First, a story.

Once upon a time, I figured everybody who might ever want to read SEO School had already read it (yes, you can laugh your ass off at me, it’s fine) and decided to take it off the shelves. I try to remember what I was feeling at the time – my real reasons – and I can’t.

(I was accused of doing it to make sales, but that wasn’t really it. I knew I’d sell a few more copies from the Oh My God They’re Going To Take It Away crowd, sure, but, what? Ten? I’m not going to potentially ruin my professional reputation to sell ten copies of an ebook.) I suppose I was doing it because SEO School wasn’t who I was. I wrote it to solve a problem – I was totally broke – and when the problem was solved, I guess I was done with it.

Then I was lynched in the virtual streets (read The One Where I Get Accused Of Rape for a fairly hilarious read) and I put it back, silently swearing to never do THAT again. Yowza.

Sometimes, though, your feelings matter more than the court of public opinion.

I was going to do some kind of launch or sale or something in July because, well, we always do. It made sense for that product to be Summer Camp. Every time I went to write the copy, though, I couldn’t pull the trigger. I sat down in front of the computer and quite literally hyperventilated. I tried writing by hand – a common solution for me – and that didn’t work either.

I simply couldn’t do it.

I talked to my power people, the ones who should receive a monthly stipend simply for putting up with me, and let it wander around in my subconscious for a while. What the hell was my problem?

After a few weeks of total blankness, I understood. July and August 2009 were the worst months of my life. (The phone booth post and the Barney’s coup d’etat post for a day in the life) and I had no home and no plan and I had just left England for all the wrong reasons. The pain of missing my mother was so intense that I finally understood people who hurt themselves physically to divert their attention from their mental pain. I’d had to leave my dream home and my youngest son was sick and my oldest son only wanted Jamie and I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do next.

I had promised I would teach a class (Summer Camp) and I taught it. I’m told it was good. We got a lot of new customers from it – several people got their businesses off the ground as a result of the class, so they went on to buy the more advanced stuff – and a lot of great feedback. But I couldn’t ever be objective about it because the surrounding life stuff was too much. I recorded that class hiding in Jamie’s best friend’s basement while Jamie tried to keep Jack and Michael occupied elsewhere, in mind crushing heat and with no home. Not a good time for me.

The point is, I don’t care what my many critics say. I don’t want to remember that summer, and Summer Camp is a part of that, so I’m getting rid of it. I have thankfully reached the point in my career when I can decide what I want to do based on what *I* want to do, and not on what some blogger somewhere will say about it.

At the same time, I know there are a lot of people who wanted the class, and I do feel bad about that. Not bad enough to have a constant reminder of the summer from hell sitting around staring at me from my store, but bad.

Where I tell you about the 3 for 1 sale

Summer Camp is out of the stores as of Friday. For its last week, I’m combining it with Marketing 101, which is the next reasonable step after Summer Camp. (As far as I can remember, Marketing 101 also comes with the Marketing School ebook because we never got around to taking it out.) So if you buy Summer Camp this week, you can have Marketing 101 and Marketing School for free.

Basically, you get 450 bucks worth of stuff for 197. Details and full product descriptions are here.

As always, if you’re having a total freakout and don’t have the money right now, email the ninjas (ninjas@ittybiz.com) and they’ll sort you out with a payment plan or you can pay next week or something. (It’d be better for me if your suggested payment plan doesn’t include 20 payments because I don’t really want an inbox full of “Summer Camp” emails for the next six months, but if you gotta do it, you gotta do it. I’ll live.)

There’s no limit on number of copies but if I end up paying more in ninja wages for admin than I get from the sale, I’ll pull it early. Not likely, but possible. So if you do really want this, you may want to do it now.

Wait! The Sample!

This is a sample of Day Three, Part One (each day has four parts). We’re talking about talent, how Charlie Gilkey gets his rocks off, how business is like hockey, how the whole “4 out of 5 businesses fail in the first five years” is a dirty, filthy lie, and the only real reason a business can fail. Oh, and don’t skip the intro and the outro. You’ll understand when you hear it.

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See? I told you the outro was awesome.