Some of you may have wondered after my last entry if I not only forgot to plug into my cell phone about doing another post on here, but that maybe I lost my whole calendar!

Never to fear, I’ve just been tied up with a lot of things I’ve been working on and have been demanding my attention in one way or another.

I have a new business endeavor I haven’t officially started yet, but prepping for it took up some time during the month of October. This month of November has been dedicated toward another business endeavor with a particular goal in mind for the end of the month. Throughout it all, I’ve had several stressful situations of varying degrees occur which took up any time I would have put toward this blog and a couple of other pleasant things in my life such as just sitting back each night with a good novel to read before I go to bed.

So, enough of that, I’m sure you are wondering what all is going on with Beyond the Charts.

Well, as you should be aware, I’m taking pre-orders for “GRO$$ OUT!! – Effective Marketing For Getting Your Next $144,000″

This is a Limited – Signed and Numbered – Hardback Edition sold only through Beyond the Charts which will be released at full price in March 2012.

The first pre-order price (which all prices include shipping and handling) was at $25 ($35 international) at the beginning of September. It went up in October and now in November it is at $35 ($45 international). If that sounds a little high, just remember that it IS a hardback edition, and if you’ve taken a look at hardbacks, even the latest Stephen King novel is almost $35 in hardback. And that’s WITHOUT shipping and handling. Mine includes shipping. And it’s a Limited Edition. Signed by myself as the author. So the rarity does demand a respective price.

Even so, I am making a special price just for Black Friday after Thanksgiving.

For 24 hours I will have the pre-order price be at the lowest it has ever been from the website at $22 ($32 international) and that STILL includes shipping and handling.

I’m also offering select prizes to certain people that order including not having to pay for the book! That’s right, some people will be able to get the book for FREE!!!

All the info you need for this Black Friday Sale can be found at Beyond the Charts, so be sure to go there to look it all over, and be sure to come back after you’ve eaten some turkey so you can pre-order yourself the book which will help you make some sales of your product this next year!

Once again, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! Have a great weekend, and I hope to see your name in my inbox as someone I’ll be sending a signed copy of my book to in March!

Chicago at the end of July, Kentucky in the middle of August, Atlanta at the first of September. I was planning for another trip to Boston this weekend, but at this point unless a miracle of money comes in I think I’m going to have to cancel my spot at it. Indeed, considering my driving time on trips, I may just have to do that cancellation today. Maybe I could use the “rest” from traveling so often all of a sudden anyway. Bo Bice is supposed to be in our small town this weekend performing at our annual event. Maybe I’ll go check him out. Never seen him live before.

For some of you that don’t know, I live in a small town in the mountains of Northeast Georgia. It’s pretty nice up here. I’ve lived here on and off throughout my lifetime, so out of all the places I’ve lived I sort of consider this area “home”. For better or for worse.

Coming home from these trips lately has been quite an experience. Depending on the event, I’ve had my head going in different directions when I get back and I find myself doing all sorts of stuff regarding whatever I was doing that weekend during the first few days I’m back.

It can really take a while sometimes to integrate new information into one’s daily routine or one’s life and have everything else that’s needed bounce back too.

It got so bad this past week that I missed an appointment I had set up about a month ago to see someone. I just forgot about it. Didn’t like that. I began to use the calendar on my new cell phone after that. Got an appointment later today I need to attend to. Got it in my phone, so I know it must be true.

So now it comes to today and I’m sitting here realizing that it’s the 14th of the month and I posted last on the 1st promising you guys the excerpts would resume last week after Dragon*Con and here I am two weeks into the month without another post.

So here I am posting. Hope I ain’t boring you to tears talking about my life.

I suppose if I’m to get “caught up” on my excerpt posts I’ll have to do one every other day for about a week and a half or so. Hope you guys don’t mind that sort of frequency. I know for about a week or so there I was posting at least one every day, at times there was more than one. I think on one day I posted three in a 24 hour period.

That surprised even me.

