Book Distribution

- A scattering of seeds or contributing to space waste?

Light morning… Luminous day… Lunar evening…

Recently, a client and friend released their first book, and like every person who has ever invested hours, days, weeks and months into their creation, they want it to reach a broad audience. They have a message to share, a story to tell, a vision to inspire and uplift and so forth. Books and storytelling shape our lives, give us pause to reflect and hope for a kinder future, and often provide the stimulus we need to progress from a place of stuckness into movement. Of course, stories can also do the opposite, creating dangerous worlds where dread and dire infinitely play on repeat from a source no longer sustainable on this planet, that invariably induce nightmares and promote fear-based thought processes.

So when my client asked what I thought of a relatively new platform that has created a way to centralise self-published authors so their written work is seen, my response was I hoped that the money the founder is making is being used wisely to benefit the people and the planet. I also said that the other consideration, for me, was we need to be more conscious of the data we contribute to the planet and its taxing effects on our environment… that there was more to consider than simply spreading our book seeds far and wide. Considering there are so many platforms we can upload our books to and that book publishing has become a saturated market, the onus is on the individual to be discerning as to where we promote from and what we aspire to achieve from doing so.

Aside from uploading our book to these platforms, when we have launched and let go of a project there is an undeniable space that once occupied is now open and available for something new. Often, rest is part of a period of incubation. And if we were to consider nature in this equation, once a plant has produced its bloom it withers and dies to leave a space where something else can be reborn anew. So the danger of scattering our book seeds too far and wide can distract us as we try to keep up with what’s selling on which platform, along with the who, what, where, when and why instead of allowing nature to take its course.

After ten years of self-publishing with IngramSpark (paperbacks) and Amazon (eBooks)  and feeling unseen, admittedly there was an aspect of me too who decided to upload to other platforms, including Kobo, Google Play and Nook, as I grew impatient and disenchanted by the entire book publishing industry and the way some companies conduct ‘business’. I soon realised this was not the solution because everyone else is doing the same. What happens when we reach…

Saturation Point

Saturation Point is not what we may think where an individual’s books are on every conceivable platform along with millions of others; it is the swimming floaters in the seas of our watery eyes that is the problem, for no longer will anyone be able to find the book they need when the ocean is littered not with books but data.

What is data?

The Latin word for data is datum which literally means ‘something given’… this begs the question of what are we ‘giving’ and to whom? How safe are our books stored on these platforms? Who has access to them? Have they been shared without our consent? It’s not my intent to spread concern here, rather to raise our awareness of what we are actually doing as writers and what we can do as a collective of creatives to ensure we are not only responsible for the books we place on these platforms, we also discern which ones care and do their due diligence. What do they give back to the planet? At the newly created site of Sea Dream Press Authors Collective we plant trees. And while this may sound like we are adding to the cloud, it has been created for non-fiction authors in a community environment where the ‘me’ has replaced by ‘we’ as we support each other in harmony with the Earth. Read more about SDPAC here.

*photo credit: Darwin Vegher ~ Unsplash

Let’s take a peek at data storage and its effects

If everything is made of matter, we, as an overpopulated planet contribute to an overwhelming excess of data (information) where most of it is kept in the cloud, this exorbitant use of electricity to keep the machines cool contributes to our planet's ecosystem and is not natural. Imagine the billions of emails that have never been deleted from a user’s inbox, outbox, spam folder, trash etc, this is like congestion in the Earth's lungs and throughout space that spreads like a disease into other dimensions.

There are many disadvantages to cloud storage:

• We depend on the internet and wifi coverage instead of being reliant on our ability to connect naturally, which dumbs us down

• There are issues with privacy and security due to a third party being involved

• We hand over the control of our personal intellectual property where the vendor of the information stored in the cloud is in charge of what happens to it

• There is a cost component

• The MIT Press Reader states: the Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry, while Lancaster University estimates that the cloud is responsible for between a quarter and 1.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions globally, equating to at least 100 million tonnes per year

Without going too deep down the wombat hole, I return to the point of awareness and discernment… what if the bigger picture reality is that every human on the planet has come here to create and it is not, and never has been, about making money from our innate capabilities? Focusing our attention on what light’s our fire, brings us joy and fuels us to rise each day to bask in the beauty that is all about us and is all about us, we come to appreciate that when we listen to our internal workings and observe our inner compass there is a natural evolutionary time-space coordinate when every author will be seen, heard, energetically felt and known for their written words. And beyond that, as each word is expressed, it is automatically recorded by nature and in the cosmos of eternal history in its remaking where we come from the future to rewrite the past… everything simply IS.

If you’re a writer/author, what have you done to spread your book seeds?

If you’re a reader, where do find the books you want to read? Is your preference paperback or eBook?

Thank you for taking a look at book distribution with me!

Until soon…

Love in Harmony,

Leanda Michelle