Last week, Pace talked in depth about spirituality, both in general and personally. This kicked off a new series – we’re going to do a series of posts about Iron Pentacle.

Sounds witchy. What is it?

It is witchy! Iron Pentacle is a tool used by Reclaiming and Feri witches (and others, but mostly those two groups). It’s deep self-work. It’s magick. It’s spirit. It’s about sex, pride, self, power, and passion. It loosens stuck stuff. It opens closed stuff. It’s digging down and clearing out. It’s epiphany-inducing. It’s often tear-inducing. It’s, um, apparently hard to put into words. Witchy things are often hard for me to put into words.

That’s cute, but very woo-woo.

Okay, I can do this. We recently took an Iron Pentacle class with two teachers, Kira and Helix. They were an incredible team. They were kind, loving, open, and supportive of our work – even while entrenched in their own work (teaching self-work and magick is learning self-work and magick). In the class, we went through each point on the pentacle:

So, we focus on one point at a time, and we connect and ground, center, open up, breathe, listen…

And then I’m back to talking like I’m in ritual. Hmm. Apparently, writing about witchy stuff in a non-woo-woo way is quite difficult for me, so I’m going to pass the buck to Pace.

Take it away, Pace!

Thanks, Kye. (:

The Iron Pentacle is a concept. It’s a mental and spiritual tool. Like we talked about last week, you don’t need to believe anything for it to work for you. It will work whether you believe anything in particular or not.

But what does it do?

It aligns your head, heart, and body. It aligns you with your Higher Self. What that means in practical terms is that when you make important decisions after balancing yourself with the Iron Pentacle, you’re far less likely to regret them later.

It grounds you and energizes you. When you’re feeling scatterbrained, running the Iron Pentacle can help you get back to earth and feel centered again

It teaches you about yourself. If you have issues about sex, pride, self, power, or passion (and if you’re human, you probably do), you’ll feel blockages in different points of the Iron Pentacle. Sometimes just working through the Iron Pentacle can unstick the blockages, and sometimes it just points the way.

Sounds intriguing!

We learned so much in our Iron Pentacle class that we have about a dozen blog posts to share with you on the subject. We’ll be posting about Iron Pentacle every Friday for the foreseeable future. So if you want to learn more stuff that is spectacular (and ironly pentacular), just keep reading! (:

Hayden Tompkins of Through The Illusion has posted a review of our book, The Usual Error, that totally rocks our socks. Here it is!

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 3: Different personality types

People have different personality types. This will cause differences in communication styles, but also causes more fundamental differences in what people want and how people think. It’s no surprise that if people see the world in different ways, they will communicate about it in different ways.

Personality tests are fun and informative when used to explore different personality types. Are you an ENFP? A Random Gentle Love Master? An Enneatype 7? There are hundreds of personality tests out there; have some fun taking them with your partners and friends and discuss your results. These tests are often either eerily accurate or extremely off the mark; either way, they can provide good insight into the personalities of those with whom you interact on a regular basis.

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 3: Different personality types (web page)

With help from Kyeli, Havi, and Steve, I had an amazing conversation with myself. I’d like to share it with you.

Kyeli: “Are you sure you still want to do the time planning thing right now? Because if you’d like to do some healing or muscle testing to help with your sniffling first, that’s totally–”

Pace: (brusquely) “No. Later. Let’s go!”

Kyeli: “Why are you snapping at me?”

Pace: “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to snap at you; I was speaking shortly because I’m excited about doing the time planning thing.”

Kyeli: “Oh, okay. Cool.”

Pace: “You know, this happens a lot. I use a hurried or brusque tone and you feel snapped at. Can we talk about it to see if we can make it better in the future?”

Kyeli: “Sure, of course.”

Pace: “It’s the headspace/heartspace thing again. When I’m in heartspace, I speak slowly and calmly. But when I’m in headspace, when I’m focused on a task or excited about something, I speak quickly and I rush. That’s all.”

Kyeli: “Well, when you’re in headspace, I feel like I can’t keep up with you. I feel like you’re irritated at me for being so slow.”

Pace: “Yeah, I see how you would feel that way. For me, it doesn’t mean that I’m irritated with you; I’m just excited and anxious to get to the next awesome thing.”