And after talking with the various people at Dragon*Con it occurred to me that the subtitle of my book was really doing some people a disservice. My book is titled “GRO$$ OUT!!” and the subtitle is “Effective Marketing For Getting Your First $144,000″. Well, some people need help with marketing and maybe in time they’ve made that much money already or they were doing that regularly at one time but the economy or other factors caused them to slide down lower in numbers, or maybe they are doing even better than that and want to get even better.

Whatever the case, the point is that not everyone is out for their “First” $144,000.

So, I thought about it and changed the subtitle which should work regardless of how much you’ve already made.

“GRO$$ OUT!! – Effective Marketing For Getting Your Next $144,000″

I’ve already updated past blog entries to reflect this as well as the website which if you click on that shiny new title there it will take you where you need to go if you’re wanting to know more about the book.

So, no excerpts have been posted on this new book for a couple of weeks now.

Wow.

I’m definitely behind and need to start posting again real soon here. I’m sure there’s a few people out there at least that might want to see what else I’m offering before they make up their minds. Maybe I’ll start tonight with a new excerpt. Or maybe tomorrow morning. Guess I better plug it into my new cell phone so I don’t forget.

Today, September 1st, 2011, I am pleased to inform you that the Beyond the Charts website has been updated quite well. The “front” page has new information describing just what Beyond the Charts is about, not too new to those of you that have been following this blog if you’ve clicked on the above tag for “Beyond the Charts” as it is quite similar to what is found there, but quite new for the website. There are links up top for the main site, The Wasteland message board forum, this blog here, the Beyond the Charts Facebook page, and one other item I will speak of momentarily. The changes were made quite recently and a post did appear on Facebook yesterday, but otherwise this is the official announcement of that.

I am also pleased to let you know that if you haven’t checked out The Wasteland message board forum lately that you should do so. Its look has been changed too and there are many great spots to post messages and respond to other posts. Feel free to introduce yourself in the appropriate area once you sign up.

For those of you that have been looking at my blog for some time now, and particularly the last couple of months, you know that I’ve been posting excerpts for a marketing book I’ll be releasing. Some of you may remember that I said I’d post the first pre-orders for it today.

This has now occurred.

I am pleased to announce that the book “GRO$$ OUT!! – Effective Marketing For Getting Your Next $144,000″ is now officially available for pre-ordering. Just click on the title there to find out all the details you need to know to order it. The excerpts from it that have been posting on here will resume next week and will run about two or three a week from here on out.

Exciting times for sure! This weekend I am going to Atlanta for Dragon*Con. I am quite excited and look forward to seeing a bunch of people I’ve met and hung out with the last couple of years going and I know I’ll meet many new faces as well. If you happen to be going and see me, be sure to stop and let me know you’ve been reading my blog. I’d love to meet you!

I’ll be back from the Con late Monday night, so blogging should resume sometime on late Tuesday evening.

Take care, and I’ll catch up with you again next week!

Be encouraged,

David James

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A lot of times we attribute the song to the singer. Sometimes this is true because maybe the singer had actually written the song their self, but a lot of times there’s someone that you never see that sat down one night or morning and under inspiration wrote down some lyrics that another person decided were good enough to put music to, and the next thing they knew, this singer is singing their song and it’s hitting all over the charts.

This may or may not happen to you, but if you have ideas for songs, then you should start writing them down. If you need help in learning how to make sure the song structure works, there is all kinds of help online and in books and courses in school and a lot of other places. Once you have a song written you can then see what you can do to get someone to either buy it from you and sing it or buy it from you and produce it.

And if this is how you see your self being expressed in what flows within you, then I sort of doubt that you’ll be only doing just one song. Chances are you will be writing song after song after song.

Maybe you’ll be someone that only wants to write songs for your self to sing because maybe you also have a voice on you and you know that people will listen to you when you sing, so therefore you have an idea for how you can use both with the same songs and produce your own album. You may in that case………

***to read more of this passage you must own the book***

(The above is a brief excerpt from the forthcoming book “GRO$$ OUT!! – Effective Marketing For Getting Your Next $144,000” and is in an early draft stage and may not reflect the exact wording of the book once it’s in print)

If you are finding this blog to be of benefit to you, please feel free to subscribe to it and tell others about it. Thanks in advance for following and for spreading the word!

