O-Books Author's Blog

A Message about Life from Archangel Gabriel

Dear One,

Trust that the Source of all life is active within you.  As you grow in this trust, the world around you manifests in new, more harmonious ways. Trust is an active principle of God. The freedom you seek to live in joy responds to this quality of trust. It takes active awareness to call in the Divine Light that activates this quality of trust within you. You can trust that there is a benevolent Source of Good active in the Universe that responds to your heartfelt call.

Allow the seeds of trust to sprout within your being.  Nurture them with your loving attention and feed them with Divine Light. Trust exists as a quality within all beings. Everyone trusts in something. The question becomes, what are you trusting in? Clearly if you are imagining dire circumstances, worrying that you will not be able to do or be what you want, or thinking that things may work other than the way you prefer, all of these demonstrate your beliefs and what you are trusting as truth in your life.

As an active Divine principle trust exists. Trust is receptive to the flow of your desires. With the intentional awareness of your thoughts, trust can be used to sort out the tangled beliefs wrapped in the mind. Through the active principle of trust, an expansion can occur in your energy field that allows a greater flow of Divine Light into your thought processes. It is this expansive activity of Light that can clear away the alternatives that are not so appealing for your life’s path.

Divine Light carries an amazing intelligence as well as the blessing of God’s Love. This light is a continuous flow that unifies the field of consciousness to work in harmony with more expansive qualities of thought. You can ask for the Light of Trust to flow through your being in a pillar of Gold. Anchor it in the Earth, and feel its centering, calming influence within you building the energy of trust.

Trust is faith in action and requires your willingness to join in the process of creation. This time on earth has an accelerated energy available to be used as active creative forces. Use them carefully because as you become One with the Force of Creation, you will be manifesting that which most dominates your thought processes.  This is not new information but the energetic activity is so powerful at this time, a cautionary note is required. There is an offering from the Angelic Dimensions and Angelic assistance is available. This is something in which you can trust.

Find many more things to trust so you can build this muscle and it can be serving you in daily activities. The more you rely on your trusting heart the more optimistic you will become. This optimistic nature trusts that Benevolent Outcomes are available in every situation. You can know and trust that there is a Creative Solution no matter how dire things appear.

Trust is like a little boat upon the sea…

Trust becomes a boat in which you can float down the river of your life, buoyant in the Divine Flow.  There is no need for you to row upstream resisting What Is, or struggling to make things happen in a certain way. When you trust the flow of Divine Energy, there is a wind in the sail of your purposeful life. You won’t find yourself becalmed in the seas of doubt when you claim the quality of Trust as your guiding Truth. Doubt takes the winds from your sails by contraction of the natural life force given to you by God. When the river flows slowly, blowing on the sails is not helpful. All you can do is relax and trust in Divine Timing. Trust is the rudder that steers your boat, and worry can be like the weeds that stop your forward movement by wrapping around this steering mechanism. Be attentive to the insidious thought forms that keep your life’s boat from floating free in the river of Divine Creation.

You are not alone in your journey of life. The Angelic Realms have been gifting all of humanity with their accelerated energy presence. The Angels answer the calls of humans who remember, and trust in the presence of God’s messengers. With this presence available and the active principle of Trust working within your world, all that you need is given with grace and ease. Opportunities are provided and expansive choices are offered. All you have to do is climb in the boat and keep your mind and heart open asking for the light to guide you as you allow yourself to float on these rivers of life.   There may be rapids and sometimes steep falls, but with a trusting heart and a clear intention to stay afloat in the river of Divine Creation, a graceful flow will be apparent in every area of your life.

Bringing Heaven to Earth is not difficult; it just takes trust. Trust in the Angelic Dimensions working within you, trust in yourself as a vessel to receive Divine Light, and trust that as people work together in harmony with God, the way is open for Peace to manifest on Earth.

And so it is.

