Yesterday, I told you how I beat the lizard brain and published my first book. Last night, I learned that we sold 50 books in our first day of sales, which totally exceeded my expectations!

Today, in the same spirit of my “How to Start a Side Hustle” series, I want to dig a little bit into the specifics and share with you how I actually was able to write and publish the book in about three months. This post is for all the happy black women out there who want to write and publish their own book, novel or ebook. If you “have a book in you,” I’m talking right to you darlin’.

Tell Everyone You’re Writing a Book

About a year ago, I got the idea to write a book and I started telling people about it on my nonprofit blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, and in person. It was a great answer to the “what are you working on?” question. I talked about it so much that a major publisher approached me to explore the possibility of me writing a book for them. When the publisher ultimately rejected my book proposal, I was even more determined to get the book out there. And as it turns out, you get to keep more of your earnings by self-publishing anyway.

Find a Co-Author

Although I had years of content from my blog to build from for the book, I was feeling really overwhelmed by the thought of having to do all the work to put it all together on my own in any sort of timely fashion. One of my best decisions in the process was to enlist the help of one of my colleagues to help me write the book, edit the content and figure out all the logistics of self-publishing and marketing. She and I agreed to split the workload and the profits – a win/win for both of us!

Set a Hard Deadline

The first thing I did after choosing a co-author was to set a deadline. We picked November 1, 2010 as THE day the book would go on sale to the masses. We chose that date because it was three months out, which would force us to be very diligent in getting our drafts and edits together in a short amount of time. We locked ourselves in so we couldn’t drag out the process for what could have been a whole year, really. It was a deadline that was challenging enough to keep us on track, but not impossible to meet. Marketing and business guru Seth Godin would have called it “the day we ship,” no matter what.

Create a Timeline/Workplan

From that date, we worked backwards to create a timeline and workplan for when we had to have first draft, second draft, internal edits, external edits, etc. done. We also used a workplan to map out ideas for marketing, including when we would get the book website up and running, the cover designed, outreach to bloggers and journalists to review the book once it was done. We knew all the steps we had to take and when we had to take them if we were going to meet our November 1 deadline.

Choose a Publishing or Ebook Delivery Service

We decided to publish the book in two formats – a paperback and an ebook. We chose Lulu.com to sell the paperback version and E-junkie to sell the ebook version.

Lulu.com allows you to upload your manuscript, photos or digital files, use their formatting tools to get everything set up just the way you want, from size to binding to cover art, and…voila! You’re the proud parent of a brand new digital creation, ready to publish and cherish. The publishing process couldn’t be easier!

E-junkie provides shopping cart and buy now buttons to let you sell downloads and tangible goods on your website. They make it really easy to automate and secure the digital delivery of files and codes for your ebook!

Set Up a Book Website

One of the most important things we did was set up a website specifically to market and sell the book at http://nonprofitrockstartour.com. We signed up with Bluehost for a 12-month plan to host the site (only $7 a month!) and customized it using WordPress and the Headway theme. We used Aweber to set up a mailing list and ended up with 300 people signed up to learn more about the book!

Are you thinking about writing and self-publishing a book of your own? What challenges might you need to overcome before you get started?

Sometimes change can seem so hard, so daunting, that we just stick to the status quo in our lives. “Oh, it’s good enough,” we’ll say. Or: “It’s not the best, but hey, it could be worse.”

Does any of this sound familiar?

Your job? It’s good enough for now. I mean, I wish I was doing something else, but at least I’m working when so many people are unemployed.

Your current boyfriend/jumpoff? He’s all right for now. He’s got issues, but it’s just something to do until the right one comes along.

Each of us probably has one or two or ten things in our lives that’s “just OK.” Even though we know it can be so much better. We even dream of the possibilities . . . until that damn lizard brain shows up to rain on our parade. The lizard brain asks dumb questions like:

Who are you to want something more?

Why are you so high maintenance?

Why can’t you just be happy with what you have?

With all of its insistent curiosity, though, the lizard brain never asks the really important questions that need to be answered as we move forward in our life journey.

What truly amazing relationship are you keeping yourself from by settling for one that’s just “good enough?”

