In this section of my web site you can explore The Structure of Success. One of my recent major projects was publishing my book EASY BEING: Making Life as Simple and as Much Fun as Possible. I published the book myself, helped by my wonderful support team. So this is the example I work through.

But it doesn't have to be publishing, The Structure of Success works in any project you may be thinking of. Everything depends on how we think about things. You will discover, among other things:

• Walt Disney's Strategy for turning dreams into reality
• How to create the perfect support team
• The structure of effective leadership
• How to get the best from everyone
• How to get the best for everyone

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

If the world of traditional publishing is driving you mad, self-publishing can be an exciting and rewarding alternative. I would not necessarily recommend it for your first book; but, once you've got one or more books selling well with a 'proper' publisher,

• You have the credibility
• You have the clout of an established reputation
• You know your way around enough to think about doing it yourself

First buy the bible: HOW TO PUBLISH YOURSELF: A Practical Guide, by Peter Finch - Allison & Busby, ISBN 0 85031 777 0. The new edition (which even includes a section on How to Publish on the Internet) came out in December 1997. It's beautifully written, asks some serious questions; has all the practical information you need and - above all - will entertain you as you learn about the supposedly arcane world of publishing.

You can get it through your bookseller, or you can order it direct from The Oriel Bookshop in Cardiff, Wales - where Peter is the Manager, when he's not being a poet.

When you have read it, and - if you decide that you want to go ahead - come back to this, and read on.

The answer is the experience of having done it myself, armed with nothing more than Peter's book, and the NLP structure for making life simpler, and making things work.

I learned a lot about how publishing works from the publishers of my first book NLP for Lazy Learning: getting it ready for press was a nightmare! Whereas EASY BEING: Making Life as Simple and as Much Fun as Possible - the DIY job - was a breeze thanks to my brilliant support team.

EASY BEING is doing really well. By publication date, I had already sold over £1,500 worth of books - and I am not even the distributor. I had also sold the Swedish rights for £1,700 and had two other foreign publishers interested in the rights. In other words, over half the printing bill was covered.

The press are producing brilliant support: 'Good Housekeeping' did a feature; and lots of other glossies followed up with features too.

One of the main reasons for publishing the book myself was to prove that the EASY BEING system works. It does!

It doesn't have to be Publishing - this section of the web site has the structure of success in any project you may be thinking of.

If you want to find out more about me, before you read on, click here.

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

As you will have discovered from Peter, publishing is not as arcane (or as expensive) as publishers would have us believe. His timely reminder that a book once cost the same as a pair of breeches (of necessity hand-made) made me realise how the world of publishers and agents had got us all in their thrall - making us think that we did not dare to dabble in anything so expensive on our own.

In my experience, publishers and agents suck their teeth and disapprove: they won't let you say this, or do that; and as for political correctness! I finally lost my cool when the copy editor for LAZY LEARNING deleted 'mankind' and substituted 'humans'.

'Okay', I said, 'we can have "humans" as long as we add "and huwomans"'. At that moment, the commissioning editor finally saw sense. (More about copy editors later).

To be fair, I have friends who love their publishers - and what you read about here is just my experience.

My outcome for writing these pages is to give you a glimpse of the possibilities that exist, and maybe contribute to a world where authors can take charge of their own work, and produce the books they want to produce - rather than what publishers think the world should have.

After all, without authors, there would be no publishers anyway!

The old arrangement was - and publishers and agents would still, apparently, like it to be - that you sent your manuscript to one publishing house, they sat on it for about six months and then returned it. Then you started all over again. At this rate, you could submit your manuscript to about two publishers a year.

For LAZY LEARNING, I simply couldn't be bothered with all that, so I asked the Marketing Expert of W H Smith out to lunch, told her about the book, and invited her suggestions. She recommended four publishers who specialised in that sort of book.

When I asked which to approach first, she answered: 'All of them.' So I rang them all; they all asked to see the ms and two of them wanted to buy it. So much for tradition!

Not only is the old order is changing, it is changing incredibly fast. We now have wonderful technology at our disposal, and - if we cannot reproduce a particular piece of wizardry ourselves - there is always someone who can. The new world of publishing is available to you - if you want it!

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

With HOW TO PUBLISH YOURSELF, you will have asked yourself a series of extremely important questions, and you will know how to do what publishing requires - so all you need to ask yourself now is:

• How much do I want to do myself?
• What do I want to pay other people to do?

As a publisher, you will need:

• A manuscript - that's your job, and may be all that you want to produce yourself
  
  
• A typist
  
  
• A typesetter - you can do both these yourself, if you've got a word processor; and, as Peter points out, half the cost of producing a book goes on the typesetting
  
  
• A copy editor - this is a must: we are too close to our work to notice our own mistakes.
  
  
• A book designer - you can do this yourself, too, if you've got the software for desk top publishing.
  
  
• A designer for the jacket - both front and back - once again, if you're artistic ..........
  
  
• A distributor - Booksellers buy @ 35% discount, carriage paid; and pay up (with luck) within 30 days. For the full package, ie storing, repping, supplying and chasing invoices, a distributor will charge about 25% of the discounted price, plus VAT (which you can reclaim, if you are registered). To follow these sums through: my EASY BEING retails at £8.99:
  
  

  Retail Price	£8.99
  Less 35% - to the bookshop	- £3.15
  Wholesale Price - paid by the bookshop	£5.84
  Less 25% - to the distributer	- £1.46
  Sub total	£4.38
  Less VAT @ 17.5%	- £0.77
  I receive per book (within 90 days)	£3.61

  I then reclaim the VAT and we're back to £4.38 per book (a lot less than £8.99 - which I'd get if I sold them one by one, myself), but I can't be bothered with all the nitty gritty of distribution, so I'm happy to pay someone else to do it. It is up to you to decide how much you want to do.
  
  

• A publicist - people need to know that your masterpiece is available, and miles of column inches are devoted to books£nbsp;- not to mention volumes of sound bites and television exposure. Journalists and programme producers have time and space to fill - your masterpiece could be just what they are looking for.
  
  
• The capital - (this is the only disadvantage of DIY). To give you a vague idea of prices: EASY BEING is 224 pages, paperback, with black and white diagrams and photographs. I produced it on disk for the designer, and the whole exercise cost about £10,000 for 5,000 copies (ex VAT)£nbsp- ie £2 per book - of which the printers' bill was about £6,500. The huge cost of printing is for setting up: for reprinting, a run-on of 1,000 will only cost about £700, ie 70p per book - which is rather different.

  TIP: Register for VAT. There is no VAT on books, but a whacking great 17.5% is added on to every bill you pay in the course of production; and you can't afford it. It does mean doing your accounts every quarter, but you get the VAT back. And I've had nothing but kindness from the VAT people - they know I'm not an accountant, and fully expect me to ask silly questions and make mistakes.

  The size of the first printing is important - for example, if I had only printed 50 copies, no one would have been able to afford to buy them; whereas, if I had printed 100,000, I would be making an enormous profit per book, but how long would it take me to repay the capital investment? You have to decide for yourself. If you are already an established author, then you can more or less guarantee sales. How big was the first print run of your last book?

  I chose the figure of 5,000 because my first book LAZY LEARNING had a first print run of 5,500; it was published in June 1994 and, by November of that year, was out of print. So I reckoned 5,000 was a fairly safe bet. LAZY LEARNING has been reprinted every year since publication, which is a nice little earner for the publishers, whereas I still get the same royalty as I did on the first print run.

• A Company name for your Publishing House. Mine is The Useful Book Company and is an unlimited company because it's just me and I'm operating on my own from home, ie no huge company debts for which I could be liable.(NB Check with Companies House in Cardiff; - or wherever is necessary if you are not in the UK - that no one else is using the name you have chosen.)

