(part 1)

Here are some more blog reviews of The Usual Error that lovely people have been posting. Thanks so much, lovely people! This time we’ve included short excerpts from the reviews; click through to read the full articles.

Review #1, by Tammy Lenski, a professional mediator and conflict resolution consultant:

For those of you who’ve read many of the conflict resolution bestsellers like Difficult Conversations, Fierce Conversations, The Power of a Positive No and others, there’s not a lot of new content in The Usual Error. But that’s not a reason to skip the book. Actually, it’s a reason to read the book, because they highlight, in short, easily digestible chunks, some of the best ideas out there, and they make those ideas their own with stories from their lives and with little gems that stick in your mind. They take good ideas and make them better. [more...]

Review #2, by Sari O, a Finnish university student studying communication (among other things):

At the university, I’m used to reading texts about human interaction and behavior that’s littered with source citations, concept definitions, and theoretical framing. This is not one of those texts.

At first, I have to admit, it bothered me a bit. Then again, the purpose of this book is radically different from that of scientific articles or books.

…The aim is, as far as I’ve understood, to draw attention to the different kinds of problems that the usual error causes in human communication and to offer tools with which to go about addressing those problems. It’s intended as a workbook, and as such it serves beautifully. [more...]

Review #3, by Patty Newbold, a researcher in psychology, sociology, love, and life:

While showing you how to spot these errors and fix them, Pace and Kyeli offer code names for them, so you can defuse a situation quickly. They provide wonderful little vignettes of how they have cropped up in their lives and how they now handle them. [more...]

If you write a review of The Usual Error, please let us know so we can be sure to include you in our next review roundup! (:

Personally, if we were browsing a website and we read part of a book we liked, we’d buy the tree book instead of the e-book. Especially if the authors were (slowly) giving the e-book away for free.

Apparently, we made the usual error.

We received an email asking if the e-book version of The Usual Error was available for purchase, so we quickly Made It Happen behind the scenes and then replied “Yes!” But he had bought the e-book before we even had a chance to send the reply. (:

So! For your e-reading pleasure, we present to you a downloadable PDF of The Usual Error e-book, for $9.99. (The tree book on Amazon is selling for $14.39 at the moment.)

Here is the place where you click to find out more about the book, or to buy it (as paper or bits).

Thanks, everyone, for your support! We’re thrilled you’re enjoying the book so much!

p.s. If you’ve already read the book, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d write a short Amazon review for us. It only takes a couple of minutes; it doesn’t have to be long and involved. (:

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

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 announced this yesterday, but we understand that not everyone likes to watch dorky videos. Well, we know that not every one likes to watch dorky videos, but we don’t entirely understand it – but then, we’re dorky, so there you go.

Consider this a special re-announcement! Woo!

Our book, The Usual Error: Why We Don’t Understand Each Other and 34 Ways to Make it Better, is now available on Amazon.com!

As of yesterday, that’s the only place you can get it. They’ve already discounted the price from $15.99 to $14.39 – which means they want to sell more of it, so yay!

The front cover is now blue and in full color:

and the back cover is gorgeous, too:

…we crack me up. Voodoo dolls and nuclear explosions. Haha!

Anyway, here are a few snippets from the top reviews:

A wonderful resource!

In this book, Pace and Kyeli examine how people communicate and where they most often make mistakes. They unfold their findings in a conversational style that makes the communication principles easy to remember. Reading this book taught me things without me even realizing how much I’d retained; the ideas seeped right into my brain…

…This book has practical advice, memorable metaphors, wonderful illustrations, and I recommend it to anyone who wants a fresh approach for the age-old problems of communication.

5 stars – Kira A. Parra

The Usual Error

…The Usual Error is not a magic potion to instantly solve all your communication issues. It is, however, a great inspiration; it is a starting point from which epiphanies are born. As you read, you will recall situations from your own life in which the knowledge would have been helpful, and after reading it, you will remember its simple, quirky and honest advice when future problems arise.

Chapters are short, easy to read and understand, and encourage reflection without the cheesy, condescending language that tends to dominate the self-help genre. Pace and Kyeli Smith write the chapters cleanly and pleasantly, no doubt as a result of the project’s origins as a workshop and presentation, and the brilliant illustrations by Martin Whitmore capture the spirit and humor of the authors perfectly. All in all, the experience of reading this book is one of great amusement and deep reflection…

5 stars – Green Blackwell

This book has been great for my marriage.

I purchased a copy of “The Usual Error” as my husband and I had been using some of the skills that we’d been reading about on Pace and Kyeli’s blog. We have been working on each chapter and it has given us the opportunity to communicate better and it has really improved our marriage as a whole.

The advice given is very real-world and doesn’t involve sitting across from each other doing practice sessions or anything like that. It involves reading the chapter and talking about what you learned and really listening to each other. It’s a far more effective method for us…

5 stars – Jenn Strobel

You can buy your very own copy here, through Amazon. (We don’t recommend buying the $35 “used” copy, though. Yeesh.)

We are really excited! We’ve spent three years total in creation, from start to finish. We’ve had the help of many people, most notably Martin Whitmore (our illustrator) and Megan Elizabeth Morris (our designer). We’ve been inspired and encouraged by friends and family along the way, and we are very grateful to all of you.

