Being Who You Are Is Not A Luxury

About a week ago, I got the first e-mail from my publisher (O Books) since I submitted my final proofs. It was from the marketing department and addressed those with books coming out in December. Catherine noted that the group was generating a lot of activity on the database and that she was glad to see we were all busy with our marketing efforts. Of course, I immediately felt as if I was trailing behind all those other industrious authors. The e-mail also offered help, but then it suggested where you could find it on the database.

I heard from another author who is doing very well, too. Mick Quinn’s book, “The Uncommon Path,” came out in July. He’s been very busy since then. Nouk Sanchez suggested the contact, and Mick, like Nouk, responded right away to my request for ideas on marketing. He sent me a couple of thing he’d produced and said, “Use the database. It’s a goldmine of contacts.”

Okay, already.

Since receiving the marketing department’s e-mail encouragement I ignored the suggestion that I write a short, bulleted reply about my needs and wrote instead that I don’t know what my needs are and that the things I have done, and am supposed to enter on the database, have not worked out real well. But I also actually sent my first article to a source found on the database, and I was able to enter the fact that I contacted my local paper’s book reviewer and she’d agreed to look at the book. The woman from Barnes and Noble has played a little phone tag with me, but it sounds like a launch site has been found too. This is movement.

So enough, already. I just want to admit outright that I’m one of those people who can think there must be a better way even when all evidence points to the contrary. It’s served me at times in matters of spirit, and since it has, I always at least look at it as an option.

And finally, just to speak of something that feels of my heart, a subject that came up with my friend Mary today, I’ll just give myself a minute’s peace from marketing ideas and talk about that. Mary and I always talk from the heart, and today we were marveling over the idea that it may not only be what keeps us sane, but what keeps us healthy. You know how you get all pent up with your various anxieties? And then how, if you can talk to someone who understands, they practically vanish? This is a large part of heart talk in my book (which I was using as an expression but it is actually a part of “The Given Self” too).

It’s hard to express the difference between heart sharing and general griping, but I’d say you can tell the difference by the way you feel afterwards. If your load feels lightened, you’ve been doing some heart sharing. If you feel drained and irritable, you’ve been doing little more than sharing gripes. I wrote a post not long ago on my alternate blog http://spit-and-vinegar.blogspot.com about this very thing, and the radical idea that what we call complaints, could be seen as acceptance of the way we feel.

I’ve applied the same general principle to the issue of marketing, and I still feel that the matter of energy – what gives a person energy and what drains it – is a good gauge of when you’re following your heart. Now you might say that marketing has nothing to do with following your heart, but the thing is, how can it be any good if it doesn’t? If it doesn’t, you’re just doing busy work. The article I submitted came from my heart. I didn’t have to enjoy researching where to submit it so much, but I did have to be in that good energy place to write it and to care enough about it to follow through with the submission.

One of the great lines from “A Course of Love” is “Being who you are is not a luxury.” It’s not for the chosen few who have nothing to gain or lose. It’s for all of us.