Transcript

Brian
Hi and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Ani, how are you today?

Ani
I’m good. How are you, Brian?

Brian
I’m doing well. Thanks for asking.

Ani
I’m getting really excited about our book coming out on July 2nd.

Brian
Yeah, the book coming out.

Ani
Well, yeah. Where have you been, you dummy? Manifestation for Dummies is now available for preorder. If you haven’t heard us talking about it, it’s here. It’s ready for pre-order, so you can go to the somaticcoachingacademy.com site and pre-order your copy of Manifestation for Dummies. I’m just— I mean, it’s like all we’re doing right now is, you know, and getting bonuses. Yeah, there’s a lot of really cool bonuses.

Brian
Yeah, when you come to the, uh, site and order it, then you get your bonuses, right?

Ani
Don’t just go to Amazon, I mean, or Barnes Noble or whatever. Like, you’re gonna— if you’re bought— yeah, go to the website, it’ll give you more information. There’s all kinds of bonuses. Yeah. So yeah, I’m just like really excited because it’s mostly what we’re doing right now is talking about the book and yeah, it’s exciting. Yeah.

Brian
So we’re going to talk about today is how we manifested this book deal.

Ani
And it’s a great story, but also we know that a lot of people who listen to the podcast would love to have a book themselves someday. And so we have both self-published.

Brian
Yep.

Ani
Self-publishing, we’ve done hybridized publishing, and now we have a publishing deal. And so, you know, it’s on the aspiration line for many people who are listening. And so we wanted to tell you more about the story of how it, how it came to be. I mean, have you kind of— how long have you wanted to be a published author? And I mean, I know you self-published, but did you want like a publishing deal?

Brian
Yeah, I mean, I think I always thought it would be really great to have a publishing deal, especially, you know, early on reading a lot of books from like, you know, Wayne Dyer and The Greats and, you know, that kind of stuff and thinking, oh man, it would be amazing to be able to have that kind of outreach. You know, funny, listening to a lot of Wayne Dyer audiobooks and reading his books too in my formative years, he would always talk about how grateful he was to his readers that they were buying his books because that then allowed him to live on Maui and swim in the ocean every day. It was really funny, but it was actually, you know, really truthful too. He’s like, “I’m so grateful to you that you allow me to write books and to talk about these things.” And I thought that is a kind of life that what was really appealing to me to be able to teach and to speak and to present. That was always just really attractive to me. And feel like books obviously are a huge part of that.

Ani
Books have been a huge part of my life too. And you’re so right. Like, now that we’ve written books, we understand— listeners, thank you, because without you, we don’t get the privilege of writing books. It’s— I don’t know about you, Brian. It’s like one of the most fun things that I do in my life.

Brian
And that’s actually one— our dedication to the book is to our students and our readers. Yeah. To everyone who has inspired us so much to do this work and to dig in and do the research and take chances.

Ani
And all the stories to tell that make sense in the book and all of that stuff. I too was really inspired to want to write for a major publisher back in the day, years ago, when I started reading personal development books and reading the greats. And I thought, like, wow, to be able to share wisdom and have that recognized by a publisher and have the support also of that, because Self-publishing is very cool. Also, there’s a lot of things that you kind of got to move around yourself, and I wondered what it was like to have the support of a publisher because it’s a different process.

Brian
Totally different.

Ani
It’s a different process, and, um, I’ve enjoyed both. And by the way, shout out to Wiley Press because they have been so awesome to work with.

Brian
Phenomenal.

Ani
I love—

Brian
absolutely phenomenal—

Ani
every single interaction that we’ve had with them. So, um, anytime you see a Dummies or a Wiley Press book out there on the shelves, know that, or on your bookshelves, know that, you know, you’ve supported a really great company. We’ve been very impressed with them. Yeah. So I started to get the itch around getting a publishing deal about 2 years ago because my, um, Find Your Soul’s Agenda book had come out, I think it was in 2019. It was kind of a while ago, and I was getting ready to write another book. You know, so Brian and I were teaching our mastermind program, which is now called Mindset for Manifestation: Living the Laws, and I was co-teaching that with you at the time. And we were setting intentions with the group together, and that was one of my intentions, was to manifest a publishing deal. So I mean, the, the whole seed of us manifesting this started, as you can tell from the story already, a long time ago, right? Like, it’s not just because we read the books of the greats and, you know, had this idea that wouldn’t it be nice to write our own book, but we’ve done a lot of work and degrees and certifications and teaching.

