The unspoken component in my books has always been full disclosure of what I’ve learned. I always wanted somebody to be able to pick up my book and translate that information into something they could actually perform. Why read a book full of unrelated information when it’s performance we are after? Art Hinkel told me he specifically wrote his book so that folks would have to attend his school to learn the blend. My view was, and is, the opposite of this notion.
I was always sort of a pain in the ass because of my “need to know.” If somebody says: “I do this ‘whatever’.” and doesn’t tell me exactly what he or she is doing, I get frustrated. I ask too many questions and I pry. I’ve always been like this. Teachers used to dread having me in class. When I went to register for the Hinkel School of Electrology, Mr. Hinkel interviewed me. After the interview he refused to let me enroll! After some heavy coaxing from Claire Lofgren (his main teacher), and her assurance that she would “control me,” Hinkel reluctantly allowed me to attend. It took two weeks of pressure. Of course, Hinkel and I became very close and it was a beautiful relationship … once he realized I was not intent on challenging or undermining him.
Anyway, back to the book story. It was early 1987 and I bought my first Macintosh. It was IIcx with a 40-megabyte hard drive and 1 meg of ram. With the monitor, it cost $5,400! The scanner and printer added another $2,000. Unbelievable how cheap computers are now? (At that time almost nobody had a computer.)
As I mentioned, my first book required a payment of $27,000 for 5,000 books that were “sheet fed” on a Heidelberg press. I built shelves everywhere to store the things. Sadly, the bindings immediately started to fall apart. I was unable to get the printer to do anything because they went bankrupt. So, I paid another $2,000 to have the bindings cut off and spiral-bound. Each book had been plastic shrink-wrapped, so that also had to be removed.
In those days, there were no digital cameras so I did color slides, had black and white prints made, scanned them myself and edited them in Photoshop. Oh, I forgot to include the price of all the software: about $500 per program (Word, PageMaker, Illustrator and Photoshop). The color pages (on my original tele book) were 4 panel color separations that cost $600 per page (I had four color pages).
Anyway, I’m not complaining, I’m only “setting you up” for all the GOOD news to come. With all the new developments, virtually any of you can write a book or a decent paper with almost no money. And, I’ll explain this in the next section. PLEASE, if you have ever thought about doing this, get started. Everyone wants to hear your ideas. (By the way, to date I have sold about 7,000 blend, and 6,000 tele books.) Blend books are not as popular any more, because the blend method is out of vogue. The tele book is selling very well, however. Somebody is doing the treatment!
