Open Our Eyes Press

Earlier this week I reported the first week sales for Open Our Eyes. The book’s been doing pretty well and we’re building on lots of publicity. Here are some of the highlights:

You can find more on the reviews page. We still need all the help we can get to keep the momentum going. Please consider tweeting it, liking it on Facebook or doing whatever you can to spread the word.

And don’t forget to buy a copy from Amazon.com.

Thanks.

NaNoWriMo FAIL

Mold-a-Rama Gorilla from Como ParkIt turns out that I’m crazy.

I dove into National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for the fourth time this year and it’s not meant to be. I had this grand plan of linking the story to Como Park and publishing the story with lots of help and Como Park goodies for everyone. It’s not going to happen.

I stopped writing last Friday, just shy of 20,000 words.

It really came down to two things:

  1. My life is crazy right now.
  2. The story wasn’t working.

My life is crazy right now: Work is both slow and busy (if you’ve ever been self-employed you might understand that predicament). Lexi stopped napping. Milo screamed more (didn’t think that was possible). We have a pre-teen in the family. Evenings have all but disappeared. We launched a book last week.

I’m not sure crazy does it justice.

When my wife started commenting about how stressed I was, I realized NaNoWriMo wasn’t a good idea this year. It didn’t help when I had to break out my brace to fight wrist over-use syndrome (yes, that’s what a doctor diagnosed it as a few years ago—shut up).

The story wasn’t working: I could put up with all of the above if the story were working. But it’s not. My characters feel flat. There is no plot. It feels like I’m trying to force reluctant people on a tour of Como Park, and that’s not what it’s supposed to be. Getting up an hour early every day to work on this just isn’t worth it.

NaNoWriMo is supposed to be about slogging through all that, but this year if I’m going to be that stressed I should at least be paying the bills.

Lessons from Failure
So I failed. I’m both sorry and grateful to my backers and cheerleaders. But sometimes I think we need to try crazy, ridiculous ideas and fail. I have a lot of crazy ideas, and they wouldn’t be so crazy if they all worked. And it’s not really failure if the idea sits in your head and you never try it—it’s something worse. So as scary as it is and as much as my Midwest work ethic says “Never give up!”, I’m giving up.

And it’s not a total loss.

  • I loved writing about Como Park. I loved diving into the history and story of the place. I will come back to that. Some day.
  • A few scenes and moments and ideas in the story did work. There are places that I really like, even if the rest falls apart. And that’s really what NaNoWriMo is about—finding some treasure in the trash.
  • I also learned the ins and outs of Kickstarter. I love the idea behind this site, the way creatives can pitch ideas and people can step up to make them happen. Go find some ideas and support them. Make a record with Shaun Groves. Help a photographer create street galleries in New York. Find a project you like and help it become a reality.

And there it is. Thanks.

Open Our Eyes: One Week

Open Our Eyes: Seeing the Invisible People of HomelessnessLast week we launched Open Our Eyes to lots of rave reviews. It’s been a busy week and very exciting because all the profits go to homeless advocate Mark Horvath and his nonprofit InvisiblePeople.tv. It’s been fun to see so many people come together to support the book.

I know it didn’t mean anything, but it was especially cool to see the book climb to #7,864 on Amazon’s sales rank and #3,680 on their Kindle store.

In reality, we sold 44 print copies and 21 digital copies. That works out to something in the neighborhood of $220 for Mark Horvath! (I’ll have exact numbers later, but the Kindle royalty figures are current through Saturday, which missed a few sales)

Those numbers may sound small, but that’s quite a launch for a self-published book. My hope is that momentum will continue to build and books will continue to sell, raising more money for Mark.

A big thanks goes out to everyone who helped make this thing possible. Now we just have to keep pushing it and build on this success. So you if you haven’t bought a copy yet, do it today.

Writing Love On Your Arm

TWLOHA Day: Love in English & AmharicThousands of people have been writing love on their arms yesterday and this weekend in support of To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA). It’s an organization that gives hope to people who struggle with depression, suicide, self-injury and addiction.

What’s cool is that none of this was started by TWLOHA. I’m not sure how it all started, but someone launched a TWLOHA Day on Facebook, and pretty soon dozens of similar events were popping up, some with tens of thousands of people participating. I wrote about it for HalogenTV and then put together a photo gallery from some of the thousands of photos people have shared. It’s pretty cool to see people show their support in such a tangible way.

I asked Yeshumnesh how to write ‘love’ in Amharic and to my surprise she only laughed at me a little bit.

The Life of a One-Car Family

With the launch of Open Our Eyes: Seeing the Invisible People of Homelessness it’s been a crazy week. That is perhaps the understatement of the year.

