Who is the publisher?

I went full circle with this one. As I said, originally my assumption was that I would use a print-on-demand service and just give the book away. I didn’t think twice about this route until about six months ago. As my wonderful senior editor Chris Benz worked on the book (who has done work for Michael Lewis and Dave Eggers), he kept urging me to go through a traditional publisher. I kept resisting and he eventually asked if he could “play agent” with it. Within a week he found an agent, two days later that agent found a publisher. This was incredibly exciting because the agency represented some really big names (Dr. Phil, Joel Osteen, Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, and many others). However, it was clear early on that I was going to have to compromise. They said it definitely couldn’t be in color, needed to be 200-250 pages long, and some other things. Whether it was from vision, stubbornness, or self-destructiveness, in the end I decided to walk away from it all and go back to self-publishing.

I have no regrets about this. I eventually decided to have them printed because the print-on-demand was very low quality. I’m very happy with what you see today. The book itself experiments with some publishing innovations that I feel will make the concepts easier to understand – particularly the use of color to “brand” concepts. I am printing it with the best materials: cloth quarter bound hardcover with an embossed dust jacket, the highest quality paper, and first rate graphic design. None of this would have happened with a traditional publisher and certainly not for $32.00.