Kyeli: “Right, and I understand that. But what often happens is that you cut me off in mid-sentence, so I don’t feel–”

Pace: “Right! You don’t feel heard! That makes sense. Oh. I just did it again, didn’t I? Oh. I’m sorry.”

Kyeli: *listens*

Pace: “This is so frustrating. Every time I think I’ve dealt with this headspace/heartspace thing, it keeps coming back up. I try to accept the headspace part of myself, but it’s hard when it causes so much friction. Sometimes I feel like you only love the heartspace part of me and you resent the headspace part of me. I mean, I know you love and accept all of me and blahblahblah, but–”

Kyeli: “Whoa. That’s a really important thing that you totally trivialized! I love and accept all of you. Heartspace and headspace. All of you, Pace.”

Pace: “I’m sorry, honey. It’s just that when I’m feeling conflicted and afraid like this, I don’t feel loved. I feel the friction and the tension, and that overpowers the love. I know that you love and accept all of me, but when I’m feeling like this, it doesn’t sink in.”

Kyeli: “Well, I’m sure that we can come up with a way to help it sink in…”

Pace: *snaps fingers*

Kyeli: “What?”

Pace: “I just had an epiphany!”

Kyeli: “What is it?”

Pace: “It came from something Steve and I were talking about. I thought of two other labels for the heartspace part of me and the headspace part of me. Love and Power. Love Pace and Power Pace.”

Kyeli: “Whoa, you look sick to your stomach. Are you okay?”

Pace: “Yeah, I’m great! That was my mind-boggling epiphany look. I just had another one from something Havi said. I need to have a conversation with myself. Okay?”

Kyeli: “Okay!” *listens, witnesses*

Pace: “Hey, Power Pace. I’d like to talk to you, okay? Okay. First of all, I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. I’m sorry for resenting you and trying to kill you and trying to push you down into a corner and tell you that you’re bad. Because now I understand that all along, you were trying to help me.

“You were trying to help me be worthy of love. I picked up the message that I was worthy of love if. I’m worthy of love if I get A’s in school, I’m worthy of love if I get all my to-do items done, I’m worthy of love if I’m successful, I’m worthy of love if I do good things for others. So you’ve been doing your best to help me be worthy of love. You’ve been making sure I stay on track, making sure I stay focused, making sure I stay dedicated and efficient. So that I’ll be worthy of being loved.

“Thank you. I really appreciate you.

“I’m sorry for saying all those mean things about you. I didn’t understand that you were trying to help me, and until now I didn’t understand how you were trying to help me. But there’s something important that I want to tell you now.

“I love you. I love you no matter what. I love me no matter what. I love you, me, even if we don’t get all our to-do items done. I love you even if we hurt those we love. I love you if we’re successful, I love you if we fail. I love me even when I’m mean. I love you all the time. Kyeli loves us too. She loves all of us. So it’s okay. You’ve done a good job, and it’s okay now. It’s safe. We’re on the same team. I respect you, I appreciate you, and I love you.”

Power Pace & Love Pace: *cry, embrace, love*

Kyeli & Pace: *cry, embrace, love*

For most people, religion is the only way they get their spirituality and the only way they get their personal growth. I want to open-source spirituality and personal growth. Let’s bust this up and make it available to everyone!

Before I get out the pickaxe, let me explain what exactly I’m talking about.

Religion is a belief system with supporting social systems. For example, Christianity is a religion. It has a belief system, which says things about the nature of the universe (God created it in seven days, etc.) and it also has supporting social systems, like church. It also has rules, like “Thou shalt not kill.”

Spirituality is our connection with the divine, the supernatural, something greater than ourselves.

Personal growth is improving your inner self. Not just acquiring new skills, like learning to play volleyball. It’s learning how to know yourself better, getting in better touch with your emotions, becoming better able to handle difficult situations, learning to love more wholeheartedly. That sort of thing.

Here’s one of the two points I want to make.

You don’t need religion to get spirituality.

In my worldview, spirituality is a very personal, individual experience. It’s amazing when I find people who share similar views and experiences about the divine and have a similar connection with the universe. But at the core it’s something that’s personal and individual. Hmm. That’s actually completely false. It’s not individual at all because it’s all about oneness and connectedness, at least for me. What I was trying to get at is that it’s not something that can be taught. It’s not something that can be learned or dictated. It’s something that must be experienced on your own.

