Marge and I continue to write books, even though our primary focus is helping people achieve their physical and financial goals through Team Beachbody. A few people have asked us why we keep on writing and publishing books when we are so clearly committed to Beachbody. We even asked ourselves that a while back when we resumed more concentrated effort on writing and publishing when our list of Team Beachbody customers and Coaches was growing.
The answer is clear to us, "We write because we must." That may sound odd, or self-agrandizing, but it's part of our truth as individuals and as a couple.
We love to write - it's just part of who we are, as much as our love of reading. We are book people. We're also word people which is pretty clear a message that gets across as Marge's "31 Days to Improve Your Vocabulary" is the best seller among our 20-odd titles published on Amazon month after month. So not writing would be against our nature. We're not big letter writers, as our family and friends can attest, so the two best outlets for our writing are books and our blogs. (Check out Being Marge Brown to read Marge's blog.)
We are also students of personal development. The first personal development seminar we ever attended was a two-weekend event called "Adventures in Attitudes" run in the February 1973 by our very close friend Ray Smith. Since that initial exposure we've taken many seminars, attended workshops, read books, heard speakers live, recorded, and online, and for the past few years we've written our own books about personal and business development topics. So, in just a few months we'll be celebrating 40 years in the study of personal development - it only seems natural that we should give back for all we've gained.
Marge and I talk often of ways we can help people and how we can make positive impact even on folks we never meet in person. Blogging and social media are wonderful ways to connect, share, and, in some instances, even inspire people around the globe. But you know, there are some messages, some content that you just can't fit into a 140 character Tweet, a Facebook post, a 3-minute Youtube video, or even a 1,000 word blog post. (Conventional advice is that no blog post should be more than two or three paragraphs long - of course I regularly ignore that.)
So we write books. We have published more than 30 books during the past four years. All have been on Amazon but we've taken some down, either because we've written new editions, we've rewritten a longer and hopefully better version and used a new title, or because the time has passed for a few of the titles. We actually have a huge list of titles we want to write (I won't define 'huge' here because the number would seem silly). Someday we may write most if not all of them, but surely the list will grow as we continue to learn and grow ourselves and decide that perhaps, we, too, have something to share.
Once in a while one of us will say, "OK, that's it. I'm done writing books. It's too much work, it takes too much time, and there are so many other things I want to do."
Quitting usually lasts about two weeks max till one of us wakes up and states, "Here's a book I've got to write." Sometimes the idea comes in the shower so the announcement is hollered, but my point here is that we do not resist. When the concept for a new book strikes us, if we both give it the nod, then it becomes a work in progress.
Sometimes only a few weeks pass between inspiration and publication - the removal of traditional barriers by ebook publishing on Amazon are wonderful. More typically the idea will join the list while one or both of us thinks about it for a while and then within six months or so we'll get down to it and write the book.
For our shorter, 10 Steps to Success books, usually the actually writing to publication timeline takes only a week or two, even though the original idea may have appeared a year or more in the past. Three recent examples are Improve Your Positivity - 10 Steps to Success, Improve Your Leadership - 10 Steps to Success, and Attraction Marketing - 10 Steps to Success. Actually the Attraction Marketing book was going to be a 31 Days to Mastery book but we decided we wanted to think and work on the concept some more to develop more content. So we finished and published the shorter version as a 10 Steps book.
The latest book I'm focusing on personally, 31 Days to Facebook Marketing Mastery, was originally going to focus more broadly on social media as a whole. I started outlining it in 2007. After several false starts, and project-shelving, it's coming out this month (within days of this writing) and I'm pretty happy about how it's shaping up. In no way am I a Facebook expert, nor to I aspire or wish to become a Facebook trainer or consultant, but along the way I've learned and observed a goodly list of strategies, tools, and techniques that appear to help others as well as me market via Facebook. So the book has to emerge - that's how it feels to us.
Chances are you weren't really asking yourself the question about why Marge and I still write books, but if you've read this far, whether you wondered or not, you know the answer. Thanks for reading.