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

I thought that this would be a good moment to do you a nice chart of the advantages and disadvantages of DIY but, as the question of capital is the only disadvantage I can think of (and admittedly this is a large question), such an unbalanced chart would have wasted a lot of valuable space. So, let's think about some of the advantages. They come in no particular order.

• Speed: I made the decision to go it alone at the end of May (with nothing but the manuscript on disk) and, on 16^th August, I had the first books in my hand. Compare that to traditional publishers!
  
  
• Control: things happen how and when you want them to - rather than at the whims of your publishers (for example: you're wildly busy with something else, the corrected manuscript arrives and they want it checked and back to them within 48 hours). When you're in charge, things happen when you decide they will happen.
  
  
• Saving paper: (this may seem petty, but to me it's very important). There was only ever one hard copy of the manuscript of EASY BEING - which the copy editor used. Otherwise we simply worked from disk (with several copies) - which is also much easier to handle, and cheaper to post.
  
  
• I've done some sums for you...
  
  
• Faster access to your money: okay, so you get an advance from traditional publishers - supposedly one third on signature of the contract, one third on submission of the manuscript, and the rest on publication; and this is not to be sneezed at, if it's a worthwhile advance. (However, they may have the manuscript, and simply delay signing the contract so they don't have to pay.)
  
  The rest of your royalties will sit with your publishers from four to ten months - earning interest for them, rather than you. For example a Statement of Accounts 31^st September to 31^st March comes to you (with luck) with payment by 31^st July. They may also hang on to 20% of your Royalties for two years - supposedly to cover any losses.
  
  
• A much larger slice of other rights: A publisher will generally go for '50% of net receipts'. For example, the Swedish publishers of both my books pay an advance of royalties of £1,700. For LAZY LEARNING, the publishers' agent took 10%, leaving £1,530, and the publishers took 50% of that, leaving me with £765 (which they hung onto for as long as they could - see above). Whereas the £1,700 for EASY BEING comes straight to me. (You can always employ your own agent to handle specific rights, and this will cost you 10%-20%, depending on whether or not your agent goes through another agent in the country concerned.)
  
  

  There are all sorts of other little clauses in publishers' contracts, which don't mean much at the time: like, if they sell books at a 50% discount, your royalty percentage goes down, and if we work this one through, based on a cost of £2 per book to the publishers, and a retail price of £8.99:

  Wholesale price:	£5.84	50% Discount price	£4.50
  Less your royalty of 15%	- £0.88	Less your your reduced royalty of 10%	- £0.45
  Leaves them with	£4.96	Leaves them with	£4.05
  Less cost per book	- £2.00	Less cost per books	- £2.00
  Sub total	£2.96	Sub total	£2.05
  Less carriage per book (say)	- £1.00	Less carriage per book (say)	- £1.00
  Their profit per book	£1.96	Their profit per book	£1.05

  So, they are always making more than twice as much profit as you on the first print run.

• A much higher profit on reprints: as you discovered above, a run-on of 1,000 copies will cost the publishers 70p per book, ie it increases their profit by £1.30 per book; so they are now getting £3.26 per book, while you are still getting 88p - in four to ten months' time - ie they're making almost four times as much as you, and faster than you.
  
  
• You are working one-to-one, with people you know, who are becoming friends :- rather than playing Chinese whispers with a collection of faceless individuals. This, for me, is the most important aspect of the whole exercise. With LAZY LEARNING, I would tell whoever I was dealing with at the publishers that something needed changing; the information would be passed down the line to someone, get mangled on the way, and something else would get changed instead. It drove me mad!
  
  

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

Each minute of thought you put into turning your dream into reality will save you at least a day of unscrambling any mess you might get into.

Unless you have money to throw away, your sums are the most important thing. If you need to raise the money, no one will come up with a penny unless they can see that your proposal is going to work. In this section, you will find:

• My sums ... and the things I forgot!
• How to cover the gap between paying for production and publication date.
• Hidden extras: the cost of borrowing money
• Books cost money to move around
• Some more promotional ideas.
• How to make promotion cheaper.

When you have decided how much of the work you want to do yourself, and how much you want to contract out, you will need to discover how much each part of the process is going to cost.

In my case, I have got a computer with a word-processing package, and a resident computer expert (my husband, Philip). We have got a desktop-publishing package somewhere but, for my first effort, I preferred to hand the design over to a professional - installing and finding our way round the DTP software would have taken too long, and there was too much margin for error.

Ask around, consult Yellow Pages, get some ideas and some firm quotes. And remember, the quotes that you get will probably be ex VAT - I forgot!

The initial quotes I worked from were:

Click here to skip forward a few paragraphs and find out my final overall costs.

These were the sums I took to Mark, my Bank Manager, who supports all my wild and wacky ideas.

I also took the sales figures for LAZY LEARNING: eg, it was published in June '94 and was out of print by November; it has been reprinted every year; it has been translated into six foreign languages (translation rights are an excellent bonus).

We compared the profit I would make by doing it myself to the royalties I received for LAZY LEARNING, and discussed the cost of borrowing the money - in other words, it would not be all pure profit. 'And there will be things you've forgotten,' he added.

He was right! I'd forgotten the VAT, for a start - but I could, at least, claim that back within three months. There were then other ideas that I had for promotion.

I rediscovered a postcard I'd had from the journalist Andrew Roberts - it was the cover of his novel: THE AACHEN REFERENDUM - which I'd promptly gone out and bought. 'Now there's a good idea!' I thought to myself. I ordered 1,000 postcards announcing the publication date and telling people they could buy advance copies direct from me.

This was very useful, because it brought in lots of orders @ £8.99 (plus postage and packing) - enough to cover the monthly repayments of the loan between the time I had to fork out for the printing and the official publication date, when people could buy the book in the shops. It also told people that the book would be around soon, and got them talking, and curious. People are far more likely to keep postcards in obvious places than letters - which get filed or thrown away.

But Remember, 1,000 stamps will set you back a lot of money!

Then, with perfect timing, I was repaid some money that I thought I would never see again. Time to employ a professional publicist. This is worth every penny and more (provided, that is, that you employ a good one) so include it in your original figures. It cost £2,100 plus VAT and their expenses. By my calculation, the books were already paid for, so I divided £2,100 by the price I get from the distributors, and discovered that I would only need to sell another 480 copies to get it back. It was this figure that brought the total bill for production up to about £10,000, ie £2 per book. More about the results of the publicity later.

Warning! The printing prices are based on a book of a certain length. If the book is longer, the retail price will need to be higher. The thing to remember about printers is that they do everything in 32-page batches; and it's cheaper to produce a book with 30 blank pages at the end, than to add 2 pages. In other words, a whole section is cheaper than a part section; so aim to cut, in order to fit in with multiples of 32. In other words, with all your end pages, etc, your book needs to be 64, 96, 128, 160, 192 (and so on) pages, or less.

(Useful tip from AuthorDocs (who designed EASY BEING): if you've got some blank pages at the end, call them 'Notes' - then it looks as though you put them in specially.)

My basic overall cost for producing EASY BEING was about £10,000; ie, with a print run of 5,000, £2.00 per copy - a smaller print run would have made the book more expensive.

Click here to go back to my original sums

Remember: this is only the basic cost. I haven't calculated the cost of borrowing - the Bank Rate fluctuates, and Banks will give you different quotes anyway. Also, you may have to take out insurance against your being unable to repay the loan: this can cost an arm and a leg - make sure you know exactly how much; and whether you will get a refund if you pay off the loan sooner than expected.