Brian
Teaching for a long time and documenting teaching, which is kind of like, you know, writing a book. We’ve done a lot of writing over the years, just not always organize it into a cohesive narrative between two covers.

Ani
Exactly.

Brian
Right?

Ani
Working with clients and gathering stories. And so there was all of this fertile soil a long time ago. Now, when I set this intention about 2 years ago, I wanted to write my own book again. I had not considered writing a book with Brian. And to be perfectly honest with you, Brian, one of the reasons that it didn’t occur to me was because, you know, it’s hard enough to work with your life and business partner. You and I are always creating things. And I thought, this will be a nice project for me. But also, like, any time that you do a creative process with another individual, there’s another individual. So it’s like communication and co-collaboration and working together, and that sounded like a lot, you know, to add another project to our plate. So anyway, I was gonna go manifest this book deal by myself, you know, and I started. And I think that’s an important part of the process of manifestation, because as I’ve talked to people over the years, they’ll say, I’m manifesting something or other, but they haven’t actually stepped into the physical level of manifestation, which you’ll read about in Manifestation for Dummies, um, they don’t actually get started on anything.

Ani
So I actually got started. I did a number of things. I contacted, um, first of all, I told a bunch of people that this is what I was manifesting, just in case somebody else who was listening knew a publisher and could connect me, which did happen, by the way. Um, and then, uh, but not with this project. And then, um, I also started to research what it takes to get a publisher, and I knew that what it took was getting an agent, and having a large social media following was one of the things I was seeing. Agents don’t even want to talk to you, let alone publishers, unless you have a really large social media following, which we’ve never concentrated on.

Brian
Yeah, you know, I actually, um, wrote a book in 20 10, 20, 2009, 2010, and it was called Help Yourself Heal. And I actually did, was shopping for agents at that time, and through an editor friend of mine who knew some agents, actually read, read the manuscript of the book, or not manuscript, basically like the, the, the sample chapters and those kinds of things, and they loved it. But they had trouble, uh, basically selling it to publishers because, well, at that time there wasn’t really a social media thing happening, right? Yeah, but it was actually— it was written a lot from body-mind, um, healing methods, and it was just too early for it, right? They’re like, this is amazing, I can see how this works, but like people just don’t get it. Yeah, kind of thing. They don’t want to understand how to heal your back pain by doing meditation and by doing tai chi and qigong and breathwork and somatic practices. They want to know how many reps that you do of sit-ups, sort of thing. I’m like, but that’s not what this book’s about. It’s about the body-mind connection, because this is back in like 2008, 2009, kind of before this wave of more holistic methods kind of has come, sort of thing.

Brian
I just think it’s interesting that I actually repurposed a lot of that material and put it in, put it into our book and on the chapters on how to manifest health.

Ani
That’s funny. That’s interesting.

Brian
So in some ways That book actually still got written. Yeah, it was incubating for a really long period of time. Yeah, people just weren’t ready for it yet.

Ani
But we talked about that in the Mindset for Manifestation Mastermind program that we run. I mean, one of the months that we talked about right timing. Yeah, you know, and so it was like preparation work, but you didn’t know it at the time, right?

Brian
But I’ve been teaching on those topics since 2008. Yeah, groups and our own private programs and those kinds of things. And so refining the topics, refining the ideas, getting stories. Yeah, you know, patient— real patient stories and real client stories based on the material. And so it was just— it just evolved, and this is the right time, right? The universe is like, okay, now it’s time, and here’s the vessel to bring it forth.

Ani
And here it is. Yeah, exactly. So I met with that publisher that my friend connected me with. It was a funny conversation because neither one of us— it was like a blind date, and we were like, hey, how are you? Hey, I’m fine, how are you? Um, this doesn’t seem like a good match. So, um, we got off the phone really quickly, wished each other well, and I really set to work growing our social media following. I sunk a bunch of time, a bunch of money, and a bunch of effort into doing this thing that I knew would get me an agent someday to be able to do this. And so I worked on that for, like, really, really seriously for months. And man, it’s just like always been challenging for us to do that, um, probably because we’re not super fans of social media. So anyway, um, we’ve done, we’ve done a remarkable job. Social media. But anyway, so it was, um, the whole project really sped up when a client of mine said to me she was reading a manifestation book that she really liked, and I hadn’t sunk my teeth into a like a manifestation, spiritually based body-mind stuff book in a while because I had been concentrating a lot on business development stuff for the Somatic Coaching Academy.

