There’s a lot of conversation about how many excellent authors are being overlooked because the “big” publishers simply don’t want to spend money on or do marketing for untested authors. What do we do, as authors, to make our way in a very crowded global field?

I’d like to suggest that we think small. That we work locally. I don’t mean, local in the sense of down the street, but rather in the group you personally gather around you – in your email contacts, your extended family, your friends – like Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury – we need to gather together in an intimate generosity that not only doesn’t need the big publishers, but doesn’t even want them. 

I’m a member of She Writes “Independent Publishers and Writers” group, and I’ve decided to take my own advice, and in doing so to add another twist to the notion. I started my own indie press, I’m a “micro-publisher.” I’ve signed five authors, people in my extended circle whose work impressed me, and who deserved notice, deserved a chance. AND, like Virginia Woolf, I’m publishing my own work as well. 

Here’s the extra twist, our press works from a basic notion of generosity. Therefore, wherever possible it is our intention to donate profits to good causes. One of our authors is a young woman of 20 who can’t live on what she makes from her art, so we offered her generous royalty terms.  

For my book, Becoming Hummingbird: Charting Your Life Journey the Shaman’s Way, I am donating my profits to a very important humanitarian project, a school for the children of the indigenous Q’ero people of the high Andes of Peru. You can read about this school on their website, www.kusiquyllur.org, or my website www.becominghummingbird.com.

Becoming Hummingbird has just launched, available through all the usual distribution channels. I’m very proud to be giving back to the beautiful Q’ero people of Peru.  Becoming Hummingbird asks the reader to consider their responsibility to the global collective, while at the same time as¬sessing the qualities of the mythical Hero’s path as it applies to her or his own personal journey. This combination of Jungian psychology, mythology, and shamanism produces a workbook guide for the future that is timely and inspiring. 

“What is your personal mythology? Modern Western culture has been stripped of archetypal connections: those universal path¬way that act as life guides. Many of us have lost our way. This book provides a process of twelve guided meditations by which each of us can establish our own destiny and move forward into a life lived fully and with conscious care for the world at large. Using Jungian psychology, shamanic healing techniques, and deep meditation, the reader learns to identify a personal hero’s path by creating a mythology that resonates in today’s world.”

“We have a choice: we can devolve into an early version of humans surviving on fighting over food, sex, and gods, or we can evolve into a species working on the energetic in conjunction with the Universe under a global sensibility. We are currently peril¬ously close to the former mode, warring against one another over basic survival. All of us, men and women, have an opportunity to evolve and put these masculine tendencies to rest in favor of feminine nurturing modalities. This will be the Middle world struggle of this century. Evolve or die out.”  Jane Galer