So, when a religion says “Your only connection with the powers greater than yourself is through me,” I bristle. It’s a heavy-handed control paradigm tactic. The religion takes away your power, your birthright to be connected to the divine, and tells you that you aren’t qualified to do that on your own. That you need an intermediary.

That’s all bullshit. No one owns your spirituality.

Sit down in a quiet place, close your eyes, and look inward. Or outward. Look all sorts of ways and feel your connection to the divine. It’s there, just waiting for you to pay attention to it and open yourself to it.

And here’s the other point I want to make:

You don’t need religion or spirituality to get personal growth.

I’m pagan. A Reclaiming-ish neopagan, to be precise. I don’t worship Satan (I don’t even believe in Satan, in fact), I don’t sacrifice goats, and I’m not anti-Christian. In fact, I think Jesus sounds like a pretty swell guy, and I think the world would be a better place if more people (including Christians) paid attention to what he said.

Paganism is a religion. (Actually, multiple religions. Just like there are denominations of Christianity, like Catholic and Lutheran, there are denominations of paganism, like Wicca and Reclaiming.) It has a belief system (there are many gods, the earth is sacred, etc.) it has supporting social systems and traditions (shared rituals at the turning of the seasons, etc.) and it has rules, like “An ye harm none, do what thou wilt.”

But that’s not really important to me.

The reason I’m pagan isn’t because of the religion. It’s because of the spirituality and the personal growth. Paganism attracts people whose spiritual paths are similar to mine, and provides me with lots of yummy spiritual soul food. Also, it provides me with useful tools for personal growth, tools that can help me get in touch with my emotions, let go of stale patterns that no longer serve me, feel more at peace in a stressful situation, help me realize new things about myself, etc. Paganism couches these tools in the language of its own religion and its own spirituality, but that’s not important.

You can change the metaphor, and it still works.

In paganism, you practice magick. (The extra k is to distinguish it from stage magic.) You perform a certain ritual in a certain way, you chant, you sing, you breathe, you move energy. You connect with the gods.

In Christianity, you pray. You perform a certain ritual in a certain way, you chant, you sing, you kneel, you stand, you worship. You connect with God.

In therapy, you process. You talk, you roleplay, you lie down on the couch, you fingerpaint, you let out a primal scream, you get in touch with your inner child, you introspect. You connect with yourself.

It doesn’t matter what wrapper you wrap around it.

There are fundamental truths of the universe, and different people, different religions, and different spiritualities each interpret these truths differently. It’s like switching window managers but keeping the same kernel. You can use whatever metaphor works for you.

If you’re a pagan listening to a Christian talk about God, try interpreting what they say by substituting your own concept of the divine. When they talk about praying, substitute “focusing energy”. If you’re a rationalist listening to a spiritualist talk about the divine, try interpreting what they say psychologically instead of spiritually. Think about their spiritual experiences as interesting insights into psychology and useful tools for introspection and personal growth.

Magick is science. God is the universe.

Next Friday, we’re going to start posting about a spiritual experience we had that spurred a lot of epiphanies and personal growth. Remember that if our metaphors don’t work for you, you are empowered to substitute your own.

It’s all the same underneath.

Chapter 2: Different communication styles

We all look at the world through special glasses created by us, for us. Kyeli sees the world through Kyeli-colored glasses and Pace sees the world through Pace-colored glasses. Your mom, your best friend, the mailman, the Dalai Lama, Alanis Morissette, and you each have your own lenses to see the world through. No matter how close we get to our loved ones, we can never see the world in exactly the same way they do. This lends itself not only to the usual error, but also to different communication styles. Everyone communicates in their own way. We all have our own idiosyncrasies, phrases, definitions, meanings, and understandings that belong to us and us alone. We each have our own issues and emotional baggage as well as our own unique ways of interpreting what we hear.

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 2: Different communication styles (web page)

This is hard to share, but important.

In November of 2002, I found out I was pregnant. I was elated – I’d been wanting another baby for some time, and had pretty much realized it wasn’t going to happen, but the appearance of that double pink line changed everything. It was four months before my 25th birthday, two before Dru’s 5th birthday; we were living in Rochester, NY (upstate on the lake). We were all thrilled and excited. I knew immediately she would be a girl. I told everyone; family, friends, co-workers, strangers, everyone.

We named her Caelia Faith.

9 weeks later, I lost her.

This story does end well.