Ani
So I thought, heck, I’m going to get it. And so I got it and I was poring through it and it was both really good, but also to me it also felt like a book that I’ve read before. Like I’ve— I— the techniques were techniques that other people talk about. I, you know, I know this stuff and it’s not just because I teach this stuff. It just kind of felt like a little stale. Although it was also a wonderful book, and no, I’m not going to tell you what it was. So I was on the couch reading it one day, and Brian’s at the dining room table working on his computer. And I took the book and I closed it tight. And I said, gosh, Brian, we could write a manifestation book that’s so much simpler than this, like, like simple manifestation. Like, could you see the light bulb that went over my head when I said Manifestation for Dummies?

Brian
Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Ani
Like, it felt like, like one of those moments where in the cartoons where it’s like, ding, and the light bulb comes over. And I said, like, Manifestation for Dummies.

Brian
And I said, somebody’s had to have written that already, right?

Ani
Somebody has had to have written that book. So I got the— got on the computer and recognized no one had written this book. That’s crazy. So, you know, what you’re gonna find out is Wiley had also had this idea about how somebody should write Manifestation for Dummies. But get this, So we know somebody who had written a dummies book in the past. Like a good friend of ours wrote a dummies book. So I thought to myself, what do I have to lose? So I sent her a text and I said, would you introduce me to your editor? And she said, I’d love to. So she did. So we got an introduction to the editor and I wrote the editor what I would consider one of the top 3 best emails I’ve ever written in my life. Um, knowing that I wanted to step into a relationship that they understood, I understood would be mutually beneficial. So it wasn’t like, you’re a publisher and I want to get something for you from you. It was like, you’re a publisher, you can help us out, and also we’re going to help you out like this.

Brian
Positive reciprocity.

Ani
Exactly, baby. So I baked in the positive reciprocity and then the, um Editor got back to me, thanked me for reaching out, and said, we’re looking for an author for Manifestation for Dummies right now. Wow. Wow.

Brian
Crazy, right?

Ani
Right. So that’s one of those, those, um, ideas Brian and I talk about all the time with, um, to, to ourselves and also on the podcast, or like synchronicity.

Brian
Synchronicities.

Ani
Yeah, right. So right timing, synchronicity. They’re— they were either actively reaching out and looking for somebody because they recruit authors at Wiley or, you know, they were thinking about it, but we met somewhere in the field. And so it was a very short amount of time after that that we met the author recruiter who was looking for— actively looking for the book author for Manifestation for Dummies. And we spoke and it was a very easy conversation, and we were signing the contract really soon after that. Um, so what a manifestation. Story that was. And there were so many different elements that we talk about in the book. I mean, just from a concept of the natural laws, for sure. We talked about a little of that already, certainly from this concept of the physical level of manifestation, the kind of putting in the work, and then the sensory emotional level of manifestation, which came up for us as well, needing to work through our own emotional stuff. And that came up And then spontaneous flow, which we were, you know, definitely a part of. You’ll read more about that when you get your copy of Manifestation for Dummies.

Ani
So, um, part of the kind of middle part, that sensory-emotional part, came up when I realized, first of all, this was not my project, this was our project. And I navigated the resistance to change on that like a pro because, well, I’ve got all my sensory tools in my toolbox for sure. And, you know, I kind of like knew what I was doing with that. But then another wave of resistance came up when we were signing the contract and they asked us, kind of told us, asked us, you know, when you’re asked but told, that we had 4 months to write the book.

Brian
Yeah, right.

Ani
Yeah, you remember?

Brian
Very tight, very tight deadline.

Ani
Yeah, yeah. So Brian and I were on the call with the editor and she said, can you write it in 4 months. And we smiled and looked at her on Zoom and said, of course we can. And then we closed the computer and said, oh my gosh, how are we going to do that?

Brian
Yeah, because our calendar had already been booked out for so long and was pretty full already. So it ended up being, um, stepping into another level of challenge, right? But, but to just to kind of go back a little bit, that this manifestation had been brewing for 20 years.

Ani
Long time.

Brian
A long time. A long time. And even, even the friend that we texted to connect us with, um, Her Dummies editor, like, the reason we were connected with that friend was because of some very important and very, uh, challenging choices that we made, uh, years before that.