What are you missing out on by staying in a dead-end job?

How are you limiting yourself by pretending to be content with your current state of being?

On it’s face, “good enough” seems like something to be happy about. But when you allow yourself to think about what you really want, you might find that you’re just settling out of fear that you won’t get it. Let’s keep it real with ourselves, shall we? If given a choice between good and great, most of us would probably choose the latter.

“A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror.” – Ken Keyes, Jr.

One of the most important things I’ve learned in my short years of life is that there is more than one world out there: a loving world and a hostile world. Your perspective is everything. Two people can look at the same situation yet have totally different reactions.

Getting dumped by a boyfriend:

I can’t believe this is happening to me. I’ll never find anyone else. Surely I’ll die alone.

OR

I can’t believe this is happening to me. Oh well, his loss. On to the next!

Losing your job:

This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m a total loser and no one will ever want to hire me again.

OR

This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I hated that job anyway, but I was too scared to leave. Now I can pursue bigger and better opportunities!

See the difference? It’s all about perspective. And the best thing about having multiple worlds is that you get to choose which one you want to live in.

Not so long ago, I was the total opposite of a happy black woman.

I was mad as hell. I was mad at my mom for not knowing how to be a mom. I was mad at my father for being so selfish as to take his own life. I was mad at my grandfather for dying on me before he could see me graduate from college. I was mad at each of my consecutive boyfriends for not fitting into the molds that I had created for them. I carried around a lot of resentment and I was always trying to change people. It was extremely unhealthy, to say the least.

Then one day, I decided that I wanted to live in a different world. I wanted to live in a world of abundance instead of scarcity. I wanted to live in a loving world instead of a hostile one. I wanted to live in the magical world of possibility. Quite simply, I just wanted to finally be happy after being so mad all the damn time. And ever since I changed my perspective on different things, it has, indeed been a magical world for me. It’s free of projecting my own fears and insecurities onto others. It’s free of everyone else’s fears and insecurities projected onto me. It’s a world that honors authenticity when so much around me is contrived and fake. It’s a world that demands that I give my best and expect the best in others. It’s a world that challenges me to always choose love over fear.

It’s a world that proves to me over and over that there is nothing I cannot do. Anything, anywhere is possible.

Care to join me? It’s amazing here.

Former pro hockey player Wayne Gretzky once said:

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

It makes perfect sense, yet every day, we pass up opportunities to take proactive steps to changing our lives and careers for the better. Mostly, we’re afraid. More specifically, we get stuck in the frame of thinking about what’s the worst that can happen? Often after answering this question, we realize that we really don’t have anything to be afraid of at all. But sometimes, it can actually take us even deeper into that place of fear. We might get further with our career goals if instead, we focused on the positive and then took actions based on the expectation of success. What if, instead, we asked ourselves, what’s the best that could happen?

Envision Your Ideal Future

Instead of focusing in on all the risks and failures that could occur as a result of you pursuing your goals, focus on a vision for the future that shows you enjoying your success and the fruits of your labor. In August, I announced my new consulting team, new logo and all the services my company is ready to offer. Scary? Hell yes. Even though the worst that can happen is that no one ever hires us. Which is highly unlikely. And the best that can happen? We will get to use our talents to help others in a huge, transformative way. That’s what I’m thinking about. That’s what I’m banking on. And positive energy only attracts more of itself from the universe. Try it. You’ll see. Make a firm commitment to moving forward on that one thing you really want to do in your career but keep putting off out of fear. Write an inspiring letter to your future self about how you want your life to be six months or a year from now.

Name the Fear

If you must, go ahead and give the fear a little attention. Name it. Acknowledge it. Let it know that you know it’s there. If you’re afraid of losing your job (or your mind), go ahead and say it out loud. If you’re afraid of failing, write it down in your journal somewhere. This is good to do. Because once you name the fear, it loses a bit of its power. And then, you get to plow right through, just like a buffalo.

Borrow Someone Else’s Swagger

Right before you go into that important meeting or launch that big project, channel the attitude of someone with an ego and bank account much bigger than yours. Sometimes before my speaking engagements, I’ll pretend like I’m Kanye West walking into the room with all that power. Pick your own alter ego. Everybody needs their own theme music. Mine is just always a little bit gangsta.