Shanta Gabriel
For Archangel Gabriel

Copyright: January 26, 2010

Shanta Gabriel is a teacher, healer and the author of The Gabriel Messages. A book of inspired communication from Archangel Gabriel, it ignites the spark of hope in the heart of those seeking peace in their lives.  This volume of timeless and compassionate wisdom for the 21st Century is personal as well as practical, and provides clear suggestions for emotional and spiritual balance.

Shanta’s work with the Archangels was both unexpected and spontaneous when she received a surprise visit from Archangel Michael in 1988.  This huge winged being blessed her healing work with Light and opened the way for communication from Archangel Gabriel in 1990. She has received messages from Gabriel since that time. Shanta also produced a popular purple card set called Angel Messages and wrote the Angel Messages Book and Cards.

As a part of her ongoing with work with the Archangels, Shanta offers a monthly newsletter, “Archangel Gabriel’s Messages to the World.” She also continues her work through private sessions that include Angelic Life Path Readings as well as hands-on Angelic Light Therapy work.  Shanta leads an inspiring and experiential seven-month Archangel Study Program that uses the essence of each Archangel as it is reflected in the human chakra system.  Shanta assists the anchoring of that energy into the being through original meditation CDs, flower essences and in-depth study. Shanta is available for TV and radio interviews, and to lead workshops that bridge Heaven and Earth through Angelic Light Therapy and Communion with Angels. For more information about her seminars and private sessions, to see frequent messages from Archangel Gabriel, or to sign up for her free newsletter, see: www.thegabrielmessages.com.

I laughed my head off over the weekend. I was around with a bunch of relatives at my mothers. She has one of those old fashioned phones where you put your finger in the dial numbers and turn the wheel round (remember them? She is, after all, in her late ’80s).

One of my nephews, aged 10, who has his own picture-taking, all-singing and dancing mobile phone, was thrilled by it.
“What’s THAT?”
“ A phone.”
“Wow. That’s really COOL.”

We’ve been thinking a lot about gadgets, systems and digital books recently, trying to figure out the best way of handling it all on small budgets. How to get the efficiencies that speed and scale can bring whilst keeping things friendly and personal. How to handle more information whilst giving everyone enough time. How to square the circle.

It’s impossible to get exactly right of course. Depends in part on how fast you reckon things are going to change. One significant book retial chain, and online seller, and wholesaler in each country by the end of next year? Or in 5 years time? Are ereaders cutting edge, or allready dinosaurs in the path of more flexible, smaller, smarter gadgets? What’s going to be the “point” of publishers, and how far will their role be taken over by forward-looking printers, or retailers? That would indeed be turning the clock back a century or two.

The only certainty, surely, is that those trying to preserve the status quo will lose out. Publishing in the last couple of decades has looked increasingly like trade across old national boundaries used to be – several barriers from content to reader, a toll tax at each point, increasing the price at each stage but often diminishing rather than improving value. The next generation will look back on the days when the author got 10% or so of the eventual price, with 90% being lost to middlemen along the way, as medieval.

John Hunt
ps free ebook on how how many thinkers see the priorities for the future at

Seth Godin

Our own standard contract starts at 10% of income (receipts) for the author royalty, going up to 25% on quantity. Which I think is slightly above the norm (more in the help icon against “Sample contract”).

I guess keeping 90% might seem unreasonable. Self-publishers and vanity publishers make play of their more generous arrangements, author gets to keep 50%, or 80%, or whatever.

On the other hand, the average quantity sold of a self-published book is around 10 copies. The cost of getting books through the system, and marketing them, accounts for most of the 90% that the traditional publisher keeps. Publishing is not a particularly profitable business, at the best of times. It’s relatively small, miniscule compared with manufacturing or energy or finance, and most people in it are there because they like books rather than because they see a way of making serous money. If it was otherwise, and easy to make money publishing books, then it would be easier to get published.
Things will change though. You’ll get author collectives working together for marketing muscle, digital is going to lead to a higher author share however much the big guys fight it, sales online with their lower transaction costs will increase as a %, etc. At O-Books we’ve been driving down the publisher share of the cost over the last few years, through using this database of ours, which, for the author, has advantages and disadvantages. It enables the author to see what is happening, it gives them access to vastly more information than they usually get, but it also puts some onus on the author to use it. It reduces the “one-to-one” time.

