Every business seems to have an ebook these days. Why is that? Well, in the age of the internet, it is important to be able to offer your clients, or potential clients, something for free. That's right. The more free information you give out, the more likely you are to have clients actually pay you for more of the same. I don't know why this is. Something about human nature, something about priming the pump, something about people getting giddy with knowledge juice, I guess. You don't have to be a writer to do
it. You hire a writer to ask you the right questions, organize your
information, and make it all presentable. Judging from my own experience as a customer who appreciates free ebooks, I would say it is successful because when you draw someone into your profession by giving them a taste of just how complex your work is, just how much is involved in it, they will no longer want to do it themselves. They will realize how worthwhile it is to hire you to do it. I have seen this work with websites that give away information on: how to write a resume, how to SEO optimize your website, how to do inbound marketing, project ideas for teachers . . . It's endless.

At first, if they are diabolically minded, like me, they will think- Aha! I have the information! I can do it myself! Then, very soon they will realize that there is no way they have the time to learn all the information they need. I have written ebooks for several clients who are business consultants. They give away their success ideas for free. You may ask: if their aim is to get hired to conduct workshops and seminars about these strategies, why would they give them away for free? It seems counter-intuitive, but it isn't. The fact of the matter is that the more information you give away, the more people respect you as an expert, the more they believe that you have MORE to teach them. However, do not take this statement as a suggestion to make your ebook a teaser that only gives part of the information the reader needs, urging them to pay you for a consultation where you will get the rest. It's not like that. Your ebook should be an honest, straightforward nonfiction book about the information it says it will provide.

Here is how you reel people in: Let's say you are a business consultant who deals with time management, increasing productivity, creating SMART goals, improved management strategies, insightful hiring practices, and innovative customer service. You write your ebook on "time management," one component of what you do. People get it for free and they use the ideas. They are impressed. They want more. They like you and want you and your expertise to be a part of their life and business. They hire you to teach them the full spectrum of business-improvement ideas. It's as simple as that.

It always helps to be slightly famous. Whether you are selling widgets or offering a widget-repair service, your business will benefit if you, the proprietor, are well-known for your expertise. One way to get to this point is to publish a book. It is easy enough these days to engage a vanity press to print your book affordably, but what of the actual writing of the thing? Now, if you are trying to get slightly famous as a writer, it follows that you might want to write your own book. However, if you want to be slightly famous as the world's best widget maker, you can hire someone to do the writing. No one expects a widget-maker to be a literary scholar. We all have different experiences from which we could draw for our book. Perhaps you haven't been in the widget business long, so you don't feel comfortable claiming expertise in that area. That's fine. You could talk about what it was like going to widget school. The trials and tribulations of the gruelling widget-repair training course you attended. The main thing to keep in mind is that you are unique, so the things you have to say will be unique as well. This is where you ghostwriter comes in. It is her job to go through your memoir of a widget-obsessed childhood and point out the parts that are interesting and should be developed further as well as the parts that you might have thought were fantastic but are actually a little cliche or a little boring or a little confusing. Your writer can interview you as needed to bring out the chapter ideas to make the book come alive, then help you expound upon the experiences you want to relate or the ideas you want to communicate. She does the organizing, she does the conceptual thinking, she does the proofreading, she gets it all down, and she makes it funny, profound, suspenseful, philosophical, spiritual, or conversational—whatever style you desire. All you do is dream . . . and talk. And with the help of a ghostwriter and a vanity press, you are soon on your way to being slightly famous.

I was in high school and my dad came home one day full of big ideas, saying he was going to write a detective novel. Oh, he never did it, at least not yet, but who hasn't had an idea like this? So many of us have a novel or memoir in us. My Granddad was a big storyteller too, and before he died, he wrote a collection of his tales of growing up in rural Tennessee, back in the day where you had to bang out each word on a typewriter, with a bottle or two of correction fluid waiting by your side. Writing a memoir is a way of leaving a legacy. A lot of people have had fascinating lives and love to tell the stories. What they are essentially doing is giving their family members an oral memoir. But for many, it somehow never comes out right. The pieces are disjointed and out of order, and the storytelling style rambles on and on and on. Your grandkids wait patiently for you to finish the endless one about the year you spent in the Merchant Marines, the tedious one about the blizzard of '76, the wierd one about the summer you made ten thousand bucks and blew it on cheap wine and . . . well, maybe you wouldn't tell that one to your grandkids.