Jump the Fence

OK. At some point, you just have to make the leap and do the damn thing. There is no way you’ll ever find out if you’ve got what it takes to change your career until you try. Until you do. Not before. If you hate your job, take the first step today to find a new one. Update your resume. Ask for help. Just don’t complain about it. Not today.

And on the off chance that you do fail? Well, at least you’ll be closer to the finish line than you were when you weren’t even in the race.

“To attract something that you want, become as joyful as you think that thing would make you. The joy, not the thing, is the point.” — Martha Beck

How would you finish this sentence? I’ll be totally happy once I ___________________.

There are a million ways people tend to fill in the blank. I’ll be totally happy once I:

…get a new job
…find a man
…lose weight
…move to another city
…finish school
…get a promotion
…earn more money
…win the lottery
…take a vacation
…get married
…have kids

Everyone has their own set of goals. But if we’re really honest with ourselves, happiness is always the ultimate goal, we just hope the accomplishments we get along the way will make us so.

Think about it.

Why do you want to earn more money? Because you think it will make you happy.

Why do you want to lose weight? So you can look better, feel better…and be happy.

Why do you want to be married? So you can have someone to share your life with and be happy.

Many of the things we say we want are simply items, relationships or accomplishments that we think will bring about happiness in our lives. At least, we hope they will.

But I’m sure you know people who have all these things and are still miserable.

Why? Because they focus so much on getting to the next thing or on what’s still jacked up in their lives that they never focus on appreciating what they already have. They never focus on actually being happy.

It’s like this weird game of delayed gratification we play with ourselves. It’s like we won’t allow ourselves to be completely happy until we reach certain milestones, and even then whatever contentment we derive from that is quickly overshadowed by the race to the next goal or the fact that someone else has a better life than we do.

One problem is that the way we view happiness is in relation to others. Grama used to always warn me and my sister about trying to “keep up with the Joneses,” which just meant that instead of worrying about what the next person has, we should be grateful for what we had been blessed with.

In my own life, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I quit my job to work for myself as a consultant. I didn’t do it to make more money, but sometimes it seems like that’s all I worry about. If I get one more new client, I’ll make more money and then I’ll be happy. While I’m doing pretty well for myself so far, the money certainly isn’t guaranteed like that direct deposit I was getting in my account from my full-time job every month.

But the freedom I have now is priceless. It’s what I really wanted the whole time. Happiness for me right now is having the time and the energy to do what I want to do, when I want to do it. It’s not about getting to the next level. This IS the next level. And I’m reminding myself to enjoy every moment of it. Because the joy, not the thing, is the point.

I was speaking at the National Urban League Youth Summit last week and the guy who spoke after me gave some very sound advice to the teenagers in attendance. He said that young people these days behave too much like groupies. They “fan” their favorite artists on Facebook, they “follow” their favorite celebrities on Twitter, and they have lengthy conversations about how many records Drake sold.

I chuckled, because adults do the same thing. Where do we think the kids get it from? Mama’s sitting on the couch watching Real Housewives of Detroit.

The point he was making was that many of us spend so much time keeping tabs on other people’s lives, that we rarely stop to evaluate our own. We spend our time on celebrity gossip sites while our own life is in disarray. We keep track of how many millions Beyonce is worth, yet our own money is funny. We sit up and watch the Kardashians get married, but do nothing to improve our own hubby prospects.

I think it’s cool to have people to look up to where you can say, “I want to live large like that one day,” but it can be dangerous to live vicariously through them. It can lead to avoiding the very real and very difficult task of becoming the people we were meant to be. Because that “one day” pinnacle of success will never come in your life if you don’t take steps to achieve it. Look at Diddy. The man has a lot of dough, but he worked hard to get it. He gets out of bed early to go make those deals that push his businesses forward.

If we just spent a little more time on becoming our own biggest fan, maybe we’d drop the compulsive need to be all up in everybody else’s fabulous life. In fact, we’d be too busy living our own.