Yesterday's surprise posting of our book on a large internet retailer (I will henceforth refer to as Rubicon.com) was fun. My scurry to learn how to become a Rubicon affiliate to promote the book was kind of a fun challenge, albeit a total urgent distraction. It's not like I am going to get rich off of Rubicon's commision rates for referrals, but I really look forward to getting the daily data back on how many sales my book is getting. So imagine my surprise when I get an email tonight from Rubicon telling me my application to become an affiliate had been denied but giving no reason. They were nice enough to include a link to their Affiliate Operating Agreement for my reference. I never never never click on links from emails I am not expecting. But I was so surprised, I did. Good news is that it did take me to the Rubicon Affilate Operating Agreement at a legitimate Rubicon URL. But then I realized I broke my rule of never clicking on a URL from an unexpected email. I went back to the email and, being the newly minted professional writer that I am, noticed that it said "weve" when they meant "we've" and "youll" when they meant "you'll". Seemed kind of phishy for me for a multi-billion dollar corporation to not be 100% buttoned up in their English usage. (As I write this, I am pretty sure I should have put the period inside the parentheses mark and should have used 'percent' instead of '%', but Strunk and White don't rule me!) I freaked out a bit. Should I change every password on every financial site I have on every computer, alive and completely dead, in my house right now? Should I put this one in the microwave? Should I move to Paraguay and change my name? I collected my thoughts and did the right thing when you feel like you might have just exposed yourself to a high tech attack ... get very low tech. I looked up Rubicon's phone number for their Affilate program and called them. I was surprised to get throught to a human pretty quickly. (I'll call him Julius, as I completely forgot his name already). I asked Julius if Rubicon really sent that email. He read it back to me and said it was from them, so I pulled my laptop out of the microwave and exhaled. Getting turned down to be a Rubicon affiliate is a much better problem to deal with than figuring out what to pack for a new life in Paraguay. I'm on that and I like my chances to get that fixed, since I used to manage affiliate marketing for a big company myself way back in the day when it was kind of cool. My larger point in telling this story is to give an example of why I titled this blog entry the way I did. If you want to be an author, there is a LOT more stuff outside of actually writing the great American novel/leadership book/cookbook that you have to do. You are crossing a bright line between being a private person to a public figure. (What was the name of the river Julius Caeser famously decided to cross?) I have had to think about things in the last few weeks that I never even knew existed (e.g., hacker insurance, speaker bureaus). I haven't found any of it to be particularly impossible, but it is surprising... and it is work. Tonight's story was just one small example of many sure to come.