So our cost-per-book has come down. We’ve used that to publish more books, which in turn helps to drive the cost down further (in dealing with design, print etc.). Our overall cost hasn’t decreased much, because about half our overhead in time/cost goes into developing the database itself. But it does set up the possibility of setting up a different kind of revenue-sharing.

Could we, for instance, move to a 60/40 split, rather than 90/10 (or 80/20)?

In theory, we should be getting there, as a possibility. There are two main problems. The first is that we don’t really make anything on the first 1000 copies. Not at the kind of retail prices we have. Too much info to process to get the book into the systems and through them. The second is that with the average first-time book 60% doesn’t cover the sales and distribution costs which we get charged for when you count in the returns, and the cost of printing those titles, let alone leave anything for overheads and marketing. Not at the moment anyway.

If the book was to turn into a strong, regular seller, it would be different – the returns come down, the print cost comes down. So here’s a suggestion; what if we left the current contract as one option, and had option B) a contract with no royalty on the first 1000 copies, but 40% after that, less the cost of sending out review copies (about $8 per book) and less the cost the warehouse charges us for returns (about $0.50 a book).

Would anyone go for it?

Note; I’ll put this up on the blog I’ve got now on the new website. I’ll probably start sticking general meandering stuff like this up there so we can keep the forum for proper questions and answers.

John Hunt

When we first started publishing in O Books 5 years ago, with about one title a month, we were pretty ignorant about scheduling in the trade/retail area. Having mostly prior to that been producing color books for other publishers, you got their books to their warehouse, and the responsibility ended.
It took us a couple of years to realize how important it was to get the information about the books available for the trade 6 or 9 months before publication. Which in turn meant having the details of the book (cover, page extent, price etc) firmed up in time for that.
It took us another couple of years, whilst coping with the rapidly growing number of titles, to get the systems in place to enable that to happen.
Compared to three years or so back, when the majority of titles tended to miss their targeted release dates, now they virtually all hit them. Our main effort is directed not so much as getting books in print for publication, as having them ready 4 months before publication, so there are advance copies to send out to the kind of media that want 4 months notice.
Not that everything now runs through smoothly. There’s still the odd one that misses the date altogether, for one reason or another, which creates more hassle in terms of re-scheduling and responding to queries than 10 other titles put together.
And the bulk of our work is not actually on the key stuff like working on the manuscript or the sales, it’s shuffling changes around in the year or so between getting the manuscript and publication. It’s like the old Heineken ad, there’s always another database in a corner somewhere that you can’t reach.
Every few years main accounts seem to want information a month earlier than before. Exactly why that schedule is extending when everything else in life is getting faster, and when “just in time” is the mantra to which everyone except for the Ministry of Defence, pharmaceutical companies and similar work, is a mystery to me. I suspect it’s got something to do with the fact that people running book chains nowadays and buying books for supermarkets have had nothing much to do with “books”. They’re retailers. Imported from groceries, or stationery, or retail consultancy, to run a chain of bookshops. They’re used to seasonal buying patterns. The orders for autumn oranges are placed at Christmas. The orders for Christmas cards are placed in the spring. Buying and sales budgets accordingly are fixed 6-12 months ahead. Makes it easier to plan for the bonuses.
So if you miss these extended schedules on books, it’s a reason for them not to buy. Doesn’t seem to make a difference if there really is a hot book though; our title with the largest pre-sales this year is coming out in November and we didn’t know anything much about it till August, and got the manuscript in October.
So it’s a mechanism that works for the main accounts, feeding everything else through a slow funnel, but it doesn’t actually help the vast majority of authors.
Because, frankly, if the orders through bookshops are going to be very modest, (and a shop stocking a few tens of thousands of titles is unlikely to stock any new first time author unless they have some really heavy backing behind them), is it worth adding 6-9 months on the schedule to make it available? If it’s going to be in the mega-category where the trade magazines are talking about it in their “major hits for 2011” through to December 2011, and that comes out in December 2010, so the whole package of information is needed some months prior to that, in early Autumn – an 18 months schedule from finished proofs, or 2 years from finished manuscript – then fair enough. But most authors I reckon lose heart when faced with a prospect of publication 12-18 months after they’ve finished the book (or double that for most publishers). The momentum goes. Unless they’re a professional author churning them out regularly, life moves on.
So having just got to the point of being able to meet these schedules regularly, I reckon it’s time to abandon them. Most of our working time is spent servicing a system that doesn’t deliver. The future is not here.
We should move to a 6 month schedule. 6 months is what the wholesalers need. But we have to do it from when the finished proofs are ready, for text and cover. Otherwise it would be chaos trying to get all the changes notified around in a shorter time frame. We’ll schedule the book firmly when we have it ready to print, for 6 months ahead. That means we can get advance copies 4 months ahead of publication in time for the national media etc.. who want it.
It means we miss out on the schedule the sales rep at NBN work to. So they won’t be taking the book around 6-9 months before publication. We’ll figure out ways around that. It’s going to be our main challenge over the next year.
We’ll not be changing the schedules on titles that are already up on the website (too many people to notify, and half of the time they won’t go through, so will end up in confusion). But for titles that haven’t been firmly scheduled yet, it’s 6 months from approved final proofs. It’s simple, straightforward, and means we can stop flaffing around with changes all the time and work on the sales instead.
John Hunt

