Progress is sometimes painful and especially when you are 99% done with a body of work, and cannot give it a name! I actually now understand, though never blessed with children of my own, what it’s like to have to wait for the baby to be born before you know its name! It’s weird but it happens.
My book title, which is on the first page of my website, and which soon will be changed, was never the exact right title of the book. However, in the process of building a brand name, you have to start somewhere, so you put up the best you have, until you have something better. And I now have something better!
I enlisted the help of another highly respected creative entrepreneur to help me find the real title of my book; that it is just about ready to be published.
Her name is Sam Horn, www.SamHorn.com, and if you can get past her fee of $600.00 per hour ( yes real creative entrepreneurs REALLY DO MAKE MONEY!!); you will find her to be enormously helpful and worth every dollar. ( My book, by the way, will help you learn how to do what you do well and get paid well)
Sam and I, after many questions from her about the material I sent her to review, and a very lively and interesting exchange back and forth, for exactly one hour; decided that the best title for my first book is Starving Artist, Not! The words will appear inside the universal symbol of a circle with a red line drawn through it.
While It might seem to you like not a big revelation as far as a title goes; its huge for me~ cause its the right one. We also laid out the books cover and the placement of everything on it and where it will appear.
I will need a celebrity quote and I will also need a forward written by someone who will equally be as interesting. These are some of my most critical and last steps before I can set this baby down on the press to run.
I am very excited about getting this material out, and can hardly believe that at some point soon, there will be a book in my hand that I wrote!
It feels painful, these last steps, however.
Everything is so new, and I have already spent so much time on it, that this actually feels like some of the hardest stuff I will do yet!
Positioning a product, or in this case my book, so that it hits the right market or fragmented market, in my case, is very tricky tough stuff. I know who needs to read this book and I know what I have to say will help a great deal; if the book can be in that audience’s line of view to find, buy and read.
But to express a brief clear image, via a few words and an image on a book cover, alongside of a single quote, serving as all you have to capture the interest of that audience; now that stuff is hardest of all.
Not to mention the other little problem …Do any of you know the right kind of celebrity, who you can ring right up? That right somebody who will in earnest, and because they are interested, read the material and write a quote? ~~Well neither do I.
I have never done this before, and I have no idea how this goes.
I have a few ideas of how to go about all this, and Sam Horn will be helpeing me with some of this too next week; but this is all new. I wonder: Do celebs charge money for this kind of thing, and if so….I don’t want one of them!
But what if they all do, where is the line between creative support and appropriate financial gain?
If I want my book to be a hit, will I have to pay this money to do that? Where is the right place for the line to be in one’s principle versus a good business move?
If everyone does it does it make it right? Or is it more simple: you should be paid for what you do that you do well? Is that really wrong?Are you not really helping someone then in a way they could not help themselves?
Well let’s just say that I am focusing on believing that I can find the right someone who is a somebody, who will just simply be a believer in where I am coming from; and want to say something in support. That’s what I am looking for and that is the kind of celebrity person I am going to focus on finding. I will put this good intention out and not settle for less. My good karma will serve me.
Anyone know anything abut Paula Zahn? Besides being a journalist I understand she plays the cello very well….Mmmm.
Onward. Up the steep climb to the peek. It ain’t easy and it ain’t no fun but those who feel the pain, gain– isn’t that what the gainers say?
5 Comments
This is a really interesting blog post,I have added your blog to my favourites I really like it,keep up the good work!
The most difficult thing about being an entrepreneur is that there are no guarantees. You can make it almost to the finish line, thinking you are really going to win a race that began as hope in your heart, and everything can go wrong. My book was accepted three months after I wrote this post by a big NY agent, Susan Schulman. Susan insisted on a name change for the book and so it became Build a Blue Bike.
Susan has represented two very important authors for the arts: Economist, Richard Florida- Rise of The Creative Class and Artist, Julia Cameron- Artists’ Way. I thought surely my book would sell with her support. But it never did in 2008. The manuscript now resides in the back of my sock drawer, so to speak.
They say that every writer has a book or two “waiting” for its moment, that has not sold. So I guess I now have one too… I am still thinking about self publishing it, but my goal was to be published by a big house.
In the meantime, I am writing a new book called The Dream Switch: A Journey Into Greatness with sports psychologist Jason Sellk. We will see if this one can make it across the finish line. Welcome to the world of entrepreneurship!! (But, know this, dear reader, despite my set backs it is all worth it. What is inside your heart to share always is!)
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The Dream Switch on Easter Sunday, 2009 was rejected by my former agent Susan Schulman. She dropped me as her client. Is my passion dead? Do I feel defeated? I was crushed for 24 hours, 7 minutes and 12 seconds. It was a set back- without a doubt- but the conviction about what I need to share from my heart has only grown.
She wasn’t that into my work… so what….I never felt an amazing connection to her. I just felt “lucky” to have her accept my first book.
This is not the first impossible obstacle in life and work I have faced and it certainly won’t be the last. It’s the journey, dear reader, that matters to me…. not the destination. When you are doing the work you were put on this earth to do… it always is.
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