what I can do to help. And again, thank you all so much for being here live, and if you're watching on the replay, I really appreciate your attention and your interest in this topic. Let's flood Amazon with a bunch more Three Principles books and really help to raise the awareness of this incredibly powerful understanding with more and more and more people. Barbara, what was your question? Did I miss it? About— oh, where that people who have Windows cannot get into my webinar. No, I did not know that. I did not know that. I know that this works best with Chrome, and that's about all I know. I will look into that and see if I can find anything out about that, but I haven't had that question come up before. I hope this wasn't a problem for you, Barbara. Thank you all for being here. Thank you, Antonio. Again, any questions that come come up afterwards, which I'm sure there will be, feel free to drop me a line or get in touch with me by just replying to an email, and I will see what I could do to be of support to you. Thank you, everybody. I can't wait to read your books. Thank you, Juliet. Thank you, Ivana. Thank you, everybody. Let me see everybody's name who was here live. Ewan, Lori, Lizzie, Hega, Louise, John, Kim, Juliet, Barbara, Lynn, Debbie, Antonio, Judy, Iden, Sue, Lindsay, Massimo, Marg, Regula, Iris, Merritt, Martine, Claire, Linda, Monica, Ivana, Judy, and Shanna. Yay! And to everybody on the replay, thank you for being here. I will talk to you again very soon, and I'll probably do another one of these because I can see that there's interest and I want to support you. Thank you so much. Bye everybody. Give me a wave on the chat. Goodbye. I'll talk to you again soon. Bye. Waving. Bye everybody. Take care. Thank you so much.