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Are you a mental health professional who is writing professional articles or books in the fields of psychology, mental health, mind-body medicine, or consciousness?

Having trouble finding a publisher, or feeling that it is pointless to work on or complete your writing because you feel there is no market or way to get your work into print?

Tired of giving up? Need something to catalyze your ambition and creative energies?
Possibly you will want to consider what we have done at the Mind-Body-Press, which is to form your own imprint, and to self-publish your own work. Although there are many guides to self-publishing available, we encourage you to create your own unique approach, which will have as its greatest strength its streamlined quality of efficiency. Read about anyone's and everyone's approach to self-publishing as you wish, but add as few elements to your own approach as possible. Always keep your approach sparse procedurally, and self-publishing may work for you.

Get Off the Merry-Go-Round of Indecision

The vicious circle of frustration, hesitation, passivity, and paralysis which plagues many would-be writers and publishers is all created by a deficient publishing system and industry. First, the difficulties of gaining access to publishers and literary agents makes for a powerful closed-shop atmosphere that makes the decision to try to publish a formidable one. This obstacle is sufficient to shut down the reasonable writing ambitions of many writers. Instead of talent, or quality of ideas, what survives in publishing is the ability to function within the very toxic publishing industry.

If you have good ideas or talent, do you really want the defects of the publishing industry to dictate your future, your success, and your participation in the world of ideas?

This is where self-publishing comes in. If you are dedicated to your work, it probably means that you are not a "one book" author, but contemplate a career in writing and publishing for yourself. If you really have only one or two books in mind, then self-publishing is probably too much trouble for you, as more streamlined approaches are available to the individual or business with a limited publishing agenda.

Self-publishing is for the career writer, who hopes to publish many books or articles over time, and especially for the writer who experiences writer's block related to the frustration of trying to deal with the publishing industry.

This does not mean that any serious writer should abandon efforts to succeed within orthodox channels of publishing. It instead asserts that creating a self-publishing component to one's approach to writing is likely to facilitate success for writing projects which may "make it", i.e. succeed in orthodox commercial publishing, but will most importantly provide an alternate avenue of success for writing projects and efforts which otherwise might not achieve publication, visibility, distribution, or sales.

Knowing that one can self-publish any personal writing efforts in a rapid time frame is a new type of literary and expressive freedom which begins to approximate the ideals of the first amendment "Freedom of the Press" for the first time since its inception. The question "should I or shouldn't I write?" becomes obsolete in the face of knowing that anything written can and will be published, one way or the other, either through traditional commercial publishing, or by alternative self-publishing.

In summary, while already-established career writers may not need the advantages of self-publishing, most writers do need self-publishing for a percentage of their projects. Also, even established writers can increase their earnings and profitability through employment of non-traditional publishing with certain projects.

No More Writer's Paralysis !

Now you can plan to finish all projects as soon as possible. The cycle of stopping or starting projects according to the whims of agents or publishers, or meeting imaginary deadlines, all fall by the wayside. Instead, you can feel freed up to finish your projects as soon as possible, free of the restrictions or toxicity of the traditional submit - hope - wait - brush-off cycle. Never wait again for action by any publishing professional - keep yourself working at full speed and potential before, during, and after the submission. Stop writing to the preferences and reactions of editors and agents, and start writing to your readership, usually an audience very different from editors and agents.

Break free from the limitations of the closed-shop publishing industry by literally "opening your own shop" to assure an alternative route to success for any project that doesn't appeal to those in the role of decision-making in orthodox publishing.

Walk both sides of the line, if you can. Enjoy the benefits of commercial publishing when you can get an offer, and enjoy the benefits of self-publishing for the rest of your writing.

Never forget the fundamental truth that if a major publisher would determine that they could yield a profit of $60,000 from publishing your book, that this prediction would usually lead the publisher to decide not to publish the book, as this is insufficient profit to be worth the amount of cost required to generate it.

This same $60,000, in the hands of the writer, is an excellent profit, and well worth the effort, as the individual does not necessarily incur the same broad costs as does the major publisher.

The book that would make "bad business sense" for a major publisher to publish, make may great sense for an individual to self-publish. Also, if this $60,000 profit serves as a springboard to future publishing for an individual, then it is an excellent business decision which could facilitate associated earnings as well as direct profits from publishing.

In the fields of psychology, consciousness, and mind-body healing, the problem of publisher's bias is powerful. The American public hasn't seen any good psychology written at the layman's level for 30 or 40 years. What the public gets instead is limited to those forms of psychology which happen to be appealing to agents and editors. The psychology which the publishing industry has promulgated has unfortunately turned out to consistently have a low level of psychological sophistication. The public is as hungry as ever for help and answers to their concerns, but publishers are consistently more loyal to the dictum that anything written above an 8th or 10th grade reading level is geared too high for current publishing. Is it any wonder that the typical American thinks like an 8th or 10th grader about crucial psychological matters?