Here’s to awesome communication!

We have some exciting news to share with you today, so we recorded ourselves sitting on our couch, yelling and waving our arms about excitedly. Enjoy! (:

Vlog summary: We channel Scrooge McDuck, wade knee-deep in a pile of books, discuss the best ways to ship squid, shout “DeLorean!”, and… *drum roll*… announce that our book, The Usual Error, is now available on Amazon! (But in all honesty, the vlog is worth watching just to hear our son giggle. It’s the most adorable sound on Earth.)

LATE-BREAKING NEWS: When we recorded the video, Amazon was selling the book for list price, $15.99, but just this morning they discounted it to $14.39. Yay!

This week is book week at our blog. Stick around for more fun bookish posts!

Wow, you guys are fast! You gobbled up all 100 limited edition copies of the book in four and a half days! We appreciate your support immensely!

For those of you who missed out this time, don’t worry, we’ll let you know as soon as the unlimited edition is available on Amazon. There will be plenty for everyone. (:

Surprise!

We’ve published and printed 100 copies of The Usual Error, the book that we’ve been talking about for months!

This is a very limited run of a special edition of the book. We’re releasing it with a special cover. Each book will be numbered. Each book will be signed by myself, Pace, and Marty (our infamous illustrator). We’ll even personalize it for you however you wish!

There are only 100 copies of this edition, ever. Once those are gone, we’ll release it under the normal cover for the normal price ($15.99 plus shipping). There aren’t many left today, because we let the mailing list know on Friday and they gobbled up a bunch. (You can join the mailing list if you want to be among the first to know upcoming things, too.) So get ‘em while you can, but please, no more than 5 books per person.

The limited, special edition costs $9.99 – and we’ll ship it to you free! If you order before December 8th, we’ll even make sure it gets to you in time for whichever winter holiday you celebrate. (If you celebrate Zamenhof Day, it’ll be a tight squeeze, but if you celebrate Hogswatchnight, you’ve got no worries.)

We’re so excited to bring this to you far earlier than we anticipated!

Click here to order one for yourself!

In addition to the paperback book (which will be available for preorder soon!) we’ll be releasing the e-book and the audio book online for free! As soon as the book is published on Amazon, we’ll post one chapter in the blog each week, in both text and MP3 format. We’ll have a discussion with y’all about the topic of the chapter and answer any questions you have. Then, when all the chapters have been posted, we’ll wrap them all up in a nice PDF that anyone can download.

As a sneak preview, you can listen to Chapter 1 of the audiobook here! (8:36)

We’re releasing the entire book, in all its forms, under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike License (by-nc-sa). This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this work non-commercially, as long as they credit the authors and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Some people have said that it’s bad business to give away the entire e-book and audiobook for free. They’ve suggested giving away just certain chapters as a teaser and selling the rest. We’re not worried, though. People still like to have paper copies of books that they can hold in their hands and carry around with them, so we’re not worried about it hurting sales of the paperback. And anyway, the usual way of handling copyright is far too restrictive; it’s important to us that people to have free and easy access to good stuff about communication.

When it comes to giving e-book versions of paper books away for free, we’re in good company. Cory Doctorow thinks it’s a cool idea, and he releases all his books as free downloads. Neil Gaiman released his best-seller American Gods as a free e-book (temporarily), and sales quadrupled. If you know of others, big names or small, please leave a comment. I’m accumulating a list. (:

We’re very excited about sharing the book with you, in all its myriad forms. We’ll let you know when it’s available for preorder!

Thursday night, I got sick. I’ve been out of commission since. My head hurts, my nose isn’t working properly, my joints ache, I’ve got a killer cough, and it’s all I can do to be semi-coherent through the fog in my head.

Even the movie The Fog didn’t have this much fog. Sheesh.

In the meantime, Pace spent the weekend working at top speed. She, Megan, and Marty were working long, intense hours to get our book ready for publication. I spent most of the time sleeping or hacking, but I’m told the book has been sent off to the printers – which means it’s only a matter of days before pre-orders are announced!

In a lovely finishing touch, Marty finished up his illustration of Pace and me for the back of the book. We’ll put it permanently on the blog at some point, but for now, you can bask in its glory here.

We really love it. We wanted a picture of us, but we wanted to stick with the fun, lighthearted style of the book, so we asked him to draw us. It’s perfect. He even remembered my eyebrow ring! (:

I’m so incredibly proud of my team. The three of them really pulled it together and pushed themselves like… something really pushy… maybe a soccer mom? to get the book put together, proofread, designed, and finished. They met and exceeded our hopes because they are made of awesome.

We even have a logo for Connection Paradigm Press, our publishing company! In an awesome moment of clarity and inspiration, I spouted out an idea for it, and true to form, Marty created it, and it’s totally amazing and wonderful. It birthed from the only moment of clarity I’ve had in days, so I’m particularly pleased.

I’m grateful to those people who did last-minute proofreading for us. I’m not even sure who you all are, because I’ve been too sick to be in the loop, but you’re awesome and I appreciate your help. I’m also extremely grateful to Pace, Megan, and Marty – I’m extremely grateful to have the three of the awesomest people in the world in my camp, working hard for our passions even when I’m too sick to get out of bed and be sweet to them.