The first galleys of my next book, “Talking To Animals” arrived today, it will be published in May of 2017.

Now you can pre-order “Talking To Animals: How You Can Understand Animals And They Can Understand You,” from Simon and Schuster. If you order the book through Battenkill Books, my local independent bookstore, I will sign and personalize it for you, and we will send back a gift – a Tote-bag, picture post-card, even in some cases, a potholder. Free stuff.

In publishing we call it inducements. The Darwinian rules of modern publishing today are this: the writer writes the book, hires his own editor, does his own marketing. The publisher prints the book and ships it out. I’m in.

It’s between me and you, and my primary marketing tool is my  blog and posts on Facebook. I think that will really work for me, and I love comebacks, challenges and independence. My blog is my savior as a writer, in many ways. I am an eager to explore the new world of the writer.  It is my life to live and make meaningful, I accept responsibility for my fate.

This, I think, is an interesting book. Eighty years ago, author and naturalist Henry Beston issued an important call in his much-loved book Outermost House for a more intuitive and mystical understanding of animals. His book helped spawn the animal rights and rescue movements, but in many important ways, his plea has yet to be answered.

I hope to help address that in Talking To Animals.

As animals vanish from our world, we need to understand them and their needs more and more, yet we seem to understand them less and less.

“Saving animals does not mean taking them away from people,” I write in the book, “forcing them out of work, and out of cities and suburbs and towns. It means just the opposite: it means finding work for them everywhere we can and as often as we can…Every animal banned or banished is another drop of blood for mother earth and for the idea of the great partnership between people and animals that has existed for all of human history.”

The book chronicles my 15 years of learning to communicate with animals – dogs, donkeys, barn cats, even sheep – using food, visualization,  body language and active listening. I begin with my first dog Lucky, continue through to the New York Carriage Horse controversy and Red and Fate.

To understand animals is to know what they really need, not what we think they ought to need. I detail how I realized that the New York Carriage Horses were not being mistreated, but were well cared for and exactly where they ought to be.

I illustrate my ideas about communicating through the animals I have lived with for more than a decade. I describe how I have kept my dogs and cats away from roads and understood that a struggle ewe was not dying but giving birth to twins. I describe the impact of animals on my life and work.

If you wish to pre-order this book – I think it is, in many ways my most important – you can do so through Battenkill Books. They take Paypal and most credit cards, they ship anywhere else in the world, and they are nice as Hell. Connie Brooks has defied conventional wisdom by starting a beautiful bookstore in a small upstate New  York town and making it work.

You can help her and me and hopefully you animals by ordering this book through Battenkill. This one is important, I believe the future survival of animals depends on our understanding them in Beston’s new and more mystical way, not emotionalizing them and driving them to extinction.

For this book, there are no fancy and expensive book tours, no elaborate publicity campaign. This is it, and I am excited about it.

Your animals will thank you, and I will thank you and you will get a gift in return. Check it out.