blog 2
Thought I’ld better get another one done before losing the hang of it.
I used to hate going to the doctor’s surgery with one of my kids for their various aches and pains, because you couldn’t get through on the phone, couldn’t book appointments, and just had to turn up and wait for an hour or two until one overworked receptionist fed you through. You might only be there for 5 minutes, but you had to hang around for 10 times longer.
I had to go for something last week, and it was a completely different experience. You have to select from options on the phone (appointment, home call, pharmacy, renew prescription, etc..), which is always slightly annoying, but it was quick, not like one of those robotic voices saying “you are held in a queue, you are at number 26, your call is important to us”. And you can fix a time to go, and I was in and out in a few minutes.
I guess the surgery has about as many patients as we have people we’re in regular contact with, a few thousand of them. There aren’t more doctors there than there were before, but somehow they’ve got the system working so much better. Mostly by spending £ a few hundred on a decent phone system.
We spend about half our total overhead on continuous improvements to the systems in the business. Dealing efficiently with the queries is our particular problem. There are usually 100 or so separate ones on the average book, if you take it from contract all the way through to royalties, from authors, distributors – hundreds if you include media and shops, possibly thousands -and they can carry on for years, decades, even if the book has been out of print. There’s no way we can handle it on the phone, where you have to be reasonably nice rather than brusque. Maybe there’s some Nirvana around the corner where everything is digital and editing is automatic and books don’t have to be packed and shipped several times over before they arrive home, but it’s not coming in a hurry.
Bigger companies can split everything off into departments for all the separate queries. Trouble is, you end up with a really costly overhead structure, and have to confine yourself to books that can pay for it, and drop them when they don’t.
In smaller publishers, you have to be multi-tasking. Dozens or hundreds of emails a day, anything from disputing custom charges in New York to permission rights for a couple of pictures in Vietnam.
Trouble is, you stretch yourself thin catching up with this kind of thing all the time, and never get down to what you’re meant to be doing, improving a manuscript or getting sales.
A few months ago I changed my email address and passed the load on. It’s been great; I’ve started reading books again. I comment on every proposal that comes in. Think about the way forward. It feels better for the business.
But the indigestible lump of emails has just been shunted further down the throat. The office is more of an email call centre than a hive of proactive sales and marketing. It’s not like “send one email to sell 10 books”, it’s more like “send 10 emails to sell one book”. Several hundred billion emails are sent in the world every day, though there are less than 2 billion internet users. Worldwide, and in our little business, it doesn’t add up.
I think we’ll have to take a lesson from the doctor’s surgery. You can’t respond personally to everything. You have to choose a way of operating. With the big utility companies, you can phone them but you can’t email them. With Amazon, you can email them (or you can try, and occasionally get an answer) but you can’t phone them. With us, it’s going to be you can’t phone and you can’t email.
It shouldn’t be too difficult, now we’ve got the new website linking to the database, to set up a communication system that feeds you through the right channels to the relevant answer, and if the answer isn’t there, have someone at the end of the line who can provide it and make sure it’s put there for the future.
I think that has to be our next step, before we get crippled with emailitis.
John Hunt

