This week I finally chose the cover for the second edition of The Meaning Method, which is on schedule to be released in August. Honestly, it’s been a long emotional journey to get here. After everything I’ve learned about sales over the past three years in business as an author coach, the decision wasn’t as simple as it was the first time. But that’s a good thing. As long as you dive in and experiment, you always have the opportunity to grow.

Many writers are introverts. We cherish our time alone with our notebooks pondering things: a table alone at a cozy café, solitary hours overlooking a placid lake, time to ourselves with a book. That’s our comfort zone.

As a result, we can drive ourselves mad wondering: How am I going to meet my agent? How am I going to meet influencers? How am I going to make my media breakthrough?

Media opportunities are more accessible than they've ever been, and you'll find out how to build your own public relations pyramid.

We can gain a great deal of insight by breaking up a story its component parts. Here’s one model I’ve come to love over the years: the drama triangle versus the creative triangle. It’s actually a life coaching framework, but I apply it to fiction, memoir, self-help and nonfiction, as well as the chaos of being human here on earth. The way you break a story down into these component parts will determine whether you get more drama, pain, conflict and despair or move toward heroism and strength.

Being a bestseller means different things to different people. I’m not being evasive here, I’m being honest. And the first thing you need to do is define it for yourself, or you’re never going to get there.

The fact is you're going to get better and better at similar skills in order to navigate your path. First, you get better at your craft, and then you get better at marketing, and then you get even better at your craft, and then you get even better at marketing, and so on. Pain comes when you're holding yourself to some sort of elusive standard. You will "level up" when you can define the specific goal you're going after. Being rich and famous is an ambiguous goal.

When you start writing you have big dreams. Then... you inevitably freak yourself out at some point in the process.

Many of us have grown up with the message “Don’t get your hopes up.” It's a dead-end fear-based thought. The crux of this phrase is that if you’re disappointed, you may never recover.

A far better tenet is David Orr´s quote, "Hope is a verb with its shirtsleeves rolled up." Nowhere is this more viable than with writing because there's always something you can do. Even when I've competed in markets with a 0.1% acceptance rate, I knew the only thing that could hold me back was an unwillingness to do the work. You can always write one more draft, explore one more publisher, send one more email, or grow an audience and prove the demand for what you’re doing.

First, let’s throw some confetti for self-publishing! Not because it’s the best choice for everybody, (that’s not necessarily true), but because possibilities exist now that never have before. Authors have never been able to bootstrap their own careers in the way they can now.

Obviously, I love self-publishing, however I understand there are serious concerns. Let’s address them head-on so you can navigate the best way to successfully take advantage of all the fabulous opportunities.

Many of the writing craft books have a page of questions to help you build characters. A questionnaire asks you to consider the character’s occupation, physical characteristics (it almost always asks for eye color), and usually hopes and fears too. Characters aren’t just random or invented people; they are inspired by the meaning of what you’re writing. That goes for fiction and memoir.

That’s why it’s really helpful to train the intuitive skill of clairaudience. I’m not talking about clairvoyance, which you may already be familiar with, I’m talking about clairaudience. It’s the ability to hear voices; not exactly a skill that’s been admired in the mainstream. As a result, we don’t know how to get good at it!

As a coach, I notice that people who lead with clairaudience can hear their characters first and foremost. We’ll go through some exercises that help you do this for yourself.

Sharing personal stories makes most everyone feel self-conscious. On the one hand, it makes you wonder, why should anyone care, while at the same time it can leave you feeling vulnerable and exposed. Yet, one of the most generous acts an author can share is a piece of themselves. We bond with people who are honest and authentic. I’m sure you can think of multiple examples of this principle when reading interviews or memoirs from people you admire.

Therefore, no matter what you’re working on, sharing stories that connect with your audience is an essential trick of the trade. It gets easier with practice, and it doesn’t have to be a big deal. One of my favorite forms of writing is the vignette or flash fiction. You choose a number of words, from 10-1000 and create the full experience of a story.

It's said that with the right leverage you can move mountains, and by using the chakras we can align your inspiration, imagination, voice, heart and willpower in order to birth your book and grow your audience. That's a ton of leverage!

However, sometimes making progress triggers fear. This process works the best when you move from one chakra to the next. When you come up against any sort of block, it means that chakra is burned out from overuse or weakened by neglect.

People talk about aligning the chakras all the time and it sounds abstract. It’s not. When you align the chakras from the bottom up, i.e. the masculine path of liberation it leads to an intense connection to spirit, or what Alessandra Segrado calls a Soulgasm. But we’re not going to talk about that. Come on, stay focused or you’re never gonna get this book done.

Today I want to move all the way down the chakra system from top to bottom, using the feminine manifesting path. When you align this way you’re able to successfully create what you want to contribute to the world.

If this is the year of the book for you, it does not have to be as hard as you imagine. One of the biggest blocks that’s been coming up in the community is overwhelm.

