As I begin the bizarrely self-referential work of releasing The Release, I’m test-driving the teachings I put forward there. Can I really find increasing freedom as I send this book into the world? Can marketing and publicity really be life-giving? Can I sustain writing’s energizing, personally enriching exchange with mystery—the gift economy of the creative process—as my book enters the market economy?
No doubt I’ll trip up. At some point I’ll check sales figures or stars or reviews as measures of my commercial success. A reader will disagree with something I’ve said, sending me spiraling. Or I’ll plunge into that existential emptiness that inevitably follows launching, where I’ll get mired in despair. For now, though, I’m hanging in there with the practice I put forward.
One release gesture that’s stretching me today is asking for help. In the past, because I’ve identified so completely with my books, marketing has seemed like self-promotion, and why would I ask for help boosting my own ego? This time around I understand just how removed from me the book is. Its external reception, good or bad, will never define my worth. I also understand that the creative work of releasing writing happens in relationships, between myself and others and between my book and its readers. I can pass along the book’s life-spark whether or not anyone reads it because that essence also resides in me. I’m as much a product of these past eight years as my book is.
A month ago I asked a bunch of people, some friends, some strangers, to join my launch team. I was astonished when many said yes. When we met on zoom for the first time, I listened with amazement as these generous readers shared their initial responses to The Release: “paradigm-busting,” “inviting,” “there’s so much compassion here even as you hold our feet to some other fire.” Surely they weren’t talking about my book! And in a sense they weren’t; they were talking about this book I helped birth that’s now their book. The soul of this creative endeavor, which both is and isn’t of my own making, resides beyond its covers. At the end of the hour, our conversation felt like an ephemeral, diaphanous butterfly we’d conjured together, a new creation in its own right. A gift. The gift of The Release transitioning into a new dimension.
Thank goodness I had the courage to ask.
—Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
Order The Release: Creativity and Freedom After the Writing Is Done here!