My publisher is trying to convince me to go with a distributor package to sell my self published book – through Baker & Taylor and Ingram; is this a smart move? I am not doing any marketing now.

My reply, posted January 19, 2012:

Yes, with a couple of important caveats. I’m the Consignment Buyer for an independent bookstore with six stores (I’m the Consignment / Local Author contact at two of those stores).

Consignments are tedious, time consuming, and 95% of them are not profitable for us (I would love tips on how to make consignments profitable), so we take them only from local authors as a community service. For other titles, we order only from our established accounts. Using the big distributors fits your book easily into our existing, automated ordering, return, and payment processes. (We also happen to order from Partners West, a regional distributor.)

If Ingram or B&T carry your book, we can order a copy or two from them, and then return them 6 months down the road if they haven’t sold. BUT your publisher may not tell you that WE DO NOT “BACKORDER” FROM B&T, which is how most self-published books are available from B&T. “Backorder” is NOT the same distribution that established publishers get with B&T, so it won’t make it any easier for an indie to take a chance on your book if that’s the only way we can get it from them.

And, if you go with Ingram, make sure the books are “returnable,” which I believe costs you a couple hundred dollars more. If your books are available through the print-on-demand service from Ingram Tennessee but are not returnable, we wouldn’t carry the title in our open store stock, because we can’t return the title for credit if it doesn’t sell. We’ll order non-returnable Ingram Tennessee POD books on request for specific customers, but we require prepayment, the customer can’t return it if they don’t like it, and it takes a couple of weeks to get it.

You’re going to need to do your own marketing, though. Ingram and B&T are distributors, not marketers. They make your (or your publisher’s) marketing efforts pay off more, but you may still find yourself calling indie bookstores and asking if we can try out your books. Just make sure they’re not B&T “backorder,” and that the bookstore can return them to the distributor for full credit if they don’t sell.

The more a person understands about the brain’s rewards systems, the less they are subject to unthinking adherence to pre-rational arguments and biases, such as those exploited by fortune-tellers and con men.

Now, if one considers astrology and Tarot in the realm of psychological rather than predictive tools, they make sense. Not all religion is fundamentalist, and not all metaphysics is fortune-telling hocus pocus. If your horoscope says “you will be prone to procrastination today” and it strikes an emotional chord, it can help motivate you to overcome procrastination. If you do a Tarot reading for yourself and draw the Six of Swords, for instance, it may prompt you to consider what you need to move on from in life. It’s a valuable tool for conscious “inner work” to understand one’s own motivations, strengths, and weaknesses.

My husband and I are both Zen students, and he felt after listening to Eckhart Tolle’s “Power of Now” series several times over on CD that he had a slow “awakening” experience. As a result, he has a lasting sense of insight, greater happiness, and contentment. Perhaps there is something to be found in the spiritual traditions that we as human beings seek, something more fulfilling than mere rational understanding. Rigid belief in intellectualism or an overarching fear of being manipulated are their own barriers to personal happiness. Science can tell you how things work but can’t give our lives meaning.

I initially wrote this post as a comment to an illuminating blog on our tendency to believe vague statements, and how this human tendency is manipulated by con men and advertisers:

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/29/subjective-validation/

“Any student who turns in a paper more than a week late will lose 20% of their grade.”

Their?? Shouldn’t that be “will lose 20% of his or her grade”? Singular student, singular pronoun?

Rise up, beleaguered writers, and claim the obvious solution! Most of us automatically use “their” as the pronoun to describe a single individual so we don’t have to concede to the dreadfully gender-biased “him” as the default. (“If someone has a problem with you, start by hearing them out,” not “start by hearing him or her out.”] To suggest that one should go back and twist a written sentence to suit an outdated rule ignores this elegant, colloquial solution.  Sure, he or she could rewrite his or her sentences to cravenly avoid the problem, but we don’t similarly edit our speech, do we?

“They” is a functional, understood, gender-neutral pronoun. And if a reader doesn’t like it, they can rewrite to their own standards. But leave the rest of him or her alone.

[ While this post conforms to the American convention of putting periods and commas inside the end quotation mark, it consciously breaks old-school rules prohibiting split infinitives, sentence fragments, and starting a sentence with "and" or "but." ]

When the two denominations merged in the early 1960s, the Unitarians had the membership, and the Universalists had the money. The Unitarian side vowed to honor and remember the Universalist heritage, and not just run off with the nice endowment.  So now I’m a Unitarian Universalist, a member of a 10-syllable denomination that is commonly referred to as UU, but which is also confused with Unity, the Christian denomination; and the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon.

Is that old naming promise still binding on us as Unitarian Universalists in the 21st century? Did the American Unitarian Universalists of 1961 make an agreement about our denomination name that binds us in perpetuity?

I say, Only if we fear that in essence we are still really primarily Unitarian — “we” Unitarians took over “those” Universalists, and so “we” still need to honor our promise to “them.”

If we truly felt ourselves to be Universalist as well as Unitarian, we could decide as Universalists that the old fear of losing our identity and our message is no longer a concern. Universalists could gracefully acknowledge that American society understands the Unitarian name, and that we can call ourselves “Unitarians” without betraying our heritage — any more than we betray our Jewish and Christian roots by not calling our religion “Judeo-Christian-Based Religious Liberal Unitarian Universalists With Buddhist Influences.”

Alternatively, we could start with all-new branding. I love the poetic name “Universalist;” we could use just that name instead.

Look: I have a practical reason for this. I am the Twitter blogger for my congregation, and I blog UU issues on my private Twitter account as well.  I only get 140 characters for each message, and have you counted the letters in “Unitarian Universalist” lately?

I call on the Unitarian Universalist Association (the American denomination) to survey non-UUs, to find out how they understand and respond to the words “Unitarian,” “Universalist,” “Unitarian Universalist,” and “UU.” We talk about growing our denomination, but we’re squandering our biggest asset — a branded name. And it isn’t “Unitarian Universalist.”