<===== Excerpt: Chapter 1: Have A Product > Story > Novels

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Novels are now a classic way to pass time that could otherwise be very boring and aggravating. People in bus stations and airports frequent the small newsstand bookstores and pick up a copy of some book or another that catches their eye and while they wait for their ride or while on their ride they turn the pages and enjoy a good story.

Some, to save money, already have their book from home that they got at a discount and begin reading from the moment they get there. And with the advent of electronic devices, people are more and more holding up a screen to read a story off of that doesn’t weigh as much as a physical book and they can at any time download a copy of whatever they want to read and begin instantaneously.

If you have a way with words and have a passion to write a novel, then you can certainly have much success with this craft even if you never hit the New York Times bestseller’s list. It’s not guaranteed, but you can certainly have it. Naturally, hitting that list would be a big boost too if you are looking to also being famous and popular along with making some money with your craft. And depending on how you are published will determine what lists you hit. In today’s publishing world more and more people are looking at the stats on sites like Amazon to see how well an author is selling.

Regardless of what lists you hit and what lists you don’t hit, the important thing is to have readers that want to keep reading what you put out each time you put something out. That is what is going to keep you afloat much more than your ranking on some list somewhere.

If you are either writing a novel now or are thinking of writing one, and especially if you have already written one, if you haven’t gone………

***to read more of this passage you must own the book***

(The above is a brief excerpt from the forthcoming book “GRO$$ OUT!! – Effective Marketing For Getting Your Next $144,000” and is in an early draft stage and may not reflect the exact wording of the book once it’s in print)

If you are finding this blog to be of benefit to you, please feel free to subscribe to it and tell others about it. Thanks in advance for following and for spreading the word!

Excerpt: Chapter 1: Have A Product > Songs > Song Writing =====>
<===== Excerpt: Chapter 1: Have A Product > “Basic” Art > Paperwork: Drawings & Paintings

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History is full of drawings and paintings of various type in a multitude of cultures that tell the story of their history or of riddles that need to be solved for various reasons known only to the artists until archeologists decipher them. Kind of makes you think of Indiana Jones or The DaVinci Code in a way, eh?

There are a great variety of ways to create drawings and paint pictures that involve all sorts of tools and canvases.

You may be a person who prefers to take a pencil and study an object and take a piece of blank white paper and replicate that object in visual form on that paper with the gray matter your art instrument of choice leaves behind.

You may be someone who prefers to have a brush and colorful goop that you spread on a rougher surface to produce a more textured look and feel so that when you have established the images in your mind one can have a real sense of the location and what is taking place therein.

Or you may be an inker that likes to go over rough sketches and bring clarity and more depth to them than can be done in a beginning pencil sketch.

And you might be a colorist that likes to take an established drawing and put the appropriate color in between the lines to give it the life that only color can give.

And there is of course much more ways and combinations thereof. The important thing is………

***to read more of this passage you must own the book***

(The above is a brief excerpt from the forthcoming book “GRO$$ OUT!! – Effective Marketing For Getting Your Next $144,000” and is in an early draft stage and may not reflect the exact wording of the book once it’s in print)

If you are finding this blog to be of benefit to you, please feel free to subscribe to it and tell others about it. Thanks in advance for following and for spreading the word!

Excerpt: Chapter 1: Have A Product > Story > Novels =====>
<===== Excerpt: Chapter 1: Have A Product > Your Self > You Must Start With Your Self

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Some people think they just need to learn a lot of skills and then figure out a way to apply them to whatever they are working on in order to succeed in what they are doing. These people forget that the best expression of art is not learning HOW to do something but letting art become the expression of their HEART and SOUL.

If you learn the English language to the point where if you had the degree you could be a college professor, and then if you studied every master wordsmith out there that has told stories that were critically acclaimed, and then if you worked for years to write what you considered to be the best story ever written based on all of your study, and if you got the “best” editors out there to edit your work and make sure that all nuances of the English language was written perfectly, you got what you thought is the best agent out there, and you then went to sell that novel on the open market (this presumes that you were also able to get a publisher to publish it or was brave enough to self-publish with hopefully some knowledge on how to do that), and you put nothing of YOUR SELF into the work, then your chances of being the next great writer probably won’t be very big because I bet you will have written something that is not nearly as engaging as you might think. Not to mention the fact that you probably have no clue what to write after you’re done with that one.