When I lost her, I lost more than just a baby. I lost my hopes and dreams. I lost my faith in my gods and in the universe. I lost touch with my friends, my partner, and my little boy.

I closed my heart. I lost myself.

I spent a year in that place, dark and cold. Alone even when surrounded by loved ones. I pushed us to move away from Rochester before we were financially capable. I desperately needed to get away from that room, that house, that street, that city… those memories. That sense of lost.

We moved, life moved.

We moved to Chicago. I got a job, life moved on. Eventually, my heart-sick eased, faded. I was lonely, so I joined a tarot class. I’ve long loved tarot, and it felt like an easy way to make friends – and it worked. The teacher was a Reclaiming witch, and she drew a bunch of us into the tradition. I wound up being an integral part of the Chicago Reclaiming community. My friendships deepened, my self-work adventure started, and I came out of my shell.

I reopened my heart and deepened my connections.

Then I lost my job.

My job-hunting skills were sadly lacking. Since we’d moved before we were financially able to support such a loss, we were immediately in serious trouble. After several months without work, we began to realize that we were going to lose our apartment. I tried my best, but my best wasn’t enough, and eventually we couldn’t pay our bills anymore. We moved back to Texas, moving in with my then mother-in-law. I lost my friends, my beautiful apartment, the city I loved more than any other. Here we go again.

My partner, my son, two cats, and myself – and enough stuff to fill a two bedroom apartment – moved in to one tiny room in a house with a crazy woman. After only a few months, the crazy woman met an even crazier man. Things got worse – and far more surreal. I was depressed, despondent, bored, unhappy, lonely.

Around this time, Pace entered my life. During our first conversation ever, she said, “I really like you, Kyeli, but your life really sucks.”

My life really sucked.

I protested. I got off the phone immediately. I cried. I hemmed and hollered, whined, complained, and cried some more.

Then I realized Pace was right. My life really sucked.

Time for change!

I started evaluating myself and my life. What sucked? What didn’t? Why? What could I change, what could I work on, what needed to go? What was wrong, what was right? What really mattered – and what didn’t matter at all?

In answering those questions, I turned my life around. I severed some really intense bonds, I gained self-knowledge, I grew and learned and changed. In the past four years, I went from someone full of self-hate and despair to someone I respect, admire, and love.

Sometimes the really, really bad things are secret good things in disguise.

Now, my days are full of love and light. I spend my days surrounded by people I want to spend time with, talking to people I want to talk to. I have several hours a day to spend with my son, nearly all of which is high quality. Pace and I spend several hours a day doing what we love, making the Usual Error Project grow, touching people, blogging, talking, connecting. I have good friends, good connections, and lots of hope and faith and love.

I’m strong. I’m fierce. I’m powerful. My life is awesome.

This is the path that moves me.

This path started the day I lost my baby girl. It’s never been easy, but every step – every single step – has been worth it. Without her sacrifice, I never would have become who I am today. The lessons I’ve learned have been immeasurably important, and the life I’m living honors her memory. Every day.

Thank you, Caelia. I couldn’t have done this without you.

Trish Lambert interviewed us about our new book, The Usual Error! It was a lot of fun to be interviewed by her, and we hope you’ll enjoy listening to it, too!

Also, for those of you who are curious as to what we’re talking about at 21:10, here’s a visual aid. (:

We self-published our book, The Usual Error, and today we’re going to tell you how you can write and self-publish your own book, too.

Here’s the thing. We’re just regular people. We’re not rock stars, we don’t have Ph.D.s or lots of other letters after our names. We’re not rich. We’re not famous. We’re not perfect writers; we make spelling and grammar mistakes. We had day jobs and not a lot of free time. And we still wrote a book.

If we can do it, that means you can do it too.

Here’s how!

1. Write the first draft
2. Edit it yourself
3. Have others edit it
4. Copyright page
5. Book design and cover design
6. Printing, fulfillment, and retail
7. Marketing
8. Rest on your laurels!

1. Write the first draft

There is a Step Zero: figure out what you want to write about, but I’m assuming that if you’re reading this with intent, you’ve already done your Step Zero. Another part of Step Zero is deciding to self-publish instead of traditional publishing. Here’s why we think self-publishing is better than traditional publishing, but of course it’s your decision.

Since we had multiple authors (first three, later two) we wrote the first draft of our book on PBwiki. This had the added advantage of being in HTML, which made it much easier later on to create the e-book and the Kindle version.