Illustrations - Have you ever wondered why the illustrations for grown-up books are irritatingly lumped together, somewhere in the middle in two sections? Well now I know. They need special glossy paper and the rule of 32 applies again. As you discovered above, everything happens in sections, and it is much cheaper to put all your glossy paper according to the sections, eg four glossy pages in the middle, or at the beginning and end of each section.

If you want to keep your costs down, restrict yourself to diagrams and line drawings: I slid a couple of photographs into EASY BEING, on ordinary paper, and they do not look at all good - they do need glossy paper to do them justice.

Tip:Your designer will be able to do wondrous diagrams for you on the computer. Get him or her to put them on a disk for you - so you can use them again whenever you want: after all, you've paid for them, they are now yours, to use as you will.

The printers may want half their money up front. Check when they give you the quote. It's a sizeable sum to have to produce - if you weren't expecting to pay it in advance. And they will want the rest within 30 days.

If you have taken out a loan, monthly repayment is the normal form. Will you be able to cover this straightaway?

Remember, too, that - if you are using a distributor - there will probably be a 90-day lag before you get paid. You will need to juggle accordingly.

As you discovered above, I lit upon the postcard idea. If you want to do this, you can use the time when others are working on your project to compile a database of everyone and anyone who might be interested in your masterpiece: friends; relations; your Christmas card list; colleagues; everyone who has ever written you a fan letter about your other books, and so on.

You could, of course, just print out a whole lot of order forms instead, and send them off. This is cheaper than having postcards printed, and has the added advantage of making it much easier for people to order; but there is no picture of the jacket, and you have to put each one in an envelope: or you could send flyers - once again, envelopes will be required. You decide what would be best for you.

Your outcome is for people to know the publication date, and that they can have advance copies by ordering direct from you.

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

The Best Scenario:Your book is a huge, immediate success; you pay off your capital investment, and the rest is pure profit.

The Worst Scenario: Not one single person wants to buy your masterpiece; you have paid out, say, £10,000 and you have, say, 5,000 unwanted copies of your book - which take up an enormous amount of room. You remainder them: Peter a dvises asking 10p per copy, and being satisfied with less. At the maximum of 10p, this will only bring in £500. Can you cope with such a loss? Only you can answer this question.

How many copies will you need to sell to break even? And how fast? - bearing in mind that the money you have borrowed is costing you interest every day.

Do You Still Want to Go Ahead?

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

In my opinion this is the most important factor of success. We often want something without thinking it through properly.

The example I generally quote is: when I was about 20, I decided I wanted a Rolls Royce. But, if you offered me one now, I would not thank you: I'd never be able to park the wretched thing; it would cost a fortune to run; and, anyway, I wouldn't dare take it on the road - I wouldn't want to handle anything that size in traffic.

So the questions you need to ask now about your masterpiece are:

• What do I want
• What will that give me?

I had assorted reasons for wanting to publish EASY BEING myself. Let's take the main one: to prove that EASY BEING works as a system. So what will that give me? One of my students, rather irreverently, christened this process 'The Christmas Tree'. Start at the bottom, and work up.

You can now do your own Christmas Tree, asking yourself these questions about your venture; and go as high up into the spiritual dimensions as you would like.

When you have done that, the next question to ask yourself is: 'What will I lose?'

One of the things you may lose - if you care about that sort of thing - is the respect of your co-authors, who might consider that, if you are not with a 'proper' publisher, your work is no good. Only you can make this decision: do you want to stay in the fold, or be a pioneer? Peter Finch regales us with tales of Richard Binns - the hugely successful author of FRENCH LEAVE - and his pioneering, unorthodox spirit.

This might be the moment to do another Christmas Tree - this time, for your readers. What do you want for them? And what will that give them? They are, after all, the final arbiters: they are the ones who decide whether or not they are going to invest their money in your masterpiece. And., having invested in it, they are going to expect value for their money. What value, and added value, do you want to give them

Now let's go back to what you might lose. Success is a curious thing, and heartily disapproved of by your average Brit. You may have heard some of the bitching from the realms of academe on the subject of Dava Sobel's delightful and fascinating book LONGITUDE: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time. It is, quite simply, a great story, which grabbed the imagination of the media. It is also beautifully produced: an attractive little book that your hand reaches out for in the shop - a little book that you want to take home with you.

LONGITUDE was a run-away success, and academe was furious. The damn woman (Sobel) was neither a scientist nor an historian. How dare she presume to write a book of this nature! And worse: how dare she become such a success! They fell upon her mistakes with cries of SHOCK! HORROR! And did their best to tear her to shreds - while the great British public paid scant attention and went on buying the book. (Ironically, the subject of the book suffered the appalling treatment from his contemporaries.)

And what does 'Success' mean to you, anyway? Does it mean lots of money? Does it mean credibility? Does it mean being famous? Does it mean one in the eye for Bloggins? What does it really mean to you? Stop and have a think - this is an important part of the 'thinking it through' process; because, if you don't know precisely what success means to you, how will you know when you've got it?

What's Wrong? - Some Thoughts on Criticism

Our brains do not seem to have been programmed to notice what is right. My theory is that, if I were to tell you what was right about your book, it would take far too long; whereas it is much quicker and simpler to tell you that your paragraphs are too short (or whatever my nit-picking brain should fall upon).

(A story for you: the copy editor for LAZY LEARNING decided that my paragraphs were too short - I suppose she thought that short paragraphs did not make it look like a 'proper book'. So she ran them all together - with the result that there were often three entirely different concepts in a single paragraph. It did not enter her head that part of my prospective public would be people who did not like reading; and I have since been told by some people that they did not buy the book because it looked heavy - the paragraphs were too long.)

You are going to get criticism, and we need to remember that criticism is purely subjective: it is about whatever is going on inside the critic at the time. Can you cope with it? Some of it may even be useful! And, if you have done your Christmas Trees, both for yourself and your punters, you will know exactly why you have chosen to do something in a particular way.

(Another thing about critics is that they probably won't read your book properly and may miss the point entirely - but that is their problem. I have a theory about professional critics: if you and I are, say, theatre critics, I might think myself remarkably clever if I can one-up you - by pointing out a mistake in the production that you haven't noticed.)

What else might you lose? Time? Privacy? Friends? Only you can answer these questions. And does it matter? If it does, what can you do in advance to avoid losing whatever it might be?

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

BSE stands for Blame Somebody Else. With your project, you are in charge and there will be nobody else to blame. Do you really want this?

As you will have realised from the section 'What do You Need to Publish a Book?' each member of your team will be vital to your success, at different stages. We all have different criteria for the people we not only enjoy working with, but also work well with. For example, some of mine are:

easy going makes me laugh full of good ideas listens and then asks intelligent questions is really interested in the project and contributes to it returns my calls the same day

These criteria are, of course, entirely subjective and have no relevance to reality. For example, there may be a million and one reasons for not returning my calls; but - as far as I am concerned - if someone does not, I ask myself why. And the answer I come up with is: doesn't want to talk to me. Why? Not interested in the project/hiding from me/hasn't done what he/she has promised to do. All sorts of stuff that I consider to be unlikely to produce success.

But that's just me. What are your criteria?

In my experience, it is a mistake to hand over any part of your precious project to a friend, just for the purpose of putting some business his or her way. You need professionals: in other words, people who can do the job not only better than you, but also as well as - or better than - anybody else. How will you know that they can?

It's the old advice: ask around, and do your homework. For example, if you are looking for a publicist, find people who have employed publicists and pick their brains. People like to be useful and helpful, and you will learn a lot.

Because you are reading this on the Internet, I am presupposing that you are computer literate anyway, so we won't pursue the avenue of typesetters, etc.