You should tell these stories, and you should leave them as a legacy, but you shouldn't torture people. What you need is a ghostwriter. The point I want to make here is that this is an easy and a painless process. You don't have to go through an extensive interview process, get to know your writer, have lunch, give notes, detail your childhood, get psychoanalyzed, and agonize about your book's "theme" or "intent" or "story arc." All you have to do is sit down and tell one chapter of your story, and record it on a tape. It can help to have a friend or family member nearby, reminding you to "tell the one about the time . . ."

It will be an anecdote: one of your adventures, one of your revelations, one of your crazy nights in Burbank. You send this recording to a ghost writer, such as myself, and they do the rest. The more chapters you record for your memoir, the more the ghostwriter will begin to get an idea of where the holes are in the story, what areas need to be fleshed out to create the complete picture of your life. Then she may start giving you instructions as to specific information she recommends you add to the book. For instance, if you haven't talked about your teen years yet, a little meditation on the subject might bring out some stories that have been hidden away for years.  I'm trying to impress you with how private the whole experience is. You can work directly with your writer if you like, but if not, it is also easy to do it by yourself or with a trusted family member present, just telling your stories as you always have done. You could even instruct a family member to keep a tape recorder handy and secretly record you next time you start telling one of your anecdotes.

The writer takes what you have given her and organizes it in a way that reads better in print. That is her expertise, so once you hand the tape over, you can relax. And in the end, you won't present your family and friends with a sheaf of crumpled onionskin pages stuck in a three-ring binder, like my granddad did. You will have the book self published very affordably. So get ready to pose for the photo on your book cover. Your memoir is practically written already.

"What if it suffocates us in our sleep?"

"What if it ozonates our brains?"

"What if it's a hoax?"

We bandied these worrisome ideas about while clutching our pillows and staring into the blue all-seeing eye of science.

What the machine was supposed to do was emit negative ions, which then bond with positive ions in the air, which then makes them neutral, at which point they fall to the ground. This is supposed to be good because microscopic pollen bits and mold things and even gasses are supposed to be positively charged, according to the lady, so it takes everything out of the air. Then your allergies go away. The allergic particles are neutralized and fall to the ground. If anyone out there knows whether this makes sense or not, please do let me know.The thing cost $700, and the lady let us borrow it for a week, so we could see how great it works, before buying. I took this as a high sign of confidence in the machine, as I was supposed to do. But now, with the week up, I can't really imagine who would spend $700 on the thing. It smells like ozone, which is a nice smell. But other than that, there is just no way to know if its working or not. Allergies persist, as they will in New Mexico, and the machine continues to glow. 

The out-of-work teacher prepared her job application materials, contemplating the precious perfection and insufferably superior attitudes she expected to encounter at the alternative school designed to broaden the minds of pre-teens. If the last school where she had suffered through four fifths of a year of curiously combined appreciation and humiliation was any example of private school general attitudes, then she was right. So her preparations were meticulous but her attitude was bad. As she drove the five mintues to the school, she tried to improve upon it, forcing a smile into the rear-view mirror and thinking positive, friendly thoughts toward the institution where so many innocents spent their adolescence bieng happily intellectually stimulated beyond the wildest nightmares of even senior-high students in the local public schools, and where dedicated teachers loved their angelic pupils like their own fingers and toes.

She had taught at one of these places before and had become one of these adults whose tiny world revolved around creating tiny worlds for her students' tiny worlds to intellectually revolve around until . . . And she admitted to herself, not for the first time, that she still loved students but despised other teachers and, most especially, school administrators. Despised them. 

On that five-minute drive, while applying tingly-minty "nutmeg" lipstick, she contemplated the pure hell of teaching in public schools but discovered, to her great surprise, that she preferred it to the high and strange expectations of the far-better private school world. It struck her as odd that any sane person could prefer public school, but then again . . . On the one hand, you have the frustration of being by far the best, most organized and least burnt-out teacher in a pathetic piece-of-shit institution with no money and crappy facilities, where the children are bent on humiliating their teachers daily. Then, on the other hand, in a private school, her intellect, training, and creativity would allow her to execute her job perfectly, and with impeccable cooperation from bright and eager students, but the looming expectation of somehow falling short of a strictly adhered-to and utterly mysterious code of operational ethics and thus being shunnned by parents and teachers alike as some kind of horrifying she-wolf predator, that sort of ruined it.  She knew this because it had happened numerous times.