But if you don’t care about ebooks, Kindle versions, or multiple-author collaboration, then you can just use whatever word processing software you wish. Microsoft Word is good, because it imports well into Adobe InDesign, which is what we used for our book design.

The trick here is finding time for it, staying focused, and making progress. Keep up your motivation, make writing a habit and part of your daily routine. Remember your goal and let that feed your passion.

We started writing our first draft during NaNoWriMo, in flagrant violation of the rules. (: Still, it helped us stay focused and make it part of our routine, since many of our friends were also making writing a priority. The NaNoWriMo mantra of “December is for editing” also helped us, because it allowed us to write as many words as possible without worrying about every word being perfect. For the first draft, just get words onto paper. Everything else comes later.

Not counting the breaks where we didn’t work on the book for a while, we finished the first draft in two or three months, mostly by taking an hour to write each evening and sticking to that schedule. This got us to a 43,000-word first draft. If you write only 500 words a day, and you’re just one person, you can get to 43,000 words in three months, too!

2. Edit it yourself

After you’re done with your first draft, hooray! Go out and celebrate! Now comes the editing.

Here’s how Kyeli and I did our self-editing. For the second draft, we went over every single chapter of the rough draft and edited it for grammar, flow, tone, and understandability. Since we had multiple authors, sometimes the tone changed, and that was disconcerting. We also came up with a style guide that we stuck to.

• Singular “they” is okay.
• “I” is okay in stories and examples, but not okay in the main text.
• Title case for stories and examples, sentence case for chapter titles
• Punctuation inside the quotes.

and so on and so forth. It’s good to have a guide, like for instance the Chicago Manual of Style, but as long as you’re self-consistent, you’re probably okay. Later, your editors and beta-readers will tell you if your grammar choices are distracting. That’s all that’s important. Since you’re self-publishing, you’re not trying to please The Man. You’re trying to please your readers, who are real people just like you. As long as your style and grammar choices aren’t distracting, it’s all good.

The second draft took us about five weeks, and we made some major revisions. After we finished, we stopped using PBwiki since we weren’t editing in parallel anymore; we were working together. We created one big HTML file via copy-and-paste and an emacs macro to replace wiki markup with HTML tags, and from then on we used the HTML file as our master copy.

For the third draft, we printed out our second draft, set aside a big chunk of time, spent the day at Austin Java, and read the entire book to each other out loud. Any time something didn’t sound perfect to either of us, we’d get out a red pen and mark it. We completely rewrote one chapter that didn’t make sense in its initial form (Chapter 21), and that we did on the laptop, but the rest we did with paper and red pen, and merged our changes into the HTML file later. We did this for two long days, for a total of about 24 hours.

We must have done a good editing job on the second and third draft, because at this point we were ready to send our book out to external editors. It’s a good idea to keep self-editing over and over until you either don’t have any more changes to make or you find yourself stuck in a rut. So when you’re ready…

3. Have others edit it

Next, we asked our friends to help us edit the book.

We turned our third draft into a PDF using PDF995 and printed out a bunch of copies at Kinko’s. (I’m sorry, “FedEx Office”.) We mailed them to some of our friends who had volunteered to edit the book. We gave them a three-week turnaround time to give us their edits.

After we received all our friends’ edited copies, we went back to Austin Java, pushed a couple of tables together, and laid out all the editors’ copies side by side. We went through all the suggestions for page 1, then all the suggestions for page 2, and so on. That way, if two editors suggested the same change, we’d give it extra weight, and if two editors disagreed on something, we could take that into account right then instead of forgetting about it by the time we got to the other person’s comments.

This process took about eight solid days, and it improved the book a ton. Some of the suggestions we got were worth repeating:

• Search for every occurrence of “really” and omit it if possible
• Search for every occurrence of “very” and omit it if possible
• Search for every occurrence of “totally” and omit it if possible
• Search for every occurrence of “awesome” and reword it if possible
• Search for every occurrence of the em dash — that’s this bit of punctuation right here — and rework it if possible

After we implemented these suggestions, our book was really very totally awesome. (:

We had planned on hiring a professional editor, but we got such good edits from our friends that we decided it wasn’t necessary. So our fourth draft became our final draft.