Printing is a minefield for the uninitiated. As you will have gathered by now, I like doing things the lazy/easy way; and so, to circumnavigate this minefield, I went straight to the people who had printed LAZY LEARNING (Redwood Books of Trowbridge) and done an excellent job. I told them that I wanted EASY BEING to be exactly the same size and shape, with identical quality paper, jacket, etc as LAZY LEARNING. They also printed the flyers. I cannot recommend Redwood too highly - they pulled rabbits out of hats in all directions.

TIP for finding the sort of printers you need. Find a book whose quality fits with your masterpiece and the name of the printers will be on the back of the title page. Then you can chat them up, and at least get some idea of prices.

Another thing worth thinking about when choosing your team is where they are situated. Okay, so long-distance communication improves by the day, but I like dealing with people face-to-face. I was particularly lucky that AuthorDocs, who designed the book, were only 20 minutes down the road. I spent a lot of time with their Brian Curd. It would have taken for ever to explain by fax exactly what I wanted; as it was, we just worked on the project side by side.

Why did I choose AuthorDocs? It is such a good name, for a start; Brian is completely laid back - nothing seems to faze him; he was enthusiastic about the project; put in lots of good ideas of his own; made me laugh; and, when I discovered that his favourite radio programme was 'I'm sorry, I haven't a clue', my mind was made up. None of this is logical - but it worked! Brian did a brilliant job, and we had a gentleman's agreement about how much extra work he would have to do to follow up any new ideas I/we might have.

TIP: An important criterion for choosing a designer is how much he knows his way around what computers can do. For example, for the postcards, Brian simply put his design onto a disk, which could be taken straight off again - in other words, the postcard printers could not give me a whole lot of hassle about how much extra it was going to cost (I stupidly had not given the postcard job to Redwood in the first place). The whole book was on disk, including the jacket; and Brian took the disk over to Redwood to make sure that everyone understood exactly what was required. What we are talking about now is: No Hidden Extras.

A good reason for having your publicist close by is that it costs money to shift books. And, if the publicity is going well, they are going to keep wanting more review copies to satisfy the demand. It costs about £1 to despatch one copy of EASY BEING by post; so every frantic call for an extra supply of review copies is going to cost money.

I first met my publicist, Belinda Boyd of Pulse Communications, at Newbury Races, with her husband Nick, and they made me laugh a lot. Not a good reason for employing someone, you may think; but they were doing the PR for Newbury Racecourse at the time - and doing it extremely well.

Distributors, like everyone else on the circuit, can be snooty about self-publishing: have your figures, and what you contributed to them, for your last book all ready to dazzle them. Distributors need to know that they're going to make money from your enterprise - tell them about your world; that you are out and about in it; that you wrote this book for a good reason: you wanted people to read it. This way, they will know that the book will sell on your reputation and on your drive. The last thing any distributor wants is an author who just sits on his or her bottom, waiting for the world to beat a path to the door. Business is business: convince them that you know that.

Apart from the people on the list, who else can you enlist to help you on your way - in return for something useful from you? For example, The Anglo-American Book Company (who also publish useful books), wanted to publish EASY BEING, so the book is published 'in association with' them. They put it on the front cover of their catalogue and, before the official publication date, had ordered their second hundred copies.

We are all in business to provide us with what we want out of life. Think about this and ideas will come to you for promotion.

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

I have a firm belief that everyone wants to do their best; and there is only one way that people can give you precisely what you want: they have to know precisely what you want. This may sound obvious, but you have no more idea about what goes on in my brain than I have of what goes on in yours.

Suppose I have a great dream in my mind, and I am employing you to fulfil part of that dream: unless you can see the pictures in my mind's eye, you won't be able to come up with the goods. For example, if I asked you to find me somewhere to live, and simply assumed that you knew I had six children, seventeen dogs and a goat, it would hardly be your fault if I found myself in a two-bedroomed fifth-floor flat.

And Tell 'em the Truth! The whole unvarnished truth. Because, if they know the whole truth, they will be able to contribute so much more For example, because I was short of cash, I wanted to buy Pulse Communications' expertise - rather than their time; so I stuffed all the envelopes with press releases and stuck on the stamps and labels myself - leaving them the extra time to get on with what they were good at: ie chatting up the press.

We all think differently: I like thinking in big chunks, and too much fine detail can drive me mad. A copy editor needs to be a small-chunk thinker: someone who loves searching through haystacks for needles. Peter Gilbert, my copy editor (who enjoys thinking in the tiniest chunks), also likes meeting the people he works with face to face, so he and his wife Margaret came to lunch.

As we ate, I regaled him with the horror stories of the copy editor of LAZY LEARNING: substituting five syllable words for single syllable words where possible; cutting out the section on John Harvey-Jones - because she had never heard of him; cutting the most important section of the book, and retyping the contents list in the hope that I would not notice (and I nearly didn't! - it was only because she used a different type face that I realised what she had done); changing everything she could - simply for the sake of change, and so on.

(When I got her final version, it bore no resemblance to the book I had written, and I refused to allow it to go to press. I was so incensed by the whole incident that I wrote an article in 'The Author', which started: 'it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that your copy editor knows more about your specialised subject than you do'.)

Another very good reason for publishing yourself! You know what you're talking about, and they don't.

By the end of lunch, Peter was pretty clear about what I didn't want. I then told him what I did want. My outcome was a book which sounded like conversation, rather than deathless prose; hence a sentence ending with a preposition was something he would have to put up with; and that I had even been known to deliberately split an infinitive. What I wanted him to do was to find the typos and anything that didn't make sense; make sure I had put the inverted commas in the right places, and to check that - when I said something like 'as you discovered in Chapter 1' - that Chapter 1 was where it was. This he duly did, and only gave me a hard time - quite properly - about things like was I quoting Seneca the Elder, or Seneca the Younger? Or whether this question mark should be in italics.

If you tell people precisely what you need from them, then they will oblige - in spades. After all, why wouldn't they?

What do They Need from You?

This is a leadership question; so now is the time to stop and have a think about all the people you have pulled rabbits out of hats for. What was it about them that inspired you to such great heights? Write yourself a list, and be subjective - in other words, what effect did these people have on you? And what was it that they did that had this effect on you?

When you have done this, ask your friends the same questions. You will, of course, get varied answers, because we are all different; but you will discover the overall strategy of leadership.

Anyone can set off into a supposedly golden sunset; but, if there is nobody following, there is no leader - there is just someone heading for a golden sunset.

In my experience, anyone who is part of a team needs to feel valued and valuable. And the next question that arises is how do you know that you are valued?

What is it about people's behaviour that gives you the evidence that you are valued?

• Is it what they say?
• Is it how they say it?
• Is it the way that they look at you?
• Is it the way that they listen to you?
• Is it the time they give you?
• Is it the space they give you?
• Is it the hugs they give you?

Or is it something completely different?

This information is probably coming in at an unconscious level, so give yourself the time and space to think about it.

When you have discovered what your evidence is - and it may be something completely weird - then ask your friends, and they will probably come up with something entirely different. The only thing to notice here is how different we all are.

Supposing that my evidence that you value me is that you buy me the odd box of chocolates: if you do not know that this is my evidence, how will you ever know how to demonstrate that you value me? Our evidence procedures have nothing to do with logic, or reality - they just are; and they may be totally weird. (I once worked with a client who could not believe any compliment that anybody paid her - and that was that!)

'How do you know?' is the perennial NLP question. The information has to come from somewhere - from one or more of the five senses: it will something you see, something you hear, something you feel, something you taste, or something you smell - or any combination of the above. Try giving your appreciation through different senses, and see what happens; and remember that the only way we can really find out what goes on in other people's heads is to ask.