Like once, she had been reprimanded and forced to confusedly apologize to a schoolyard bully whom she had remanded to the authority of the office personell, but whom she had become angry with and, though she hadn't actually yelled at or touched the child, she had got "red in the face," in the words of her furious supervisor. This redness of face, apparently, was utterly unacceptable to private school people, whose collective toleration for violent-seeming skin tone was very very low indeed. Then, another time, she had sent a child who was screaming and crying with an ear infection to the office for appropriate treatment, but he was sent back to the classroom in the same screaming and crying state. She gave him an "alieve" painkiller. Not being a registered nurse, this sort of mercy is technically illegal, and so she was sent packing. The child's pain and suffering not-withstanding, apparently. No one could just sweep it under ther rug and leave well enough alone? Well, the kid gleefully ratted her out on the playground, expressing his gratitude for it to various pop-eyed adults, who took direct action. So no, it seemed not.

Public school born and bred, her demeanor was seen as excitingly "edgy" by some. A product of an east-coast-roofing-family dad cum intellectual rogue and sentimental Kennedy-worshiper and a neurotically tough mom raised with brothers and pain, her direct manner and charmlessly intelligent conversational grace befuddled many young Santa Fe parents who had never heard a voice raised in anger, nor seen a color that wasn't a pretty desert hue. "Edgy?" thought she, many times after the incident where she had been titteringly and warningly called "edgy." "Edgy?" And now, years after that confusing educational and employment tsunami, she concluded that "edgy" was just a word these west-coast people had for her people: the displaced gypsy diaspora of befuddled east-coasters who have traveled too much to belong anywhere anymore.

Suze didn't know her uncle. Her vagabond aunt had just married him so many months ago, and she knew only that he called her aunt a bloody cunt when he was angry. Apparently this was acceptable where he was from, another country. Living in a rental in a faraway cheap town after years of failed attempts at artistic endeavors, her aunt seemed mostly happy with him there too now. But this day, otherwise sunny, bright, windless and pleasant, he, we'll call him Jim, came into town to have car repairs performed. He called Suze late in the day saying that the repairs wouldn't be finished today, so he'd just spend the night at her place. She was very pleasant on the phone, then hung up and the mental gears started turning so fast she could hear them clank and complain. Situation number one: Suze lived the pleasant solitary life of an artist, without a TV, enjoying actually having conversations with friends when they came over and listening to music alone as entertainments. An entire evening alone with Jim, the "bloody cunt" man, would mean an awful lot of conversation. Hours of it. Bonding. Then making him breakfast, acting the hostess on the spur of the moment. Situation two: her own parents were arriving from the east coast the very next day for a week-long visit. She had just made the guest bedroom up with clean sheets, and her washing machine was broken. Preparing for a successful parental visit typically required an evening of calm reflection and preparation for letting things roll off her like water off a duck's back. Feeling that an evening with  Jim, the bloody cunt man, was sure to lead nowhere good and could possibly foment the destruction of her mental balance for a solid week or more, she concocted a plan. Shortly afterward, she showed up at my house with a face full of makeup, hair pulled back in a bun, and a bundle of clothes under her arm.

Me: I don't get it. You trying out for a ballet dancer?

Her: I told him he was welcome to stay, of course. But I myself couldn't stay. I myself had agreed to work for a catering company that evening. I myself had to get together my black and white catering outfit and go serve canapés. So he was welcome to make himself at home alone in my TVless house and occupy himself alone for hours and hours until bedtime, but I was very sorry but I simply would not be able to keep him company. . . I went through all the motions of showering and making myself up, asking him if he thought these black pants looked professional enough, you know, adding all sorts of made-up details about the wedding I was catering. I got so into it, it was scary. Then I drove around town for twenty minutes wondering where to go, feeling like a monumental fool, and ended up here. 

Me: So . . . what are you going to do now?

Her: Want to go out for a drink?

Me: Why not?