One of the biggest questions is, “Is my book long enough?” So let’s start by getting that worry into perspective. Therefore I have put together a list of Super famous, award-winning, bestselling, world-rocking books of every word count from 13,000 to 325,000. Little known fact: a lot of classic literature is shorter than a children’s book.

Here goes…

The other day I was joking with a friend that, “I have a PhD in rejection at this point in my life.” She said, “Really? I think I have a PhD in avoiding rejection.”

We all have areas in our lives where the fear of heartbreak is greater than the desire to grow and ultimately be happy. We plague ourselves with even the idea of rejection with false meaning and stories. We worry that our dreams will never happen because, fundamentally, we’re just mediocre. We future trip about critics impaling us, or worse, being be ignored and lonely.

The good news is, it’s impossible to stay mediocre when you continue developing your craft. With writing, nothing can stop you but yourself. Resilience is a muscle, and every lesson you learn from those early rejections is building the strength you need as you climb the ladder to a more and more expansive life.

Here are 6 tips for cultivating resilience and getting back on the productivity train with your writing!

Can you guess which self-published book has been most successful in all of history?

It’s probably not the one you’re thinking of. Ha!

I’ll give you a hint: It hasn't gone out of print in over a century and it's had hundreds (if not thousands) of film and theater adaptations that run every single year.

Click here to find out the answer in this week's blog.

I hope this holiday story inspires you as much as it inspires me.

As we move into the holiday season, I think we're all reflecting on big changes. Especially this year. So I wanted to share one of my favorite tools that helps me clean out the old, and ring in the new.

It can be excruciating to be a new person stuck in yesterday’s life. Honestly, there’s no strategy that can make it all different tomorrow. What we can do is clarify the dynamics at play so that the shift is put in motion.

Now more than ever, your future is in your hands as a writer. You get to choose whether you want to submit to a traditional publisher or stay in the driver’s seat and publish yourself. Furthermore, this is such an exciting time to publish because the game is changing. There are so many new opportunities.

Still and all, it’s important to understand the basics in a clear and simple way.

How long has your book been calling you? How long have you known you were meant to be a writer? Has a new manuscript been dancing in your head for a while, but you weren’t sure how to make the journey?

That’s about to change.

Your life fits a larger plan, but in order to make it reality, you need to open up your internal messaging system, i.e. inspiration. Writing a book is about connecting deep and expressing yourself, despite all the distractions. If you’re reading this book, you’ve heard the call, and the story you have locked inside matters to more than just you. Whenever you answer inspiration simply by taking notes, you’ll get detailed instructions on how to continue.

This week let’s create a playground for your heart by examining both sides of the story coin: conflict and significance. If we don’t care about something and it disappears, there’s no problem, no tension. There has to be some underlying care, love, want, or desire in order to make something meaningful. Life is like that. So is your creative project.

Where the untrained eye sees conflict, a writer sees a story.

If you worry that your plot is boring or your ideas won’t resonate, slow yourself down a notch and get really deliberate about these tools. In the search for meaning, this is where we put on our trench coats and whip out our magnifying glasses. Let’s get to work.

When we set off on the long path to becoming a successful and prolific published author, it can get a little heady sometimes. We question ourselves, we want guarantees, and wish we could predict the future.

The good news is, to a great degree, you can.

If you want more clarity on your specific path, I recommend an exercise I call, “This is how it happened.” It involves seven prompts that allow you to glean surprisingly specific advice from your future self.

We’re coming up on Halloween, and for my family, it’s the anniversary of the very first launch of my very first course, The Meaning Method Writer’s Workshop. It’s turning two! You can be a part of this spiritual path to writing and publishing until 8:00 PM tonight. It includes two one on one coaching sessions. Join us here.

First, let me say, the dozens of book launches I’ve helped birth over the past few years have been fun (and fairly straightforward). However, the first launch of The Meaning Method Writer’s Workshop is one I will never forget. Now, whenever a snag comes along in a book launch, I can officially, and ecstatically say, “It’s going to be okay.”

Every now and then, in this baffling jigsaw of life, some unseen force bends logic just to send us little clues. Synchronicities provide us with a wink of support. I know I’ve mentioned in the group, shortly after we started quarantining, another family moved into our house. I’m so grateful for there presence and help. That’s Briana in the picture here, and Martin, my son. It’s made a challenging time so much fun.

Over the past four years, we’ve become like one big family, but we actually met under very synchronistic circumstances…

Writing your book is so often the project that gets brushed aside because it doesn’t jump to the top of your inbox or grab you by the collar. It never yells or nags. You have to seek it out. That’s why we’re going to find space in your busy schedule to go after your heart’s desire so that you’re living a life you love, rather than a life you feel forced into.

I know, I know, it’s always something. But if we’re honest it’s usually the same thing. There’s a pattern when we stop to recognize it. This is an enormous advantage because when you can see it you can change it. The point is, once you recognize these patterns, you can see that it doesn’t have to be that way.