Day: June 7, 2013

It was a long day and I was tired, I was nodding off reading a mystery set in Shanghai, dreaming of bills I owe and of my long struggle with corporate notions of publishing, money and success. What writer does not struggle with these things?  I heard Maria speaking softly to me, saying here, you have to watch this speech. I thought I was dreaming.

I was, in a way. Last year, I published my first e-book original, “The Story Of Rose,” and it was about my life with Rose, I put my blood and sweat into it, I wrote it and polished it for six months and my publisher,  a big corporate publisher, cautiously agree to publish it as an experiment. The book was one of the best I have ever written. It quickly got more than 120 five-star reviews on Amazon, was universally praised and hit the New York Times Bestseller list both for print and e-books, a difficult thing for an e-book to do.

The book was on the Times list for several weeks, sold about six thousand copies at $2.99 and then dropped off the list. and sales slowed. There are so many books being published their shelf lives are not long.  When I proposed another e-book my agent at the time told me the publisher said that book was not successful and they didn’t want to publish another one with me. I was surprised, hurt. A failure? I wondered. My first e-book, it hit the New York Times list and sold more than 6,000 copies. Yes, she said, but to my publisher, that is a catastrophe, the book was not successful, the sales are too small. I was not surprised by the sales figure, my books are often not precisely what people want to hear, I usually write against the popular grain, I have no reason to expect huge sales, although I always do.

I have nothing to complain about, I am not much for lament. My books have often made the Times list, I am a five-time New York Times bestseller, I have made my living as a full-time writer for three decades. But in this new world of corporate publishing, my sales are now something of a disappointment, or at least I have allowed myself to feel that way about them. I have loyal fans and readers, they support and love my work, but the bar for writers has gotten higher and higher as corporations have taken over publishing and profit has become more important.  Then the digital book revolution. As publishing changed, and hardcover book sales slowed, I became more and more concerned about my future, and so began the blog, my photography podcasting, turned to social media. I resolved not to whine or complain about this, but to get to work and change. So I have, and so I am.

Gradually – and very painfully for me –  I began to ask my readers for help in continuing my work by paying for the new work I was doing and they were reading, in a way the new book, the new publishing. The big-selling books about dogs are different from mine. My dogs are not crossing any bridge to meet me any time soon.

My books might not get me onto Oprah, but my blog numbers are pretty impressive – nearly 160,000 visits last month. How to reconcile this? I tried to understand that my very hard work was valuable even though it was not commercial in the contemporary sense of modern publishing. A few years ago, my sales were considered very good and I felt very successful. I never thought to ask readers to pay for anything beyond the cost of my books, and I didn’t need to.  I struggled to square that with what I was feeling and hearing now.  I was slow to grasp the changes I need to make in the way I saw myself and my work. I did sense the wondrous power of the Internet to connect me directly to my readers in a way publishers could not really imagine.

Last week, I bowed to the inevitable and  proposed and set up a subscription process and offered people a $5-a-month subscription option, a $60 a year subscription option, and a one-time contribution.  Some people wrote me out of concern. “I am looking for work and I can’t send you any money, can I still keep on reading your blog?” Of course, I said, it is still free. But I also said that one day it would not be, as I have to get paid for my work just like anyone else, or I cannot survive to do it. When you get a new job, I told my good friend, I hope no one will ask you to do it for free.

I am keeping the blog free to those who can’t afford those options, I hope I can do that forever. For years now, I have been offering my work, my writing, thoughts and photography for free. That is not a rational thing. The question in publishing is always the same: how can we get people to pay for a writer or artist’s work? My question is different:  how can we let them pay for my work? I see from the responses to the contribution offerings that people are not only willing to pay for work that connects with them, they are eager to. It means all the more to them and they are pleased to do it. The pain and discomfort seems to have come from me, from my attachment to the old way. A typical message – one of scores – was from Valerie. I thanked her for her $5-a-month contribution and she wrote back, “you are very welcome. You gave me a great gift.” She said that more than a year ago, she was in a terrible accident, suffering from injuries, trauma and depression. Her mother sat by her side and began to read my work to her. “Your writing took me out of my self,” she said, “in such a gentle, beautiful and poignant way. Gradually, I began to read it on my own. My heart opened. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

