Well, between my recent author@google appearance (1200 views to date! Not bad!) And an upcoming feature article in the Boston Globe, my PR efforts have been fairly successful so far in 2012.
More and more these days, people are asking me how they too, can publish the book they dream about writing. When I start to answer them, a cultural rift consistently appears.
We live in a world that is filled with linear and mechanical approaches to just about everything. This is in part an artifact of what I call “classroom conditioning,” but it’s also just part and parcel of having lived through the mechanical age for so long. Culture takes a long time to catch up. It recently occurred to me that we had steam engines way back in the 1830s, but it wasn’t until the 1890’s that someone figured out that they could hook them up to looms in cotton factories. The industrial revolution could have occurred sixty years earlier. Something similar is happening now. Most of our collective problem-solving skills of the last century were focused on somehow connecting an internal combustion or steam engine to a device that would take over repetitive physical tasks. We have had a similar approach to the “machines” of the computer age. To call computer a “machine” is a little bit like calling a car a “horseless carriage.” But we define it in terms that we know that come closest.
Anyway, getting back to my original point, I’m often asked about how to publish a book, and there is always an expectation that I will give them a linear single-path response. Instead, what I’ve discovered that really does work is what I call the 360 degree method.
Once you define your goal and desire, you don’t go in just one direction. You push in every single direction you can. This will, of course, result in 359 degrees of failure, but I have no idea… nor can you or anyone else predict… in which direction you should be putting your energy. You never know when or where someone will give you a break. And you can’t be downhearted or frustrated if you don’t get any response from anybody for a day or a week or a month. You just keep pushing. If you do that, it’s virtually impossible for the universe to resist your desire. Why limit yourself to one direction? That’s mechanically efficient, but oh my, that is SO 20th century.
© Justin Locke