TIP from Don Juan, the Mexican Sorcerer who caught and held the attention of the American anthropologist Carlos Castaneda so effectively that Castaneda (who had only gone to Mexico to study the use of peyote) became his apprentice, and stayed with him for five years. Look deep into the right eye of the other person, and keep that connection.

TIP from me: just pretend: this person really matters to me.

Try them both, and see what happens!

The Other Side of the Leadership Question

This is, of course, you. And, if your mind is throwing up protesting statements like: I'm not a leader; I've never been a leader, and so on - just think back to the times when you have been a leader. It doesn't have to be an earth-shaking project: it could be the great family holiday you decided upon; or the farewell party for a favourite friend which you organised; it could be anything where you had an idea, and carried it through, with the help of others.

Then stop and think how you did it. What was going on inside you as you inspired the help of other people to turn this dream into reality. What did you believe about your idea? Why were you doing it? What was it going to give you? What was it going to give everybody else? Think about it at all the different logical levels and take separate pieces of paper for each level so that you can write everything down as it comes to you - however silly it may seem: remember we are all pretty weird - that's the fun of it!

• Where and when have you been a successful leader? Maybe when you organised a fund-raising project; maybe surrounded by your family; maybe away from your home territory; maybe in the mornings - if that's when your brain works best. You will be interested by what you discover.
  
  
• What did you do that was so successful? Did you involve other people at every level? Did you just tell them what to do? Did you delegate, or do it all yourself? What exactly did you do? Only you will know. What were you seeing in your mind's eye? What were you hearing in your mind's ear? What were you feeling? What were you tasting/smelling? (For example, how much saliva did you have in your mouth?)
  
  
• How did you do all these successful things? For example, if you delegated, how did you decide what to delegate? How did you get other people to do it? How did you react to what they had done? How did you support what they were doing? And so on, with all the other 'how' questions you can think of.
  
  
• Why were you successful? (This is a beliefs-level question.) What did you believe about the project? What did you believe about the people who were working with you? What did you believe that success would bring to you, to your team and to the world? And ask yourself any other 'why' questions you can think of.
  
  
• Who were you as this successful leader? It might be easier to use a metaphor here; for example, you might think of yourself as the tip of an arrow; or the hub of a wheel; or the catalyst; or the artist; or the gardener. Whatever you choose - and you have the universe at your disposal - let it fit comfortably with who you are.
  
  
• Who Else was your leadership going to benefit? This is the mission question. It's all about what you are doing on the planet, and what difference your project is going to make, and how that difference fits in with who you are.

Then you can think about all the other times you have been a successful leader, and go through your bits of paper with the 'wh..?' questions on them again - adding anything new that comes to you. Obviously, some things will be completely different - because the situations were different; but a lot of them will be the same. And it is the answers that are the same which will give you the structure of your own successful leadership strategy.

Some More about Telling the Truth

If everyone knows everything, then there are no surprises. For example, if I enlist your help with a project, you need to know that my brain works best in the morning. And you need to know this for two reasons:

1. Having been up since 5.00 am, I may cheerfully ring you up at 9.00 am - bubbling with all sorts of ideas. If you work late into the night, and start slowly in the morning, this may not be a very good plan.

2. If you ring me at 7.30 p.m. - bubbling with all sorts of ideas - my brain has switched off entirely, I will be concentrating on cooking, and not in the least interested in any of your wonderful ideas.

If we have different body clocks, we need to negotiate a time for our discussions when both of us are making maximum sense.

We have always been a pretty peripatetic family and, when our sons were at pre-school age, their best friends were Alice and Suzannagh. Our ways parted, and years later, when we were in Berlin, Alice decided she wanted a job there, looking after children.

As luck would have it, our next door neighbours, Issy and Gordon, needed some help. Issy wrote out this amazing list of things she thought Alice needed to know about them: 'if I don't tell her about how neurotic I am about the kitchen floor, she'll think I'm quite mad!' - Issy washes her kitchen floor three or four times a day.

Alice decided she could live with this, and went to look after Brigid and Morag, which was the greatest fun for us all. And more years later, when we all arrived in Ireland for Alice's wedding, there were Brigid and Morag as her bridesmaids.

Issy's determination that there would be no suprises was the beginning of an excellent working relationship, and a long-term friendship.

Getting the Best for Everyone

To carry the truth thing further, suppose that I have invited you to work on a prestigious project with me, in the expectation that you will return the favour by inviting me to work on your prestigious project - you need to know this. Otherwise it may never cross your mind; and I may be left feeling bitter, unappreciated, hard done by, and so on - simply because I never told you what I wanted at the beginning.

It's back to the old mind-reading thing: 'If you really loved me, you would know that I wanted to go skiing this year, rather than to the sun!' - Or any other of those 'if you really loved me ..............' things that people trot out. We expect other people to be able to read our minds - and they can't. So, if we want them to know what we want, we need to tell them.

As with all good teams, if everyone knows what everyone else wants to get out of it for themselves, they can all help each other along the way - and everyone can have the best.

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

Those who worked with him said that there were three Disneys: the Dreamer, the Realist and the Critic. And the only problem was that you never knew which one was going to turn up for your meeting.

Robert Dilts, of the NLP University in California, worked with Disney, and converted this strategy into something useful and powerful, which we can all use for our dreams.

Eeverything you see around you is the result of somebody's dream. There were no chairs, no windows, no glass, no buildings - until somebody dreamed up the idea, and carried it through. People dream supposedly impossible things: for example, Leonardo da Vinci dreamed about helicopters in the 15th century; and other people may take it upon themselves to ridicule these dreams - but that is their problem!

Step 1. Go into Dreaming Mode

Step into the space you have chosen, where you can dream away to your heart's content.

Dreaming is all about pictures in your mind's eye; so you will be standing upright, and your eyes will be up - because that is where we file pictures, in our brains. (You will have noticed how when people say: 'let me see', they look up.)

The trick, in this space, is to allow your dreams to be as crazy as they want to be - this is just the dreaming space: your realist and your critic will have their turn in due course - so let your dreams run riot!

When you have dreamed the ultimate dream, step out of that space, and choose another space.

Step 2. Go into Realist Mode

In the realist's space, you are going to become the logistics expert. What is going to have to be done, in order to achieve this dream. What resources will you need to provide? What modifications need to be made to the dream, in order to make it achievable?

In this space, you will be detached from the dream, and have your feet firmly on the ground. It is practical questions you are dealing with here.

When you have worked out how to achieve each step, and made all the necessary modifications to the dream, step out of the realist's space, and move to the critic's space (an equal distance from the dreamer and the realist - in other words: the critics space forms the third angle of an equilateral triangle)

Step 3. Go into Critic Mode

The critic has a very important job. He/she is there to make sure you don't make a complete fool of yourself; lose all your money; get sent to prison, and so on. The critic's advice is vital: the critic's job is to keep you safe.

Most of us try to ignore our critic, thinking of him/her as a nit-picking misery guts - which he or she may well become - if ignored. Whatever you say or do, your critic will persist in trying to keep you safe, so it would seem sensible to pay attention in the first place!

The critic's job is to think up everything that can possibly go wrong with your master plan; and every possible bad side effect - so that you can be prepared for anything.

In critic mode, you may find you have your hand by your mouth, as you talk things through with yourself. You may be looking down, towards the hand you don't write with, as you discuss yes/no questions with yourself. Once again, you are detached from the dream. And, most importantly, it is the dream you are criticising, not the dreamer.

Listen carefully to everything that comes up, and be prepared to modify the dream still further. For example: your realist may have worked out how to fly a pair of red knickers from the top of the church tower, but you need to pay attention to the critic's warnings that this may upset not only the church, but also your friends and neighbours. Ask yourself what your outcome is for flying the red knickers. How can you achieve this outcome without upsetting the people you don't want to upset? Then you can modify the dream accordingly.

