Cagy old trend-spotter that I am, I’ve spotted a trend over the past month or two. Affirmations for Writers, a tape I made way back when cassettes were the Next Big Thing, and now available exclusively in LB’s eBay Bookstore as an MP3 download, has been picking up steady sales. I haven’t been talking it up here or in the newsletter, haven’t been tweeting and facebooking madly about it as is my wont, but orders have been trickling in just the same. And they don’t seem to run to a pattern. I had an order a week or so ago from a woman in Estonia. Isn’t that something? I’ve been to Estonia, I like Estonia, I even have a necktie that shows the Tallinn skyline—but I never expected to sell an MP3 download there.

Well, if y’all are determined to buy Affirmations for Writers even in the absence of a campaign for it, the least I can do is put my shoulder to the virtual wheel and tell you something about it. Or—I know!—the first I’ll do is show you a picture:

What you’re looking at is the case the cassette came in, back in the day, because how do you show a picture of an MP3 download? Well, it’s a picture, anyway. But I’m not sure it’s worth a thousand words.

So let’s move on. What you get when you download Affirmations for Writers, in Tehachapi or Taichung or Tallinn, wherever you happen to be, is an audio file designed for repeated listening, upon which you’ll hear me intoning a positive thought four times, twice in the first person and twice in the second, like so: “I gain whenever another writer succeeds. I gain whenever another writer succeeds. You gain whenever another writer succeeds. You gain whenever another writer succeeds.”

And so on.

What’s the point? Well, it’s not to increase your store of information on the subject. I’m not sending any new data your way here. The underlying principle, which is the core of my seminar-in-book-form called Write For Your Life, is that unconscious negative thoughts are what make you get in your own way, over and over and over; if you can change the thoughts, perhaps the behavior and the results will change accordingly. Thus the tape is designed to be listened to many times, and the process is rendered pleasant by the musical track, written and performed by keyboard artist Jeremy Wall, a founding member of Spyro Gyra.

I wouldn’t try to argue that everyone will find Affirmations for Writers useful. For one thing, it only works if you listen to it; for another, a sufficiently opaque mind can shut out anything. There’s a lot more you can do with affirmations as well, including a pencil-and-paper process I find especially efficacious; there’s material on the subject in Spider, Spin Me a Web, and a good deal more in Write For Your Life.

The MP3 file of Affirmations for Writers is available only in LB’s eBay Bookstore. The price is $9.99, and delivery is free. Absolutely free delivery anywhere in the world, in Turin or Topeka or Tegucigalpa. Will it put you on the bestseller list? Well, probably not. But what could it hurt?

LB