Peacebuilding Starts at Home was just published.
Getting it out the metaphorical door was just the beginning.
Now, the hard part begins.
What???????????
That might seem like an odd thing for someone to say who has invested two years typing all those words and then (re)arranging them until they came close to making sense.
But the fact is: writing this book was relatively easy.
After all, it is my day job. Somewhat to my surprise, I realized a few years ago that if I had to use one word to describe my career these days, it would be writer.
Peacebuilding Starts at Home is my nineteenth book. Perhaps even my twentieth if you let me count an edited volume I did on Rondine to which I only contributed about ten pages worth of prose.
So, you might think that writing this book would have been easy.
Wrong.
Most of my successful books were written for what I think of as captive audiences. They were college textbooks. Once a professor decided to assign them, their students pretty much had to read them or risk an assault on their GPA.
For the first time, I was writing for a general audience.
Sure, my other books kept getting adopted because they were written well enough that students didn’t object to reading them. Down to earth prose. Meaningful examples. Academic story arcs (can there really be such a thing?) that encouraged curiosity. Even the occasional funny story.
But writing for anyone and everyone called on those skills and a whole lot more. That is what the Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP) was really asking me to do as part of writing a book that could help it grow as well as grow my personal writing career.
The Real Hard Part—Creating the Audience That Doesn’t Exist (Yet)
Then, as I wrote the book, its marketing plot took a challenging turn when I realized that I faced an even more daunting challenge.
I knew my stuff.
Writing about peacebuilding in the US wasn’t like writing about politics in places like India or Nigeria in my comparative politics textbooks which I had never even visited.
Not only did I know my stuff but I knew it first hand. I’ve been a professional peacebuilder for more than half a century. I was writing about people and organizations that I already knew about. Some were among my closest friends. Then, I even landed with a new publishing house whose co-founder herself was featured in the book.
Then we hit a delightful but challenging wall.
We set some lofty but arbitrary sales goals so that N/A Books could turn a profit and we could reach new readers who, in turn, could become new peacebuilders. At that point, we realized that we wouldn’t reach those goals if we only marketed the book to professional peacebuilders and their existing allies.
We would have to create new markets by reaching out to new “demographics,” as the marketers like to put things.
That was not part of my personal skill set.
I think of myself as being pretty entrepreneurial and have some experience fund-raising.
But building a market that doesn’t exist????????
And then we realized that it wouldn’t be enough do that just to sell copies of the book.
For the simple reason that I only decided to write the book to spread its ideas and use them to help turn our country around.
And that market didn’t exist.
So, We Reframed the Challenge
In the end, we took a “page” from our own “playbook,” decided to reframe the question we were posing, and got help from a couple of “third parties.”
The first came from David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist who, surprisingly even to me, is mentioned more than anyone else in the book. Although he is not normally a great source of one-liners, he did come up with one that helped define what we had to do with the book and the broader Peacebuilding Starts at Home community.
He loves talking about tiny “islands” in an archipelago of social change initiatives scattered across a vast “ocean.” That led me to ask a series of questions. How can we connect them? Build metaphoric bridges? Add metaphoric landfill? Even arrange metaphoric exchange trips for their “inhabitants?”
To help do that, we decided to work with a publicist that isn’t a traditional PR agency that specializes in building markets for authors and their books. We needed more. We needed help in defining “island bridging” goals that would take us beyond anything we even dreamed of when I joined the AfP staff and board twenty years ago. We would need new tools for reaching those new “demographics” that would have take us far beyond the kinds of people I featured in the book who, themselves, already began taking me beyond traditional peacebuilding circles.
What’s Coming
We decided to work with Ripple Impact, a relatively new firm that specializes in helping mid-career professionals pivot and redefine their careers.
While I am far beyond the middle of my career, Peacebuilding Starts at Home as both book and movement are calling on my colleagues and me to pivot, redefine, and dramatically add to the things we say and do.
Our pivot may not lead to the social change equivalent of a slam dunk, but our work with Ripple Impact and things we had come up with on our own are already beginning to bear fruit.
As you will see in the posts to come.
For now, here is a teaser of the kinds of things we are planning to do with our current and future partners.
- We will be creating a community of grass roots peacebuilders using some new (to us) public outreach tools
- We will provide “on ramps” to help those people we reach find their niche
- We will use those efforts to begin changing American cultural norms until most Americans are able to solve most of their problems most of the time using cooperative rather than confrontational technique
- We will helping our partners incubate grass roots initiatives, many
- We will figure out what works—and what doesn’t—and adjust our efforts accordingly
- We will continue our advocacy work in Washington DC while beginning to do in other places around the country in the public and private sectors where key decisions are made
- We will create the organizational scaffolding that lets us connect David’s metaphoric islands, including by developing innovative ways of fund this work
In the next few weeks, I’ll lay out more about each of those steps.
In the meantime, the book is available wherever you normally buy books on line as a basic web site, not surprisingly called www.peacebuildingstartsathome.us.
Before I write those posts, I will be “celebrating” my seventy-eighth birthday.
It would be a great birthday present if you decided to join us or even bought the book (the royalties all go to AfP, so you won’t be making me rich).
But I’ve already gotten the best birthday present.
I get to keep working for the goals that have shaped my life since was a college freshman sixty years ago.
And have a ton of fun doing so.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.