When you have dealt with everything to the critic's entire satisfaction, move on to

Step 4. Back into the Dreaming Space

Dream the modified dream. What does it look like? Does it still achieve what you want to achieve in its more workable form? Test it out. Dream some more: now that the original dream is more workable, what other ideas come up? Once again, allow yourself plenty of time and space. Then move on.

Step 5. Back into the Realist's Space

Now apply your practical, logistical mind to the modified dream. How are you going to achieve it?

Step 6. Back into the Critic's Space

The dream has been modified according to your suggestions (and maybe more has been added), and the realist has worked out how to achieve it. So what do you think of it now? Is there anything else you are not happy with? Talk it through with yourself and, once again, pay careful attention to anything that may come up.

If there is anything new, go through Steps 4, 5 and 6 again, until all three of you are completely happy with the whole project. And, when this is so, move on to

Step 7: Getting Your Act Together

You have been playing three different people in order to separate your project into its component parts - rather than having all your thoughts swirling around your head in a muddled mass. Now is the time to get it all together.

You are going to turn your triangle into a circle by walking through the three spaces four or five times, to bring each task - and the thoughts and attitudes that go with them - back into yourself. You might like to sing a song, as you walk the circle - to distract your conscious mind, and allow your unconscious mind to absorb and enjoy all the benefits you have received from your dreamer, your realist and your critic.

You are now all set to turn your dream into reality, and you can allow Walt Disney to be proud of you.

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

Mistakes are wonderful things. Can you think of a faster way of learning something? And, the bigger the mistake, the more effectively we will learn. We really cannot miss something that hits us straight between the eyes.

Problems will arise. And the question we need to ask ourselves is: what constitutes a problem? Quite simply, a problem arises when our present state does not equal our desired state. For example:

• Present State = over budget
• Desired State = within budget

Who is to blame for this situation is irrelevant, the problem simply needs sorting.

If you've done your sums right, then this will simply be a temporary cash flow problem; and, if you have kept the controller of the purse strings informed, all the way along the line, this will come as no surprise to him or her. The best businesses in the world can have cash flow problems to begin with.

What further problems can this problem create? If you can't pay Fred for a week or so, tell him, and tell him why. This means that he knows exactly what's happening, and can budget accordingly. People just like to know what's happening - it makes their lives so much simpler. (And this includes the Inland Revenue and the VAT people! They are only too happy to help, if you tell precisely what's going on.)

Supposing you're behind schedule. What other problems is this going to cause?

As Peter says, publication date is just the date you have given to Whitaker's - way out in the future: your books will be ready months before that (so that you can send out review copies, and the reps can show it off to the bookshops).

You, or your designer, will have booked your space with the printers, and they (if they are as efficient as Redwood) will have checked well in advance that you are still on schedule.

You will also have allowed yourself a week or so's leeway to cover hiccups - so what other problems could lateness cause? If a reviewer is desperate to have the book because of a deadline, he or she can always have it on disk.

 The postcards aren't ready. Okay, so what? They will just have to wait. It's no big deal.

If we think it is the end of the world, then it's going to mess us around. If, however, it simply requires a solution, then we can find a solution.

The trick is to ask yourself what you would say to a friend who came to you with the same problem - because, if the problem is not ours, we are detached from it and therefore much more rational and sensible than we would be if we thought it was going to overwhelm us.

If the problem is between you and a member of your team, then it is your joint problem - you will need to solve it together. The trick here is to do it side by side, with the problem out in front of you, say on a piece of paper, or laid out on a table. This separates the person from the problem: the other person does not need to feel defensive, because you are not eyeball to eyeball: the problem is out there, and you are working on it together. (We do not say that somebody is 'on our side' for nothing.)

Gregory Bateson, one of the great thinkers of our time, has a meta-conversation with his daughter in STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND, called 'Daddy, why do things get in a muddle?'. He goes round her bedroom discussing where she likes things to be, and how much he can move them, before she objects. They discover that her tolerance for moved things is very low, and that - for the one 'right' place for each object, there are a million and one 'wrong' places. In other words, as Peter Finch puts it: 'if it can go wrong, it will'.

All we need is the flexibility to accept this, and the flexibility to do something different if we need to.

The printers announce that our book will be ready on Friday week, and it was supposed to be ready last Friday.

The question is, what would be the most useful way to react, in order to achieve our overall goal, which is to get the book out in time for all the promotional stuff to happen before publication date? How much difference is this fortnight really going to make? Can we afford it? Or is it time for negotiation?

If we have chosen something from the 'completely different' category, what will it give us, and what will we lose?

Like the million and one things that can be 'wrong', there are a million and one opportunities open to us, when problems arise. And the first question we can ask ourselves is: what have we learned from this problem? The answer may be something that we missed in our planning process, and will be a valuable learning for our next project - like my realisation that I could have saved myself a lot of money by cutting EASY BEING down to 192 pages, instead of having whole extra section, with lots of empty pages called 'Notes'.

There are always things to learn - that is the fun of it. And NLP-ers have the presupposition that there is no failure - only feedback. Thus all our mistakes become learnings.

Back to opportunities: what could we have done and/or what could we now do differently? Because, if we always do what we've always done, we'll always get what we've always got.

We could go back into dreamer mode, and dream up all sorts of opportunities resulting from this change in circumstances; then we could consult our instinct, or our feelings, and pay attention to the answers they come up with. My husband has an irritating habit of knowing long before I do when things are not going to work; for example, when the copy editor for LAZY LEARNING started to be a pain, he said: 'get rid of her!'. 'She isn't mine to get rid of', I said, (she was employed by the publishers), and went on, sanctimoniously 'she's just a test of my flexibility'. So on I went, being flexible, getting up at 4.00 in the morning to wade through her pages of complaints until, as you know, the end result was produced - which I could not allow to go to press because it was so awful. Whereas, if I'd listened to Philip in the first place, instead of being so virtuously pigheaded ...................

Pay attention to instinct - it is there to forewarn you of trouble. And, when you hit a problem, think back to all the little warnings you were given - either unconsciously by the other person, or by your instinct - in an effort to stop you before it was too late! Then you can learn to pay attention to your own highly efficient warning system.

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

I have the overall impression that in business, in the West, if a problem arises, the culprit is sought, hounded, blamed and sacked; whereas, in Japan, they discover how the problem arose, so that they can ensure that it can never happen again. This latter solution strikes me as being rather more sensible because problems have a time line; in other words, the problem that exists now has its roots in the past, and will have effects in the future - so sacking the culprit now may look good to outsiders, but the solution it ain't.

Problems can also be perceived from different angles. There's your side of the story, there's my side of the story and there's the observer's side of the story; and - as sure as eggs is eggs - they will all be different.

The third dimension of the problem is the logical levels we looked at earlier. All the 'wh' questions. Gregory Bateson, whom you have already met, realised that we think at different logical levels; and Robert Dilts, whom you've also met, (with the late Todd Epstein) developed Bateson's ideas still further. Once you've got the hang of it, you will realise that - like all good things - it's totally obvious and completely simple; and, like me, you'll wonder why you hadn't thought of it yourself.

For those who like their information verbally:

Supposing you invite me to lunch in a restaurant;

• I follow you there in my car, and - when we arrive in the car park - I say that I don't think much of the area.
  • Will you be mortally offended? Or will you just think I'm a bit rude/weird, etc?
  • (This criticism is made at the Environment level, ie 'where?!)
    