4. Copyright page

There’s one very important page in your book that will take some work to finish: the copyright page. As an example, you can take a look at the copyleft page for The Usual Error here.

First, file the paperwork to become a publishing business: a DBA for a sole proprietorship or partnership, or other paperwork to become an LLC. You don’t want to be an S-corp or a C-corp. You’ll need to call around to see which government office has these forms, then do a search to make sure nobody else has the same name. When picking the name for your publishing business, think big. If you later want to publish more books, you’ll want the name to be appropriate for those books too.

Now that you have a publishing company, you’ll need an ISBN. Every published book has a unique ISBN, and they cost money. At the time of this writing, they were $275 for a block of 10; you can buy them from ISBN.org. If you’re self-publishing, this is the only option that I know of.

Next, you’ll need get a Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) for your book. Fill out the application here and they’ll get back to you, probably much more quickly than they say they will. (They got back to us later the same day.)

Now that you have all the numbers you want, you can finish your copyright page. We chose to release our book under the Creative Commons by-nc-sa license, which lets others share it, remix it, and tweak it, as long as they don’t make money from it, and as long as their tweaked versions are also distributed under the same license. We did this because our primary goal with this book is to spread useful information about communication, and we didn’t want copyright to be a block to that. Whatever copyright system and license you decide is best for you book, be sure to state it here on the copyright page.

5. Book design and cover design

Now that last pesky page is complete, and you’re done with your final draft! YAY! Treat yourself to something nice! All that’s left now is outsourcing, paperwork, and technical stuff.

I had considered learning how to do the book design and cover design myself, but it would have taken a while and I would have needed to buy and learn some new software like Adobe InDesign, so we outsourced the cover art to our illustrator Marty Whitmore and the book and cover design to Megan Elizabeth Morris, who is a fabulous web designer as well as an excellent designer of all sorts.

Unless you know how to use a professional design program (MS Word does not count; it’s a word processor, not a design program) and you know about bleed, DPI, PPI, CMYK, and embedding fonts in PDFs, then I suggest you outsource this, too. If you wrote your book in HTML, at this point you’ll probably need to convert it to a Word document if your book designer uses Adobe InDesign, because it imports Word documents more easily. But hang onto your HTML version if you’ve got it, because it will prove useful if you later decide to release an e-book or a Kindle version.

Your book designer will make sure your pages are the exact right size for your book, make sure the fonts and margins look great, and take care of a lot of technical things that I don’t even understand but I know are very important. Take a look at this before and after. Notice how the before looks like a random web page or Word document, and the after looks like an actual page from an actual book? That’s the importance of book design.

Oh! That reminds me: this is the time for you to decide the dimensions of your book. Pick up a few books from your bookshelf and measure them. Based on the type and genre of your book, you probably want to pick the same dimensions as a similar book. For The Usual Error, we wanted people to be able to carry it around easily, so we chose 8″ x 5″. Also, this is the time to choose hardcover or paperback. We went with paperback because we felt it was more friendly.

6. Printing, fulfillment, and retail

When your book designer is done designing your book, you get to fill out some more paperwork! (:

Now it’s time to think about how your book will be printed and how people will buy it. “Fulfillment” just means “how orders get from the person who wants to buy it to the person who has it”, as well as other details like who keeps it in stock, where, and how much. We chose a printer who does print-on-demand so we wouldn’t have to deal with fulfillment ourselves.

We chose the print-on-demand (POD) company Lightning Source, Inc. (LSI) for our printer and focused on Amazon as the main way people will purchase it. Lulu is just a middleman between you and LSI. If you choose not to outsource your book design, Lulu might provide some useful value to you, but otherwise you might as well deal with LSI directly and cut out the middleman. Another nice thing about LSI is that once LSI has your book and it’s set up correctly, it will automatically appear on Amazon.

So, sign up with LSI (Lightning Source, Inc.). Your Primary book category is probably “Trade Publisher“. Upload your finished product: the cvr.pdf and text.pdf, the finished product that your book designer and cover designer produced. Set your retail (list) price and your wholesale discount. I suggest 25%; setting your discount higher means less money for you and doesn’t yield any benefit at all. Nobody will be able to order your book for retail price, because LSI doesn’t sell directly to customers. The only people allowed to buy from LSI are wholesalers: bookstores, distributors, and resellers like Amazon. They will buy your book at the wholesale price, which is the retail price discounted by the percentage you chose.

