Month: July 2026

Does It Even Make Sense to Publish a Fourth Book?

On By benebellIn book writing, personal26 Comments

I was cleaning through old computer files when I came across these two photos, 10 years apart. The 2015 photo is from my very first Barnes & Noble author event and the first time anyone ever asked me to sign a copy of my book. It was wild. What does one even write when autographing a book. And since I use a pen name, I couldn’t even get my own (new) signature right. The 2025 photo just happens to be a similar snapshot of me signing books, which I thought made for a nice “then and now” side by side. Like, holy cow, I’ve been doing this for 10+ years.

This is going to be a ruminating, reflective sequel to an old post I wrote right after finishing I Ching, The Oracle: “Author’s Thoughts After Three Books.” Reading that before this post will provide background context. For anyone interested in yet another layer of subtext, there’s this old video and companion write-up: “To the New Pagan Author.”

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The Holistic Tarot Rewrite for Audiobook Format

On By benebellIn book writing, Holistic Tarot (book), personal4 Comments

Phew! I finally finished by re-write of Holistic Tarot for the audiobook version! Earlier this year I shared here that I was doing an abridged and revised, updated version of my inaugural 2015 book, Holistic Tarot to be narrated as an audiobook.

I think it’s funny how writing 250,000 words back in 2012 took me one Thanksgiving holiday break to complete (not really, it’s a bit more complicated and nuanced than that), whereas editing it into a 78,000 word book took me the greater part of a whole year.

Though again, that’s reductive and not really an accurate representation. What I actually did that Thanksgiving 2012 was spend a week assembling a binder of old tarot journal notes gathered over 20 years and stitched it into a tarot fundamentals book by working on it obsessively every single minute, day to night, pulling all-nighters, for seven days straight, no breaks.

Whereas this revised, shortened version was me working on it a few hours at a time, here and there, bit by bit, and going weeks without touching it at all.

For the audiobook, I had to reduce the word count from 250K to a contractually bound “50,000 – 70,000 words and will not exceed 85,000 words.”

Some major reconstructive surgery later, this version is now — get this — 7 chapters (a septenary), featuring 21 guided tarot exercises listed in the table of contents, but actually 22 total exercises– one of them is not explicitly labeled as “Exercise #__” but precedes Exercise #21, immediately following Exercise #20. =) Just a little RWS Pictorial Key easter egg.

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