    
• I am now going to tell you that I thought you drove dangerously/badly on the way here.
  • How will you respond to this, compared to my last criticism?
  • (I am now complaining about your Behaviour, ie at the 'what?' level)
    
    
• Over lunch, I am going to say that you are not a sufficiently good writer to produce a decent book.
  • How are you going to feel about this?
  • (My barbs are now aimed at your Capability - at the 'How' level - how much closer am I getting to making you angry/upset?)
    
    
• Now think about something which you believe in passionately. I am going to look you straight in the eye and say I have never heard anything so stupid in my life, and I thought you were intelligent ...... how can you believe such rubbish! and so on.
  • How are you going to react to this one?
  • I am now attacking your beliefs - the 'whys' of your existence.
    
    
• And, if someone looks us straight in the eye and says 'I don't like you', this is a direct attack upon our identity - upon who we are.
  
  

Let's pause for a moment and think about some of the things that we hear people saying about other people. 'He is arrogant'; 'she is impossible', and so on. They are all identity-level statements, following the verb 'to be' - whereas they are probably really about behaviours. Maybe, he doesn't stop and chat, she doesn't stop and listen - or whatever.

If we make identity level statements about people (even though we do it by mistake), they are going to take them at identity level - what else would one expect?

Beyond identity level we find mission. What we are doing on the planet. If I attack, say your family, or your country, or your dream for creating a better world, I could (deservedly) find myself in seriously deep water.

For those who like their information pictorially, here is my version of Robert Dilts's structure of

the logical levels. If you start in the middle at Identity, you can see how who we are is based on a collection of beliefs and values. For example, and explorer might base his identity upon the beliefs that there are more wondrous things in the world than he will find at home; that we can learn from other cultures; that we can learn a lot about our own country by exploring other countries, and so on.

These beliefs are based on a set of capabilities; maybe our explorer is a wonderful linguist; maybe she is a brilliant organiser; maybe he is an outstanding leader; maybe she is a brilliant anthropologist (I realise I am using identity level statements here to describe capabilities - it's such an easy trap to fall into).

Each capability is based on a series of behaviours: maybe the person who can learn foreign languages with great ease listens; steps into the other person's shoes; copies the way the other person moves their face and body in order to pronounce words or expressions.

And the behaviours depend on the environment: the wheres and whens. The person who is good at listening may do it best when he or she feel comfortable and at ease; and maybe at certain times of day. Who knows? We are all different.

And remember, we all have different identities in different situations. At this moment, I am a writer and a neuro-linguistic programmer - whereas the dog has just burst in to remind me that, in another identity, I am a dog walker.

Laurence Dreyfuss (the French nursery school teacher who suddenly found her classroom invaded by a gunman, and the children hostages) never forgot for one moment that her identity in that crisis was as their teacher. Her identity as a wife and a mother did not come into the equation: she was the person the children knew best; the person they trusted to get them out safely. Despite frequent offers to replace her, she stayed with her charges to the end. She was subsequently awarded the légion d'honneur for her courage.

So where is this side-track leading us? Let me tell you a story about a problem that I unwittingly created.

I was running a workshop on learning for a collection of trainers. It was going very well, they appeared to be enjoying themselves and were asking very good questions. I, too, was enjoying myself and - as a throwaway remark - I said: 'When I rule the world, cookery and chemistry will be taught together.'

There was an explosion from the far end of the room. There was a guy, shaking with rage, telling me that he had enjoyed the session, that he thought what I had said made good sense, but I had just ruined everything by making a stupid remark like that.

'Let me tell you', he said, pointing his finger at me, 'that I am a chemist. And I can assure you that chemistry has nothing whatever to do with cooking.'

I reeled at the unexpected onslaught, apologised and said that I was just a cook, and that cooking had everything to do with chemistry. But he wasn't having that, and went raging on. The rest of the participants took him apart, which was a shame - because it was me who had set it up - by unwittingly e quating his identity as a chemist with a female behaviour called cooking.

Back to problems. Nobody goes to war - or gets divorced - about behaviours: it is the effect of those behaviours on people's beliefs, identities and missions that create the conflict. Going by to my neurosis about people who don't return my calls: it makes me feel as though I and my business don't matter, and that's why I won't work with them. It's a beliefs/identity/mission question.

Think about things that people do which upset you. Then ask yourself whether it is really a belief, identity or mission question - rather than about behaviour. Does leaving the lid off the toothpaste really prove that he or she does not love you? Or do you just notice that the lid is not on the toothpaste again? What would be a useful way to react to finding the tube and lid separated in the future? And what stops you from reacting in this useful way - instead of going bananas, feeling like an insignificant worm, wanting to scream, or however you normally react to this particular piece of behaviour?

I did a fascinating survey of businesses large and small - from multi-nationals to three-man bands, and asked the question: 'what stops life at work from being as simple, as productive, as fulfilling and as much fun as you would like it to be?' and the answers were almost inevitably 'people', followed by 'lack of time' and 'stress'. This is hardly surprising because - without people - there would be no business.

Business is supposed to be an entirely logical process: do a, b and c, and x, y and will happen. But, as you and I know, this is rubbish.

Bateson describes dealing with people as the equivalent of trying to play snooker with mice. Given the laws of physics: if we hit a snooker ball in a certain way, we can more or less predict where it will go - substitute an inanimate ball with a living thing and anything could happen!

Humans think - there is no getting away from it. So it is useful to know, at least, the structure of our thinking.

Here is Robert and Todd's Jungle Gym: their three-dimensional version of the structure of a problem. It may be big to fit on your screen, so - if it drive you mad - you might like to print it out. Press here to see it on a separate page for printing.

(Design by AuthorDocs)

As you will see, there is the timeline we talked about:

• the past,
• present and
• future constituents of our problem.

There are also the three different perceptual positions:

And then we have the five logical levels of thinking.

This gives us 45 different positions from which we can review the problem!

(I use white ping-pong balls for the problem spaces, and coloured balls for the solution spaces)

Let's go back to the high-rise flat you have found me, in which I am installed with all my children, dogs and goat:

• It's my problem: 1st position
• It is Now: Present
• It is a 'where' problem: Environment-level

Place three white balls in the appropriate holes

In the future, it is going to become a Behaviour-level problem: the goat is going to eat the furnishings; all the animals are going to make a hideous mess; the children are going to find it very cramped and will probably fight over space.

If I go into 2nd position with the rest of the ménage, it may well become an Identity level problem for the animals: they won't be able (Capability) to do all the things they naturally do in this restricted space, and this may affect who they are.

I may also have problems with my neighbours (2nd position, Future) - and so on.

The question is: how am I thinking about the problem now? As you saw, it is lst position, Present, Environment-level. However, I might be busy blaming you, thinking you had done it on purpose to upset me - because you don't like me.

This immediately takes it into 2nd position Beliefs , and lst position Identity-levels, Past, Present and Future - which makes it appear much more dangerous to me; and I will be less likely to be able to think rationally about it at these levels, because they are altogether too threatening.

If I am thinking usefully, the first priority is to get the problem sorted - ie find somewhere else to live. Then comes the question of how it arose, so that I do not create more problems of this sort, for myself. Obviously, it arose in the past: we got our wires crossed: Behaviour.

So what capabilities and/or beliefs created this behaviour? What would an outsider say? (3rd position) - and so on (we can use the coloured balls to show which spaces we have explored). The more we explore the problem from all the different positions, the more evident the solution will become.

Play around in the Jungle Gym, and see what you discover.

My friend Sid Jacobson has written a wonderful book called SOLUTION STATES - published by The Anglo-American Book Company (click to order direct from them) which is all about problem solving. He tells me that before AA Books, no other publisher would look at it. I was delighted (rather perversely) by this news, because it proved two of my theories: (a) a lot of publishers don't know which side their bread is buttered and (b) AA Books know how to think usefully.