The phone rings. Its Jim, the uncle. I bang pots and pans together to simulate the background sounds of a busy kitchen. He tells Suze he guessed he would just have his wife come pick him up tonight and come back into town tomorrow for his ailing car. But thanks anyway. She let out a colossal sigh of relief that could have wrapped around my throat and strangled me for joy. 

Me: Still want that drink?

Her: Hell no. Just want to wash this crap off my face and sleep off this lie. My God, I can't believe it worked! 

Don't you love it when you KNOW something? You just know it so hard and so surely. In fact, there is a kernel of pride in the knowing because it is something you shouldn't ought to know. You make big decisions based on this prized knowledge because it is the one for-sure thing that you definitely remember. No matter what-all else might come shattering down like a ceiling of glass, you know this. And yet . . . you eventually discover that you have somehow got it wrong? How? And yet, you did! Like today I thought I was so clever. I took the train into Albuquerque, then took the bus to the intersection that the "ABQ-ride" customer service line told me was closest to the computer-fixit place. I was so sure I remembered this place was right near the Flying Star cafe, so I walked from the bus stop north, it must have been thirty blocks or more, to the Flying Star, cursing ABQ-ride all the way, only to discover that I had walked the wrong way. I turned around and walked all the way back. It turns out the computer fixit place was nowhere near the Flying Star. It was a half-block from the bus stop in the other direction. By the time I got there I had a burning heel blister and chapped thighs and when I stopped walking, my legs started shaking like the windsock in Sandía Gorge. But didn't I just know it!

Don't you love it when you KNOW something? You just know it so hard and so surely. In fact, there is a kernel of pride in the knowing because it is something you shouldn't ought to know. You make big decisions based on this prized knowledge because it is the one for-sure thing that you definitely remember. No matter what-all else might come shattering down like a ceiling of glass, you know this. And yet . . . you eventually discover that you have somehow got it wrong? How? And yet, you did! Like today I thought I was so clever. I took the train into Albuquerque, then took the bus to the intersection that the "ABQ-ride" customer service line told me was closest to the computer-fixit place. I was so sure I remembered this place was right near the Flying Star cafe, so I walked from the bus stop north, it must have been thirty blocks or more, to the Flying Star, cursing ABQ-ride all the way, only to discover that I had walked the wrong way. I turned around and walked all the way back, another thirty blocks. It turns out the computer fixit place was nowhere near the Flying Star. It was a half-block from the bus stop in the other direction. By the time I got there I had a burning heel blister and chapped thighs and when I stopped walking, my legs started shaking like the windsock in Sandía Gorge. But didn't I just know it!

The eighties was a bad time to be a hippy. Fifteen years after it was hip and fifteen years before it was retro. If you were living outside of time and space and God said "Go pick an era to go to earth and go braless!" you wouldn't pick the eighties. The era of the material girl, neon fabrics, Reaganomics, and designer jeans. If you were to pick an era to canvas for Greenpeace, to artificially heighten your senses to reveal the essence of all things, to worship nature, to wash little and always with a philosophical soap, to work little and travel much, to scour songs and publications for indications of enlightenment, to do a feminist reading of everything, to drop acid in Disneyland, and to wonder who among us would grow up to sell out, it wouldn't have been the eighties. But we were born to swim upstream, and like Salmon we returned to our place of origin and we, some of us, spawned. And we somehow lived to tell the tale. It's one of life's great rip-offs: You can't pick your era.

I have washed my custom-made pants yet again and now they are up to my mid-shin. They shrink an amazing inch to two inches in length every time I wash them. It's amazing. They should probably be made into some kind of child's toy. You know they have those sea monsters you put in water and they grow? These are pants that start out too big, then you put them in water and they shrink! Buy one enormous size to fit all and then wash them as many times as you need to for a custom fit! It's brilliant! I'll make a million! Of course, once they are the right size you can never wash them again, so that gets tricky. But that's what dry cleaning is for. I'll go ahead and be honest: they are bamboo. Yes, nailed together stalks of bamboo! No. It's a knit fabric made from bamboo, which is amazingly soft and comfy but there is this one drawback . . . and it's kind of a major one. That explains why the bamboo socks I bought for myself a year ago now look like a perfect baby shower gift. I had this plan to make a whole line of clothes out of bamboo! So much for that. Bamboo buyers be forewarned!