The same goes for drawings, sculptures, songs, and other forms of art.

If you don’t put YOUR SELF into the art that you are producing, then it just won’t sell.

Okay, I’ll make an exception. There may be a way it will sell, and that’s only if it’s so hideously grotesque that people wind up buying it out of shear curiosity, but I doubt they will enjoy it, and I doubt that they will “come back for more” if you produce something equally as horrid when you think you are creating something otherwise. There will always be people that will stop and view a train wreck after all.

Think about the names of people throughout history that when you hear their names you automatically know what you are getting from them. Sometimes even without having experienced any of their form of art. Stephen King, Picasso, Mozart, Svengali, Kenny G, Stan Lee, Asimov, and the list can go on and on. These people all remembered the key of………

***to read more of this passage you must own the book***

(The above is a brief excerpt from the forthcoming book “GRO$$ OUT!! – Effective Marketing For Getting Your Next $144,000” and is in an early draft stage and may not reflect the exact wording of the book once it’s in print)

If you are finding this blog to be of benefit to you, please feel free to subscribe to it and tell others about it. Thanks in advance for following and for spreading the word!

Excerpt: Chapter 1: Have A Product > “Basic” Art > Paperwork: Drawings & Paintings =====>
<===== Excerpt: Chapter 1: Have A Product

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With art there are many types of product expressions available. Books, drawings, songs, sculptures, costumes and many other notions come to mind when thinking about the products in art. If you’ve purchased this book, or were given it, and you are reading it now, then chances are you are an artist of some kind and you either want to have a product or you already have a product and you want to get it in the hands of the consumer.

Once you realize what the product expression is that you want to produce or already have available or are currently working on, you need to know all you can about it. You need to talk with those that have a similar product, you need to look at all different types of that product, you need to practice with the product and show your practice off to people that can help you get better at it – and then accept their advice as long as it does not completely compromise what you are seeking to convey with your product.

And by the way, if you keep getting the same advice from one person after another and you keep thinking that they are trying to completely compromise what you are seeking to convey with your product, you have one of two problems. Either one, you haven’t bothered to ask the right questions of them when they gave you the advice to find out what they meant or why they said it and therefore probably have shut off being able to really learn from them, or two, you probably weren’t talking with the right people to begin with.

So, first thing to make sure that you don’t either go forth with a flawed product because of thinking everyone’s trying to completely compromise what you are seeking to convey and to also make sure that no one actually DOES completely compromise what you are seeking to convey by giving you bad advice, let me give a suggestion.

Make sure you are talking with experts that are knowledgeable with what you are doing. Typically this is people that have gone before you and have done the same thing. Not all the time, but most of the time. In either case, they have worked extensively in the field you’re in through one capacity or another.

The second thing is to ask the person who has given you advice questions. “How did you arrive at that conclusion?” “What do you mean that this way is wrong?” “Where should I go if I’m heading the wrong direction?” These and many other thought out questions based on the advice you are given will work wonders in your growth as an artist. And when you ask the questions to them, be sure to shut up and listen. They may not always be 100% accurate in what they have to say about YOUR project, but what they have to say is valuable, so keep your mouth CLOSED and use your ears. God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason. Use them proportionately.

So let’s now talk about the most important product you have available RIGHT NOW!! This is a product you have available even BEFORE you ever put pen to paper or fingers on the keyboard or knife to a block of wood or wax. This is the product that every person………

***to read more of this passage you must own the book***

(The above is a brief excerpt from the forthcoming book “GRO$$ OUT!! – Effective Marketing For Getting Your Next $144,000” and is in an early draft stage and may not reflect the exact wording of the book once it’s in print)

If you are finding this blog to be of benefit to you, please feel free to subscribe to it and tell others about it. Thanks in advance for following and for spreading the word!

Excerpt: Chapter 1: Have A Product > Your Self > You Must Start With Your Self =====>
<===== Excerpt: Introduction > How? > How Much Do You Really Want To Make With This?