Our new website here went live yesterday, such a relief to get it done at last! Thank you, Kate, and Apul – I kiss your feet. It’s taken a couple of years of work. I expect it’s something that should have taken us a couple of months, but the difficulty has been in linking it to the information in the company database, so that it feeds through the various systems. So getting it to work has involved reinventing a load of other stuff in the “back” area. And with a dozen or so new titles a month coming out there’s always a huge amount of detail that needs updating, and with the old website we had to re-enter everything separately, which keeps putting us behind, etc…

There’s some tidying up that needs to be done. A number of reviews, endorsement comments etc. that need changing. Chunks of information to add in “Author resources”- that hasn’t all fed through yet. Bear with us for a few days while we do this (ps; if there are any authors reading this, you can do it yourself; if you just amend the copy on your book details page, or add a photo to the editorial & production page -if your photo isn’t on the website- it will feed automatically through. Similarly, add your website details to “author address” in “Change details” and that will come through).

There’s a lot more stuff to come. Soon you should be able to look up any author event/talk/workshop/launch happening in your local area. At some point we’ll move to direct sales from the site, and get digital books up there, free chapters to browse, free books in some cases – as often as authors allow us, forums for articles, submissions and requests for review copies coming through the website, videos, podcasts, etc. For authors who don’t have their own websites, we’ll enable them to turn their author page here into one.

So it’s a beginning. The emphasis throughout will be on openness and sharing. That’s what’s driven this list from its start, back in 2004, a conviction that new times call for new ways of doing business (and going back to some old ones). We’re aiming to make all our contacts (16,000 or so, heading towards 160,000 I hope) freely available for anyone to browse. For readers to be able to add their own reviews, comments, and contact addresses that they feel appropriate. For other publishers to benefit from it if they find anything useful. My guess is that we’ll end up some kind of peer-review system for submissions, where we as publisher are largely taken out of the loop. An open source approach to the system, so anyone can add applications/amendments to the software if they see something that can be improved. An open finance policy, so that salaries/profit, author/publisher share of income, are visible to anyone.

But we’ve a way to go on that yet, still got to get the basics working. It’s still a small business, we have no full time employees, the market (and even the definition of what a “book” is) is changing so fast it’s impossible to figure out what it’s going to be like 3 years down the road, so we’re just taking a punt on all this and hoping that we’re reading the runes roughly right.

Further down the line though, I see the idea of a “publisher” acting as gatekeeper between authors and readers as an anachronism. A relatively short-lived 20th century phenomenon, suited to the age of mass-publishing with paperbacks and restricted buying channels, but out of place in the internet and digital age. So having just felt over the last day, with this new website, that we’ve finally got close to being a “proper publisher”, the job for Monday is how we get beyond that. Because though the traditional publisher will always be there to cater for the top bracket of bestselling authors, along with agents and lawyers, they’ll be increasingly irrelevant for the vast majority of authors and books.

Dunno what I’m meant to say in any future blogs, haven’t done one before, and I’ve probably shot my bolt here. Might be the first and last one. Still, we’ll have a place up very soon for authors to write their own blogs. And you could always comment on this one, which might prompt another.

All the best…
John

New newsletter coming soon…

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