If you haven’t bought a copy yet, please do.

Our car has been making funny rattling noises for months and today was finally the time to check it out. Not actually take care of it, just find out what it is. This is the extent of the craziness that is my life. I have to move mountains to schedule an appointment just to find out what’s wrong with my car. Actually fixing it will require moving an entirely separate mountain.

This is what it took today:

Wife leaves for work with the car. Child #1 leaves for school. Me, child #2 and #3 take the bus to go get the car from wife’s work. We drive the car to the mechanic. The mechanic drives us back home. The mechanic drives the car back to the shop. Oil changed, tires rotated, weird noises analyzed, enormous estimate written. Different mechanic comes to pick us up in the shop’s truck because he can’t drive a stick and didn’t realize we needed the carseats. He goes back to the shop and gets the carseats out of our car. Comes back to our house and I install them in the backseat of the truck. Mechanic, me, child #2 and #3 drive back to the shop. I take the carseats out of the truck and put them back in the car. We drive the car to Abby’s work and leave child #2 there. Me and child #3 drive back home. After a nap (not for me) me and child #3 go pick up child #1 from school. Go back home. Me, child #1 and child #3 drive to wife’s work to pick up wife and child #2. The whole family, together for the first time all day, drives home.

Tired yet?

That’s the life of a one-car family. If we could afford it, I’d be tempted to put an end to that and get a second car. But then we’d have twice as many choke-worthy estimates to worry about and suddenly today’s mountain-moving insanity doesn’t seem so bad.

Go Buy Open Our Eyes

Help the homeless: I wrote a chapter. You can buy a copy.Back in January I pulled the trigger on yet another book idea. I loved the work Mark Horvath was doing to help the homeless. I hated that Mark was nearly homeless himself (again), living in a cockroach apartment with nothing in his fridge but a discounted vegetable tray and a bottle of water. He was eating his meals at the homeless shelter.

It was stupid (and it still is). Somebody should be supporting Mark and making sure he can do this work without working himself to death. But nobody had stepped up. So I did. I couldn’t do much, but I figured I could put together a project that produces something people might be willing to buy, and we could give the money to Mark. So that’s what we did.

I got a whole bunch of Mark’s friends to contribute—people like Trust Agent author Chris Brogan, mom blogger Jessica Gottlieb and Ford’s social media guru Scott Monty (and 21 others). We wrote up stories of homeless people from Mark’s travels across the country, telling the stories of moms and their kids, people who had been homeless for days and 0thers for decades, people from Seattle and Florida. The result is a manual to motivate action. It drips with Mark’s attitude and passion, the way he used what little resources he had, plugged them into social media and turned this thing into a real movement.

I hope you’ll check it out. It would mean a lot to me and it would support Mark.

Today’s the day, folks. Open Our Eyes: Seeing the Invisible People of Homelessness launches today. Please go buy it:

Then tell your friends to buy it, review it on Amazon, like it on Facebook, whatever you can do. I need your help. Mark needs your help. The homeless out there need your help. Thanks.

Remember that all profits go to homeless advocate Mark Horvath and his nonprofit InvisiblePeople.tv.

Political Communication that Works

On election day, amid the frenzy of last minute plugs and flurry of civic-minded joy, I came across a simple little website that I just love. Before linking I want to qualify this for two reasons: 1) It’s full of the f-word, which might put some people off. So fair warning. 2) It’s all pro Obama, which might put some more people off. More fair warning.

But in spite of both of those things, I think the site is really cool. I share it regardless of politics and profanity because I think it’s an interesting idea. I actually waited until after the election to let the partisan nature wear off a bit. It’s still there, but it feels easier to look past today than it would have been on election day.

The site is called What The F*ck Has Obama Done So Far? and it’s just a slide show of one-sentence accomplishments. Each accomplishment has a source link and then a button to see the next accomplishment. It’s an ingenious little way to tell a story of simple achievements. Instead of drowning people in paragraphs of text on every issue, it’s just one little snippet of factual text.

Now I realize some folks will likely take issue with each bit of “factual” text, because that’s what we do, nit-picking every statement as spin and adding our own counter-spin. But I think the basic idea does what it needs to. Some sort of way to engage those nit-pickers and add a little more explanation or context might be helpful (but that might also ruin the simplicity of the whole thing). It’s not a perfect idea, but it’s a lot more effective than any political website I’ve ever seen.

Bottom line: I love the idea of taking something as complex and off-putting as politics and phrasing it in simple one-liners of actual accomplishment that anyone can understand. That’s powerful communication.