Thank you, Valerie, you cannot know what that means to me to get messages like that. The Internet sometimes works in invisible but very powerful ways. There were lots of messages, as if they were waiting all this time. From people who started blogs. Who sought love. Who struggled with depression and anxiety. Who seek the meaning of animals in their lives. Who took photos and painted pictures and wrote poems. Who listened to their inner spirits and set them free. Who set out on so many hero journeys because I shared my own. It is not a lot of money, but it is huge step towards securing my new life as a writer. It is affirming, it reminds me that my work is valuable, it is important.

So here was the antithesis of the pre-Internet, corporate idea of payment for one’s work. Valerie was actually thanking me for letting her send me $5 a month. This shocked and touched me, as have so many of the other messages which are helping me see the way for me, to understand that the connection we make with one another online is very real and very powerful. I don’t need a big book to survive. Even as I hoped for this, I did not quite believe it was possible, the freedom, the affirmation, the intensity of it.

As I drowsed off in my chair, trying to work out my new life, Maria woke me and said, hey, I am listening to a Ted Talk by Amanda Palmer, and it is about you and what you are doing. You have to listen to it, she said. And I did, and  she was right and I have to share it with you. One of the first things I heard her say was that she longer asked herself how she could make her fans and followers give her money. Her question was how could she let them. Her music label dropped her and her band because her album only sold 25,000 copies. That, they said, was a failure. Like me, she grasped that the music she offered online was her new production contract. She could do the work she wanted and that people loved and get paid for it. She asked her readers to pay her directly for her work if they loved it, and she  raised more than one million dollars over the Internet so she could continue creating and performing her work. Just about 25,000 people contributed.

I promised myself after “Rose In A Storm” that I would never again let someone else define success of failure for me and my work. It is not measured by hundreds of thousands of dollars but by messages like Valerie’s. Amanda Palmer touched my heart, she is a pioneer, I love her bravery, honesty and spirit, she trusts not only the Internet but the people who love and support her work. She lets them pay her for work, and thus is free. Your subscriptions are appreciated.

Simon tried to stomp Red for months, he thought he was a coyote after the sheep. Red usually ignores him and lately, I keep seeing the two of them hanging out together. There are things about animals I can learn, things I will never know.

It’s pouring here today (and looks like much of tonight) and I see it is gloomy and cloudy and rainy in much of the country. The blog’s readers are now in every state in the United States, which is very cool – got somebody from South Dakota, the one missing state yesterday.  I am grateful for those of you coming on from the West, Midwest and South. The Bedlam thing is all over the country. Because it is so yukky, I thought it would brighten the day to offer a video garden tour, something I never thought I would be doing, online or off. In the video, I talked about myself and neglected to say enough about all of the work Maria has been doing in the gardens, digging, moving, re-arranging, weeding. Unlike me, she knows what all the flowers are.

Red came along, and although he kept running towards the sheep to work, I did get him to focus. Lenore came along too, eating grass and other stuff.

The gardens have become important to me, I am especially proud of the gardens all over the place that Florence planted, and that we are bringing back to life. Something very satisfying in that. So come and see our gardens and bring some color and light into your day. I welcome garden advice..there, that wasn’t so bad..):

My new e-book on my notions of dog training “Listening To Dogs: How To Be Your Own Training Guru” was published last week and has sparked a lot of discussion online and off about the state of dog training in America. It is an empowerment book, meant to encourage people to be their own guru. Last week, in several of the Facebook forums about the book, there were intense and revealing discussions about Cesar Milan, the country’s most popular and influential dog trainer and expert.

