ConsciousCafe is delighted to present our popular publishing workshop for the third year with a panel of knowledgeable experts. We will be offering you the opportunity to find out how the industry works and what you need to do to find the right publishing house for your book.
Have you ever wanted to write a book? Or perhaps you have already started? But do you know how to go about getting your work published when you have written it? Or better, do you know how to find a publisher who will give you a contract and an advance payment before you have written it?
The publishing industry is sophisticated and complex and there is much that you need to know in order to get your book out there so that it finds its way to the right readers.
Should you look for a traditional publisher – and which publishing house would be the right one? Do you need an agent? How do you approach a publisher or an agent? What do they want to see from you?
Do you want to spend the time offering your work to different companies and wait for them to reply? Or would you rather control the whole process and publish your work yourself? If so, how do you go about it – and what will it cost?
And what is the most important thing that publishers want to know before they make you an offer?
Come and find out the secrets of the publishing industry from our panel of experts. Whether you want to write non-fiction or novels, we will be able to encourage and help you to find the right approach for your work.
Date: Monday 8th April
Time: 6.30 pm – 8.30 pm
Location: Steiner House, 35 Park Road, London NW1 6XT (1 minute from Baker Street station)
Nick Williams will be advising on and sharing his experience of self-publishing.
Nick had a successful corporate career in sales and marketing. In 1989 he resigned to follow his own calling. He is the author of 15 books, many of them self-published and has spent over 20 years as a coach, workshop leader and keynote speaker on inspired leadership.
Fiona Robertson is a commissioning editor at Watkins Publishing, with 20 years' experience working on a wide range of non-fiction. The books she currently acquires span a broad well-being field, from personal development and alternative parenting to mindfulness and eastern wisdom.
Katie Read founded her company, READ Media in 2007 and specialises in non-fiction and illustrated titles. The company leads traditional book PR campaigns with the aim of reaching target audiences via extract, reviews, features and interviews across a variety of media including, print, broadcast, social and digital.
In addition, she and her team work to raise and manage an author’s profile within their specialist area long after their publication date by looking for further opportunities for favourable coverage, such as expert comment and articles, and by putting authors forward for paid speaking engagements, literary festivals, conferences and events.
We are enhancing this event with a networking opportunity in a café nearby. We will meet at 4.30 pm and you will have the chance for a networking conversation with Conscious Cafe people. We will also go out together after the event for a drink or a snack so that we can continue the conversation afterwards. Please email judy@consciouscafe.org if you would like to come to the early networking event and we will let you know where we are meeting.
Cancellation Policy Full refund minus 10% up to 7 days beforehand (Monday 1st April) after which we apologise, but cannot offer any refund due to room hire and administration costs.
Image by © Condé Nast Archive/Corbis
ConsciousCafe London met for their first 2019 gathering to enjoy a discussion on the topic of Expectations versus Reality.As soon as we began to explore the subject, it became obvious that expectations versus reality touches every aspect of our lives several times throughout each day.
We have expectations of others and expectations of ourselves. Sometimes we are much harder on ourselves if we fail to achieve our own expectations than we are on others who we feel have let us down.
We have expectations of how people will treat us - at home and at work - and few people are able to live up to our ideals. We have expectations of organisations, expectations of systems and expectations of technology. In our Western society we expect things to work. When systems fail us - as happens frequently - we often struggle with disappointment and frustration.
In Western society we have little tolerance for systems not working. If we lived in a more fragile society, we would not know what to expect on a daily basis. We also don't know what our expectations of the future of the planet might or should be. Our expectations are infinite and our knowledge very limited.
Our solutions to the problem of expectations versus reality included expressing gratitude for everything we have, focusing on what we receive from others that makes us happy rather than what makes us unhappy and doing our best to live in the present moment so that we are not constantly focusing on our expectations of what will happen in the future.
The topic was very enriching and people shared generously of their feelings - both expectations, disappointments and positive outcomes.
Thank you Gita Shri Kumari for a beautiful and inspiring meditation to start the event. Thank you everyone who took part. I hope I have expressed your experience of the event but do please add comments if I missed anything out.
We look forward to seeing you again soon.
** If you haven't been to a ConsciousCafe discussion before, come and join us. Everyone present took part in the above discussion. We explored the topic in small groups and then came together to share. Our combined exploration resulted in much personal discovery. It was a great afternoon.
All of us are creative. At every moment we are creating the lives we want to live, the space we inhabit, the way we accomplish our work, how we relate to others.
These are some of the conclusions reached at our wonderful discussion on the topic of creativity at ConsciousCafe London this week. It was very special because when we came together and shared our thoughts we were able to access a deeper than usual part of ourselves and share it with others in what turned out to be a very rich and inspiring conscious dialogue.
For some people their passion for creativity is enjoyment of the actual process of creating, whether they do it collaboratively or alone. Some of us need people to witness our creativity for it to exist. Others are happy simply to create for their own pleasure. We may create material objects - art, sculpture, batik, rune stones – for the sheer joy of the experience and for others to enjoy. Or we might write our journals for our pleasure alone. Some people create conceptually - planning lessons, growing businesses, developing relationships. Not all creativity results in anything tangible.
All kinds of things may block our creativity – time for ourselves, space in which to create, willpower, responsibilities. Yet everything we do is an act of creativity – whether we think we are channelling our inspiration and ideas from some higher source or simply using the talents and skills that we were born with.
Our conversation seemed to leave all of us on a high. We had probed so deeply and shared from our hearts. The event had turned out to be one of the most exciting of ConsciousCafe conversations (and there have been hundreds of very good ones).
Thank you everyone for taking part. See you again soon.