  Wholesale price = Retail price * (100% - wholesale discount)

So if you set your retail price to $15.00 and your discount to 20%, you can compute your wholesale price like so:

  Wholesale price = $15.00 * (100% - 20%)

  Wholesale price = $15.00 * 80%

  Wholesale price = $12.00

Your cut of the profit is the wholesale price less LSI’s printing costs. If their printing costs were $4 per book, your profits would be

  Your profit = Wholesale price - Printing costs

  Your profit = $12.00 - $4.00

  Your profit = $8.00

For our book, we selected the following options:

• US POD Direct Distribution
• US POD Wholesale Distribution
• UK/Europe POD Wholesale Distribution
• No sales tax exemption

Direct distribution means you can order copies for yourself. Wholesale distribution means that other companies (like Amazon) can order it. (Technically there are other companies in the loop, like Ingram, but you don’t need to worry about that at this point.)

Also, use cream paper, not white. It’s easier on the eyes and makes your book look more professional.

7. Marketing

Now we come to the really fun part: marketing! For The Usual Error, we already had a bunch of interested people, because we’ve been presenting communication workshops for years, we have a blog about communication, and we have a bunch of friends who respect us.

Squeezing an entire how-to about marketing into this already-huge article isn’t feasible, but if you’re self-publishing, you’re probably self-marketing too. Here’s a super-short list of pointers:

• Start a blog. We agree with Seth Godin that this is the #1 best thing you can do to market your business — or your book.
• Do everything Naomi says.
• Make an event out of launching your book. It’s exciting and fun, and can generate oodles of sales and buzz. Dave Navarro, a launch coach, can help you out with this.

Regardless of how you do your marketing, be sure to sign up with Amazon Associates and you’ll make an extra 5% or more from everyone who buys your book through your affiliate link.

8. Rest on your laurels!

You’re now a published author! Congratulations! Leave a comment and say hi, and we’ll show you the secret handshake. (:

Here’s a list of web pages, books, and people who helped me learn all this crazy stuff. You may find them useful, too.

• Creative Minds Press
• Susan Daffron of Logical Expressions, Inc.
• The Yahoo self-publishing group
• Aiming at Amazon
• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Publishing

Last but not least, remember to enjoy the journey! Writing a book is fun, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did! (:

We like you guys so much, we’re going to ply you with awesome stuff!

Every Wednesday for the next 34 weeks, we’ll be posting a new chapter from The Usual Error book! This means that you get to read the entire book, complete with illustrations, over the course of the next 8 months. (Impatient? Biased toward physical objects? You can always buy it here!)

As an added bonus, we’ll post a chapter of the audio book at the same time. We’re reading the book ourselves, with a little help from our friends, so you’ll get our quirky voices and inflections. It’ll be like we’re in your living room! Only, less crowded. EDIT: We turned the audiobook into a full-fledged product that you can buy from our store, professionally produced on a 6-CD set. Check it out!

But wait – that’s not all!

Every Wednesday will also be a Q&A day. We’ll post the chapter links. You guys read it. Sounds simple enough, but we’re going to complicate things! (In a good way.) On Wednesdays, we’ll turn the blog into a forum. Any and all questions pertaining to the chapter we’ve posted will get answered by one or the other of us, so save ‘em up and throw ‘em at us!

We really love sharing this information with everyone, so we’re giving it away (very slowly) to make sure everyone who needs it can get it. Helping you is our first and foremost goal.

We’re excited about Book Bonanza Wednesdays, so without further ado, let’s get this ball rolling! Begin transmission:

Chapter 1: The usual error

The usual error is assuming that other people are just like you.

Assuming that others think like you, would react to a certain situation like you would, or value the same things you do — all of these are examples of the usual error. Psychologists call it projection bias: we project our own perceptions, opinions, and emotions onto another person, as if our experiences were theirs. We all do this. We do it all the time; that’s why it’s called the usual error. Making the usual error isn’t something to fear, it’s something to notice. In our experience, most miscommunications stem from the usual error. When you learn to recognize that it’s happening, you can turn arguments into opportunities for understanding.

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 1: The usual error (web page)

(The reason we’re not posting the entire chapter in the blog is that for one, it looks better over there at its permanent home because there’s more room on the sidebar, and two, so people can find it easily and navigate through it without wading through lots of blog posts.)