A new (ad)venture

The road ahead is rocky and steep, but I’m dying to know: what’s around that bend?

The trouble with being out in the fresh air, getting exercise, and eating healthy food, is that your mind begins to clear. You start to get ideas. You begin to think you can do anything. This is where you get in trouble.

Take me, for instance. A few days ago, I had this sudden urge to pull an old dream out of the attic and (coughcough) dust it off. Then, I went and talked about it on Facebook. Now, I am apparently in business as a publisher, with a partner, and authors clamoring at the gates. How do I get myself into these things?

Oh, right — I am a complete flake.

You may be familiar with this syndrome

1. Impulsivity – jumping into things without scoping them out first
2. Grandiosity – great ideas, but no follow-through
3. Short attention span – mucho distractibility!
4. Procastination
5. Disorganization
6. Lack of focus
7. Trouble finishing things

Well, I could go on and on, but the list is starting to bore me. You know the drill:

8. Easily bored

But something about all this healthy living and going-for-the-dream has been solving a lot of these problems. I’m not going to kid you here, they are still problems, but where once I thought I was a hopeless case, now I have hope. I am writing almost every day now, walking every day, working on my new business, and seeing light at the end of this tunnel.

Must be all this Vitamin D.

Anyway, about the publishing thing

My good friend, the muy-talented designer and business coach Rhiannon Llewellyn, has agreed to partner with me on an as-yet unnamed indie publishing house. We plan to offer the full range of services for authors — editing, cover design, web sites, and publishing — but first things first:

We will start by continuing the series of Complete Flake Guides begun with my Kindle book, Getting Sh*t Done. The second in the series, Getting Sh*t Written by Colin Beveridge, is scheduled to be released this spring. After that, Rhi plans to write a book for the series that we hope to publish this summer. And at some point, we will start taking submissions for the Complete Flake series.

If writing a Complete Flake Guide interests you, here is a rough draft of what will become our writers’ guidelines for the series. Look again at that list above. This is the kind of person you are going to be writing for. This person (you?) needs help! And you, having lived with these problems for a few years now, have probably come up with some solutions. That’s the book we want you to write for Complete Flake Guides.

• Think of a topic that you know intimately, that will help Dear Reader solve a problem, or accomplish a goal, or achieve a dream.
• Write down all the ways s/he can do it.
• Speak directly to the reader. Say ‘you’ a lot.
• Throw some humor in there.
• Put yourself in it too – tell how you struggled with this yourself.
• Be honest – admit that you still struggle with it sometimes, because you’re human.
• Make it short – 10,000-20,000 words. Flakes have short attention spans.
• Short chapters too – ideally under 1,000 words.

If you have an idea that you think would make an awesome Complete Flake Guide, shoot me an email describing what you have in mind. (Example title: “The Complete Flake’s Guide to Meditation: How to calm your thoughts, narrow your focus, and achieve inner peace” — and yes, feel free to steal that topic.)

Make us fall in love with your idea!

But — be forewarned that we can only take on one book at a time. (There are two in the wings now, so hang in there.) We are also at the beginning of this venture and have much to learn. Patience (so I’ve heard) is a virtue.

We can do this!