JP
*The title of this piece is inspired by a line from the poem One Summer Day by Mary Oliver
ConsciousCafe is here to stay. Its our 6th Anniversary year and we have had amazing expansion in the last 12 months. New groups have opened in Canterbury, Dorchester, Geneva, Skipton and Bristol to add to the ones we already had in Oundle, New Forest, Bath and London. Now we are poised for more launches this autumn in Plymouth, Liverpool and SW London.
There was a lot to celebrate and our party was held in the main room with bar at The Lib-rary, a social club in St Martins Lane, near Charing Cross. There was a great atmosphere as people arrived and greeted old friends and were introduced to new people who they hadn’t met before.
True to ConsciousCafe style, we wanted to spend part of the evening in reflection. Thought-leader, author and international speaker Jude Jennison, who works with executive boards and leadership teams, is writing a book on coping with uncertainty and she presented us with several themes to reflect on in groups. What are the challenges of living and working with uncertainty? How do you remain grounded when you live with uncertainty? What strategies can you use to help?
Jude gave examples from her own life. It is important to be open to uncertainty as we never know what the future will hold for us. Six years ago she was afraid of horses. Now she partners with them daily and coaches teams of leaders to learn new skills. Horses give clear feedback and have no agenda and can therefore help people to gain more self-awareness and understanding as they see their own behaviour mirrored by the horses.
There was fantastic energy in the room as we shared our fears and our hopes. Uncertainly has always formed part of the human journey. It will always be with us. But it does seem magnified at the moment. Some people cope by enhancing their deep connections with the people they love; others want to spend more time in nature; some people turn to their spiritual practice. Gratitude also featured for when we appreciate all that we have been given, it can be easier to live in uncertain times.
The evening ended with more food and drink – we had an open bar which was included in the ticket price – so the drink kept flowing until the end of the evening when the tab ran out and it was time to leave the party. It gave us all a lovely feeling of abundance as we enjoyed the deep sense of connection with one another that ConsciousCafe offers.
Here’s to another year of success for ConsciousCafe as we all work together to raise awareness of the human need for love, connection and understanding both for ourselves and for our beautiful planet.
Judy Piatkus with grateful help from Dr Phyllis SantaMaria’s notes
3 July 2017
It was a beautiful English summer day when our eclectic ConsciousCafe group set off from Hampstead tube station for our first ‘Walk and Talk’ event on Hampstead Heath.
The Heath terrain is steep in parts and passes through ancient woodland areas with natural paths and wide green open spaces. Only a few of us had met before and we chatted with each other as we experienced the diverse natural pleasures of the Heath. We were on our way to Kenwood House, an elegant former stately home surrounded by a large estate with landscaped gardens. Its a great favourite with local people as well as with tourists.There’s something especially relaxing about meeting new people when you are out for a walk. Thoughtful enjoyable conversations were taking place between all of us and it didn’t feel as though we had only met each other just a short while before.
We wandered round the Kenwood grounds, admiring the lake and the views, before relaxing with a drink at the open-air café. It was such a fabulous day that most of us were not in the mood for exploring inside the house, preferring to save that pleasure for a second visit in a colder season.
Our route home took us past The Creamery, a small white building on a little hill near the main House which used to be the dairy for the estate. You can still see the equipment that was used at the time. The views from The Creamery of the fields, trees and estate are as natural now as they would have been two hundred years ago. No wonder it is such a popular location for film-makers of dramas, both historical and contemporary. Notting Hill had a scene shot here as did Belle and the new film, Hampstead, coming out soon, has some fantastic shots of the heath, Kenwood and surrounding area as it is based on a true story set in Hampstead.
We ended our visit with a look at Whitestone Pond, which some say is the highest point in London, before wending our way back down the hill towards Hampstead village. All of us agreed it had been an ideal day for the walk and we will have a lovely shared memory of the first ConsciousCafe event in nature.
Judy
ConsciousCafe FounderConsciousCafe’s London group were treated to a very inspiring evening at the end of January when Deborah Henley demonstrated how we can inspire ourselves and others by using our emotional intelligence and a variety of other techniques.
In a concise two hour presentation and interactive session Deborah offered so many inspiring ideas that soon all of us were firing on different cylinders. Each of us was invited to share a time when we had unexpectedly been inspired. Our combined experiences showed that a challenging event could often become the catalyst for a change in our lives that could inspire us to make our best decisions. I especially liked Margaret’s story of how she was inspired to change direction in her career when she found herself driving the wrong way round a one-way system.
Our emotional intelligence skills come into play when we consider ourselves in relation to others. We need to have an awareness of our own emotions and how we respond to different situations and we need the skills of self-managing our emotional state.
At the same time we need to be aware of other people’s emotions and to be able to tune into to how they are feeling or to what the atmosphere is in the culture we are working in e.g. if there are a lot of politics in a particular organisation. In relation to others our skills can be seen in the way we communicate our message, manage conflict and above all, in how we show up to inspire others with our presence.
Deborah shared a wide range of ideas and the group contributed thoughts and experiences. My favourite exercise was when we had the opportunity to imagine a future hypothetical personal dream had taken place. (Apparently this exercise is often used by hypnotherapists). I was inspired by a vision of the opening of a building, dedicated solely to ConsciousCafe where we could all meet up. I had a clear vision of what it would look like, how it would feel and how it would be used and I was able to communicate my enthusiasm and inspiration very easily to my partner. Now we just have to make it happen!
Many thanks once again to Deborah Henley for giving so generously of her time to present this event for us at ConsciousCafe. Deborah’s new website is under construction but you can find and follow her on @Deborahhenley
ConsciousCafe is a not-for-profit organisation, a friendly and welcoming community, a place to live life consciously.