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How much do you make right now? $15,000? $25,000? $35,000? $50,000? And is that amount satisfactory to you? Is it just a matter of replacing what you’re making now? Or are you seeking to make more? If you’re seeking to make more, then how much more are you seeking to make?

The subtitle of this book includes the figure of $144,000. Honestly, depending on how you work the information found in this book with just one product, you could make more or less. The figure of $144,000 is there to give you an idea – sort of a ball park figure of what’s available, and because it’s an obtainable number for most people to grab hold of and feel they can reach. Really, if you do everything you read in this book and truly work it, you have the possibility of making even more than that. It’s up to you and how much you really want to shoot for.

I do believe that it’s possible for anyone that has a product to be sold to be able to make at least $144,000 off of one product. There’s no reason this cannot happen if one does the right things the right way. Naturally, if you do the wrong things, or the right things the wrong way, you cannot expect this kind of result. Also, if you do the right things the right way there are also ways to speed up the process so that it happens much faster than it would otherwise.

Do ask yourself how much you really want to make because it is important to have that goal to shoot for. And depending on how high you want to shoot for, you may not make it the first go round. Let’s say you want to make $1,000,000 right out the gate with your product. Yet, the reality winds up being more toward the $144,000 I mentioned earlier. Or maybe even less than that. Does that mean you’ve failed? No. You just need more………

***to read more of this passage you must own the book***

(The above is a brief excerpt from the forthcoming book “GRO$$ OUT!! – Effective Marketing For Getting Your Next $144,000” and is in an early draft stage and may not reflect the exact wording of the book once it’s in print)

If you are finding this blog to be of benefit to you, please feel free to subscribe to it and tell others about it. Thanks in advance for following and for spreading the word!

Excerpt: Chapter 1: Have A Product =====>
<===== Excerpt: Introduction > Why? > Why Are You Going To Succeed?

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Sometimes we look at successful people and we ascribe some reason or reasons for their success, and we do that because we aren’t there ourselves and we are in the long run just guessing at why they succeeded rather than actually giving an answer based on accurate information on what their why was.

Some of these reasons we give are:

- they were lucky (implied: “I’m not lucky”)
- they had a good agent (implied: “I don’t have a good agent”)
- they were in all the stores (implied: “I’m not in all the stores therefore that matters”)
- the stores they were in shelved more of their stuff than they did other people’s (implied: “they didn’t shelve mine that much”)
- they had expensive ads out (implied: “I can’t afford ads like that”)
- they’ve been selling for years, so they naturally became a success because of how much they have out there (implied: “I don’t have that much out right now” or “I’m struggling just to get my first item put out there”)
- they really learned their craft and went to school for it (implied: “I didn’t do that therefore I can never succeed on their level”)
- they had a great expensive fashion designer to make them look good on their promotional material (implied: “I can’t afford a fashion designer so my picture sucks”)
- and so on, and so forth

Do you see how petty the excuses for our own failure can become when we are looking at the success of someone else and allow jealousy and envy to take over instead of taking up the responsibility we need to have in order to create our own success story?

All of these might be true for the situation of the person of success that one is looking at. And maybe some aren’t true, and some are more vanity guessing just because they succeeded where the critic didn’t – again with some being so petty. Yet all of these are things that more or less happened AFTER the real why was answered.

Why they succeeded was decided by them before they had an agent, before they had a contract, before they had their product all over the place, before ads were drawn up, probably even before they had a product, and even before they went to school if they went to school to learn their craft. I’m talking about………

***to read more of this passage you must own the book***

(The above is a brief excerpt from the forthcoming book “GRO$$ OUT!! – Effective Marketing For Getting Your Next $144,000” and is in an early draft stage and may not reflect the exact wording of the book once it’s in print)

If you are finding this blog to be of benefit to you, please feel free to subscribe to it and tell others about it. Thanks in advance for following and for spreading the word!

Excerpt: Introduction > How? > How Much Do You Really Want To Make With This? =====>
<===== Excerpt: Introduction > Where? > Where Will Your Product Be Sold?