The topics on Cesar Milan were explosive. Hundreds of people praised his clarity and firm notions of leadership and authority. Hundreds accused him of being abusive, many called him evil. The debates and discussions raged all week, veering from the angry to the illuminating. This week, in part because of these discussions,  I was re-reading the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt’s groundbreaking work on evil, “Eichmann In Jerusalem,” in which Arendt offered the then controversial theory that the architect of the “Final Solution,” one of the great evils in human history was a banal man, a bureaucrat, not especially thoughtful or powerful. His horrible crimes, she wrote, did not stem from anti-semitism alone, but from a moral vacuity, he was simply a bus driver doing what he was told.

I thought it was a striking example of the Pollution Of Outrage that has infected our ethics in so many areas, politics and the animal world come most readily to mind. Using the same term to describe Adolph Eichmann and Cesar Milan spoke to me of the utter loss of perspective afflicting the animal world, making true conversation and the exchange of ideas almost impossible. This is why I train my dogs myself, away from gurus and theorists. Training is personal, not ideological for me. In the scheme of things, Milan doesn’t cut it as a figure of evil. He’s a dog trainer with lots of ideas.

On Facebook one angry poster chastised me for failing to acknowledge the evil in Cesar Milan’s pack leader approach to training – he sometimes corrects aggressive dogs in the same way dogs do, but puffing himself up, growing and glowering, a common practice among experienced pack theory trainers and dominant dogs. Milan, I said, is no more abusive than any canine mother teaching her puppies how to behave. It’s not a training approach for me, but it seems to work for  him and his dogs. Good luck to him, he sells more books than I do, he has a message people want to hear.

I asked the messager, who was become increasingly angry at my unwillingness to call Milan abusive or evil, if it was possible that Milan was simply wrong, rather than evil or abusive. Was it possible, I asked, to disagree with him but still respect him and assume he was a person of good faith? The dictionary says that abuse means the intent to treat in a “harmful, injurious, or offensive way…”

I don’t know Milan, but I do know people who do and I have read some of his books. He is an entertainer for sure, but he also seems to me to be someone who cares about dogs and loves them. I have seen or read nothing to even suggest the true meaning of abuse in his work, that is a premeditated desire to harm and injure them. And why would he do that?

Like anyone who writes authentically about dogs, I have also been targeted by people who find me cruel, abusive, even murderous in my life with dogs and other animals. My decision to euthanize my border collie “Orson” after he bit three people brought me into this black-and-white world of outrage. Many people believe they loved Orson more than me and there are whole mailing lists and websites devoted to my evilness. Perhaps that experience is what taught me to be wary of people who sling terms like abuse and evil around. Hannah Arendt reminds us to consider what true evil really and what true evil really does.

Perhaps, I asked my angry friend on Facebook, we could simply disagree about Cesar and leave it there. She seemed mystified at that, as if there were no point to disagreeing if you couldn’t feel that the person you were disagreeing with wasn’t a demon, but was just wrong. Does this remind one of Washington, the poisoned capital?

“Listening To Dogs” is the other path, the inward path. Listening to yourself, making your own decisions, respecting yourself, not the loud and angry voices of the outward world. Angry people cannot possible have healthy and grounded dogs, anger is not compatible with the sensibilities of the animal world. Whenever an angry person uses animals to attack people, or to say there is only one way to deal with animal, I think of their poor dog, struggling to get by in such a hostile cloud. Dogs can fake it for almost anyone, but they read anger like the best MRI machine. Anger is just as coercive as any Milan training approach. An angry person cannot possible train a dog happily and well. Dogma stifles innovation and creativity, it kills sensitivity as there is no reason to think and learn and grow. Or listen.

I make my living in part from my curiosity about animals, my eagerness to learn about them and listen to them. I have been wrong so many times it breaks my own heart, let along that of others.  If being wrong is evil, get off of this website and run for your lives, because you are in the presence of Satan himself.

That, of course, is how I learn, how anybody learns. Intelligent people listen, they rarely judge. Intelligence is humility, not arrogance, an open mind, not a closed one. How can anyone say what everyone else should do?  Not me, Dear Lord, not me.

Whenever anybody tosses the term evil around, I think of the bureaucrat Eichmann, carrying out his monstrous orders. And I remember always to think of perspective, not righteousness.