Ani
Years ago.

Brian
I mean, like, like very big leaps in choice and very big decisions. And so we got a whole bunch of podcasts on decisions and go back and listen to. But literally the, the Decision podcast that we did, those 4 series last year sometime, though, that decision-making matrix is what basically led us to having the connection to the person who helped us connect with Dummies. So the thing is that there’s so many things that happen in your life that end up snowballing into creating the manifestation that is on the horizon feels like it’s so long. And so we can never discount all of this quote unquote small, but also intermediate and also important decisions that we make in our lives. They don’t even realize what they’re going to be connected to in the future because that’s the way that the universe puts it together. Manifestation is not linear and it’s just not. And especially manifestations that happen years from now, or, you know, any space of time, it’s not a linear experience. So the way that you chunk it down is you think about following the— well, the manifestation laws that we write about in the book, but the laws of, uh, of manifestation, the natural laws of the universe, the decision-making processes, all the things that we’ve been talking about on the podcast here for the last couple of years, there’s all breadcrumbs in there about how you make decisions every single day in order for those decisions to pile on top of one another in order to create what you would call like a really great manifestation in your life.

Brian
But it’s all like, it’s what’s happening every single day, every single day.

Ani
And when you get your copy of Manifestation for Dummies, it’s not like you’re starting from scratch, you know, is what Brian’s saying. Like, yes, you’re going to be learning these principles, you’re going to learn our manifestation roadmap, you’re going to learn the laws. Like Brian was saying, there’s 3 different parts: health, wealth, and relationship manifestations. So you’re going to be able to take all of that information and everything you’ve done up until this point in your life and start to click, click, click, put the pieces together for your own manifestation. So it’s not like it’s day one, you know, you’re in the middle of your manifestation. And knowing the things that are in Manifestation for Dummies are going to be able to help you just amplify and harness all of that power in your own life.

Brian
Yeah. And while this, while this, uh, book, uh, deal with Wiley, um, is just amazing and it’s what we would call like a primary or pinnacle manifestation in our lives, like our first major publisher book deal. You know, years from now we’re going to be looking back and saying, oh yeah, that was on our path to what we have manifested now.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
And that’s also just really, really exciting.

Ani
It is really exciting.

Brian
When you start looking in the rearview mirror and you start to see, oh, this is how things work. Every decision I make, every challenge I step into, like us you know, being asked, can you write this in 4 months? And any reasonable person would say, no, I can’t. Like, my— I literally every minute of my day is already booked up. But we’re like, yes, yes, we can definitely do that. And then we just figured it out.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Like, how, how was this going to happen? Because we knew that this was universe, like, this is your next door. And if you say no to it, then basically you’ve just stopped your manifestation flow. So we knew this is the next thing for us.

Ani
So we’re going to tell you a secret that’s not a secret, by the way. If you’re listening to this and you have written a book that you want to get published, or you want to write a book someday, um, when you purchase your copy of Manifestation for Dummies, you’re going to see the next thing that you see is you get to experience more bonuses with us if you purchase 5 or more copies. Then you get a chance to be on our launch team. Now, like Brian was saying, this is a part of our manifestation journey. It’s a big pinnacle manifestation, but also we are learning so much about another manifestation in the future of having a best— a New York Times bestseller, which is a super big learning process. We’re learning so much. So if you want to be on the inside and you want to see what’s going on and you want to maybe do some of this someday, or you just want to like be a part of all the action, you definitely want to be on the launch team so that you can see behind the scenes and get more stories and information about how we’re navigating this whole thing.

Ani
So you’ll be able to do that when you purchase your copy. You go to more bonuses and you can be on our launch team too. Any questions, of course, just reach out to info@somaticcoachingacademy.com. We’ll help you navigate the whole process.

Brian
Yeah, so this is like just such an exciting project. The roadmap is here, right? The roadmap is in the book. And if it’s something that you want to do to attract, to, um, connect with, to, you know, get a book published in the world with a, uh, a major publisher like like it can be done, like it’s there, it’s available to you too.

Ani
Yeah, so to your success, and thank you for all of your support in helping us get to this place where we can launch Manifestation for Dummies. We just can’t wait to hear, uh, how you like it. And, um, thanks for listening to this episode. It’s super fun to talk about the whole process. So, uh, thanks, Brian, for that, and we’ll see you next week.

Brian
Yeah, take care.