SOLUTION STATES is the book I wish I'd written.

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

The production part is over, the team have been brilliant and here is the evidence! Time to sit back and rest on your laurels? NOT!

Now comes the serious stuff. Remember you wrote this book so that other people could read it - rather than for you to sit back and gloat. Nonetheless, it is an exciting moment. You can give yourself several pats on the back.

Owing to the inevitable hiccups and crossed wires, EASY BEING was behind schedule. I had planned to take copies to a polo tournament, and flog them, but they weren't going to be ready in time. Nothing daunted, Redwood said - 'no problem How many copies do you want at Cowdray? We'll deliver them there for you'. But how on earth would a strange van driver find me on a polo ground with about 500 people? I consulted our local polo shop (Roxtons in Cirencester). 'No problem', they said, 'have them delivered to Roxtons in Midhurst'. This duly happened and was the perfect illustration of anyone and everyone pulling rabbits out of hats, once they know what you need.

The trick here is to go into 2nd position with your punters, in other words: if you were a punter and you heard about my book, how would you react? If you are anything like me, you might think: 'oh, that's interesting', and put it on one side - believing that you will do something about it later - and then forget about it entirely.

Wing out your postcards - or whatever you have chosen - as soon as you have the books in your hand, announcing the publication date, and telling people that they can have advance copies by ordering direct from you.

Make it easy for people to order now. The ideal might be a form they can fax back immediately with their credit card details.

You've got your publicist, so what else do you want to do yourself by way of promotion?

The locals are wonderful support. You are, after all, one of them, and they will be proud of you. If you are using a distributor, you will probably have an agreement whereby you do not sell to the book trade - but this does not cover your corner shop. Our village shop did a roaring trade with their advance copies of EASY BEING @ 25% on sale or return.

What other outlets can you sell to direct? Ask around: other people may have ideas which have never crossed your mind.

Your local press and BBC will also be very interested in your activities: local boy/girl made good !- it's just what they like. Chat them up and ask if they'd like a review copy. In my experience, it is better to deal with the local media yourself - they would far rather talk to the real thing, than a publicist. Some of them will want to feature the book; others will want the DIY story; and, the more variety of publicity you get - the better, because different sorts of people will read it.

Who else do you know in the media? And who do your friends know? Ask around.

Proper publishers seem to be quite uninterested in selling books - unless, of course, they have paid mind-blowing advances for them (which has inevitably got the media chattering nicely). The publicity for LAZY LEARNING consisted of my appearance on 'The Big Breakfast' (where I wasn't allowed to mention the book); an interview with Pete Murray (who is wonderful), and a couple of other regional BBC interviews - and that was it. They also got the book reviewed in the Times Educational Supplement (which was something). Apart from that, as far as I know, all the other promotion was done by me: LAZY LEARNING sold despite the publishers.

(I wrote to the editor of 'The Author' suggesting an article on the subject. He replied that it would have to say something new. In other words, there was a whole mass of other authors out there who had had the same experience.)

EASY BEING is a different ball game. I'm paying the bill - and I consequently expect my publicists to earn their keep.

Some of the questions you and your publicists will have already asked yourselves are:

Your publicists will have a Media Disk with almost every journalist listed on it, according to his or her speciality. For example, they will type in 'health', and the disk will churn out a mass of pre-printed labels.

Write your own press releases. You know what you're talking about, and no one else does. And, as you write them, wonder to yourself what a journalist would find irresistible.

Produce different press releases for the different angles you are promoting. For example, for EASY BEING, we mailed journalists who worked with Health and Fitness; Business and Personnel, Social Issues, Relationships - as well as lots of local papers with whose areas I had assorted connections for assorted reasons - as well as the literary journalists. This produced a list of about 550 people (and required 550 stamps!).

We sent each of them the relevant press release, plus a flyer. The flyers have the jacket (in colour) on the front, and blurb plus ordering details on the back. We also sent biographies to the nationals.

Where possible, press releases need to be double-spaced, and on one sheet of paper - but you can get away with l 1/2 spacing.

Your press releases will invite people to telephone and ask for a review copy.

You may be happy to do all this yourself - but you will need to buy a Media Disk (this costs £2,000 a year to keep up to date). You will also have to do all the boring chasing of people who have not responded, or people who have responded but are never in their offices - once again, it's up to you to decide how much you want to do.

TIP. Drop a 'thank you' line to everyone who writes about you/interviews you. That way they will remember you for next time.

The next question is: how much do you, yourself, want to contribute to your promotion campaign. Some authors reckon their duty is done, and it's now up to interested journalists to promote the book. Others like talking direct to the journalists who want to write features; and are happy to be be interviewed on radio and TV.

The more exposure you get, as a person, the better your book will sell. People like to meet the person behind the ideas. Hearing your voice, seeing you, and so on, makes everything more alive and human for the punters.

TIP for radio/TV: Go for live interviews where possible; and, when chatting with the interviewer before you go on air, talk about anything other than your book. Otherwise, you will spend the interview itself wondering whether you are repeating yourself. I've messed up two interviews by allowing the interviewer to talk about the book before we went on air. If that's what they want to do, simply tell them you'd rather not - and why.

Interviewers look after you - that's their job: they want to create good radio. Trust them! And enjoy the experience.

There is a statistic which says that ninety something percent of the population is more afraid of speaking in public than of dying. If the thought of being interviewed fills you with horror, go back to the reasons why you wrote your masterpiece, and everything will fall comfortably into place.

Another thought for you: if you stay in your ivory tower, the professional critics will have a field day picking holes in your work - whereas it's you the public wants to hear from. Give them the chance to choose whether or not they will like the book.

Do not hang about at this stage. Feature writers need lots of lead time (especially for the glossies). They also need time to read the book. Get on with it!

The Structure of Success - Table of Contents

There are two sides to the question of how people are going to buy your book

• They have to want to buy it
• They have to be able to buy it

Booksellers don't want to take up valuable space on their shelves by stocking books; they would much rather people came in and ordered them. People need to know your book is out there; and also that this is just the book that they need.

Booksellers can also extremely snooty about publishers. When I rang Hammicks in Cheltenham, as a courtesy, to tell them that they might like to know that I was going to be on BBC Radio Gloucestershire talking about EASY BEING, they said, primly: 'we don't normally buy from small publishers'. As a self-publisher, you can expect some booksellers to look down their noses at you - that's their problem! (And I notice from the distributors' statement that Hammicks have, in fact, ordered it.)

Waterstones, on the other hand, are very supportive of local writers, and of interesting books in general.

Your own booksellers will doubtless be very supportive - chat them up and pick their brains.

Think about your own book-buying strategies.

• How often do you wander into a bookshop and buy something that you have never heard of, off the shelf - just because it looks good? For everyone who does this, your book needs to be there, on that shelf, ready to buy - this is why I use a distributor.
• How often do you need to read/hear about a good book before you actually go out and buy it? For every person who needs several reminders, you need to provide these reminders - this is why I use a publicist.

Promotion! Promotion! Promotion! Be prepared to get out there and do it.

Diana Beaver also works privately with clients to help them solve their problems and achieve their own Structure of Success. She provides

• One-to-one Consultations and Coaching
• In-house introductory, intermediate and full length Courses in the Structure of Success
• Courses leading to Practitioner Certification in NLP

For more about NLP and how it can help you achieve your outcomes see Diana Beaver's Books, Audio Tapes and CDs

You can order EASY BEING: Making Life as Simple and as Much Fun as Possible. direct from Diana Beaver.

Thank you for visiting the web site!

©Diana Beaver, 1998, 1999, 2003

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