Part 3 of How to Not Publish or Sell Your Book Well: A Failed Publisher’s Guide

Part III

After the failure with the artists I called it quits on the press. I called it quits on a lot of things then in October 2006. I curled up into myself, lived off unemployment, and finally settled into my mind enough to ask why I kept finding myself in the same unhappy situation, with so much wasted energy and self-sabotage. The answers flowed back to everything from my parents and their troubled relationship with jobs and money, to my own sense that what I really ought to be doing with my time is writing instead of promoting other people’s writing.

To kill the time, I applied to four PhDs. One at Stanford, Berkeley, UC Irvine, and U Washington. One by one, the rejection letters came in. By then rejection felt almost normal. You see, pain and rejection have followed me almost everywhere.

But they follow me because I actually try to do things, often new and difficult things.And the amount of benefit that my life has received from the events that happened in place of say, a guy that broke up with me, a school that rejected me, a person who snubbed me, a paper I got a C on…well, when you fail a lot you learn to not see life in terms of successes and failures. You start to look at what you learned, at how you grew, and to marvel at how little control you really have in the universe but how trying is, itself, the best way to live.

In February of 2007, I refashioned myself as a copywriter and started working at Project Management Institute. Yet another job that was heads above the previous and yet still torturous for me. My need to be perfect, my doubting of my abilities, taking on too much, giving away my power, to need to prove myself while avoiding confrontation has made these situations almost unbearable.

And yet, working is what people do, so I went into the office every day, happy to at least be writing for a living. I wrote eBlasts and flyers and learned how to work with designers and run a concept through creative review. I even did some designing myself. We sat at big white desks in a sunlit room and wore cute clothes. We were a hip marketing department, or so we wanted to believe. But the department was falling apart, two managers left, and the dark underneath started to show. The girl who was also a temp but was my sort of partner was definitely my opposite and I was facing one of my biggest issues: dealing with controlling women.

And, like the year before, I was clinging once again to the press to save me. The very same month that the press landed in my lap, my friend and former SGI leader Jackie finished her first draft of a novel called Dharma Rain. I picked up the manuscript from her and swung by a spacious coffee shop near Pittsford, NY. Resting on a divan, I read page after page, making notes here and there as if it were mine to edit. The story of a magician unfolded, a magician who had lost his sincerity and had grown lazy and arrogant and unconscious. In his malaise, a great evil had entered his house and began to cause havoc in the kingdom he was given to protect. The story held me. Sure, I could see where the pacing needed to be slowed down and the writing sharpened, but the point was I was reading a young adult novel about Buddhism, written by a dear friend, and I had the means to publish it. Or at least the idea of the means: the press.

I knew that I wasn’t ready at the time to publish Dharma Rain through Inconundrum or Phantom City- a sister press to Incon that I wanted to create to publish Buddhist fiction under. But I hoped that someday I would be.

The years passed and I sold a couple copies of 4×1 through amazon.com every month. And that’s it. For all the online marketing I have done for 4×1, blogging about it, creating a website, adding a cart to the website, designing a new site with IX Webhosting, (which has great templates but is terrible to work with when trying to actually customize your page) for all the hours spent fiddling with web pages and blogs and my attempts at design, I still only managed to sell a couple copies a month- and none through the website.

Now this is a good lesson for those of you interested in becoming publishers and determined to do it better then I, which won’t be hard, seeing as how I still have yet to actually publish anything. The truth about books is that you can only do so much online. You can talk to people about the book online, generate some interest, take up someone’s time, etc. but for the most part, I believe that people are more likely to buy books when they can physically pick them up.

Of course, amazon.com makes a killing, but I would guess that it’s from people who know what book they want to get and then pop over to amazon to get it. Books like 4×1 are marginal enough so that they aren’t really a go-to book. 4×1 is the kind of book you collect if you are obsessed with having everything Rilke wrote, or if you are a fan of Pierre Joris’ translation.

Rilke, alone, should have been a good selling point. But it wasn’t good enough. Not without a distributor, not without a book tour or even a book fair. Little opportunities come here and there, though. For example, Pierre is teaching a summer course at Naropa this year and he put 4×1 on the syllabus, bless his heart. This means we might sell 15 or 20 copies all at once. And that is very good, because, as I was about to get to before, in 2007, Jackie, the writer of Dharma Rain, offered her novel to me, to publish under Phantom City. I had created a beautiful website for PC and felt like it might the saving grace of all my lost efforts at Inconundrum.

In that moment, I felt that lightening of the soul, that transcendent innocence that returns to us when we are caught up in the magic of books. It is this luminosity that I believe initially leads a lot of people into the editing and publishing fields. And it is what we have to fight for. In the past three years I have I talked with Emil Steiner, Raquel Pidal, and other writers who are, at times, miserably disillusioned. Granted one was at a drunken New Year’s and another time was at 3 am over gchat, but I find myself returning to this again and again in myself: that childlike wonder that we can experience through reading a good book is worth the trouble of supporting and promoting the publication of new books. It is worth these two years of work and no book to show for it. It is worth learning every single thing the hard way, as it seems I have to.

But there is much that can go wrong along the way. A lot of people and forces that have to collude to make a book appear. When Jackie offered my Dharma Rain, I immediately brought Anders Hansen in as the book designer. He, in one night, created a breathtaking cover and front page design and even found the perfect font. It seemed like finally the people were there who could help and give their good energy to the project. I fretted a little about how to compensate these wonderful people. I still fret about it. I do tend to get caught up on the details. Something I am working on.

I sent my first draft of notes to Jackie. I was stressed at work and once again, heavy under the pressure of a life I didn’t want. When I didn’t hear back from her, I worried that I had said something too harsh, but before I knew it, the press was no longer on my mind. I quit yet another job and, like the year before, saw a relationship go down around the same time. Once again, the same voices asking why I didn’t just write, already. Why I kept skirting the issue of who I really was.

Maybe all this publishing business was bullshit and distracted me from my real work. When I still didn’t hear from Jackie, I figured she had gotten caught up in teaching and life or was just having trouble finding the motivation. I was so focused on my own life that I let it go. I took it as a sign that it wasn’t the time.

And to be honest, it wasn’t the time. I ended up leaving Philadelphia in November 2007 and traveling to Florida, where I thought I would stay with my parents for a month or two, do some freelance copyediting work, and then return to Philadelphia. I was not working, blogging, or concerning myself with the press. In fact, a deep resentment toward the press had resurfaced, first realized in 2006 when I was on unemployment for the first time. I resented all the work I had poured into it and how it stood before me, nothing.

I felt like a monkey could have done more than me. In real terms, the most effective thing I did the entire time was to send copies of 4×1 to amazon when they needed a refill. I got Robin’s bookstore, Garland of Letters, and even the Pittsford Borders to carry copies of 4×1. And getting the money from local bookstores has always been a hassle and requires multiple phone calls and letters.

What I find, more and more, is that there are so many little details to be aware of, to take care of, for every single thing you want to do for your press. And I had finally, at 29, come to a point where I had to cut my losses. I continued to ship copies of 4×1 to amazon when they wanted them, but that was it. I let that knot that I always held in my chest, that tension that I kept around the press and the ideas and dreams I had for it had to be let go.

And I became happier. I became clearer. I am a writer. And yet, I am also an euntrepreneur, a doer. I like big ideas, I love marketing online and promoting other people’s work. It is not so black and white. And when my hotmail account was phished and everyone on my contact list, included Jackie got a weird email asking them to join some terrible marketing plan, it was actually serendipity. Because it got Jackie and I back in touch. And what I found was that she had never received my email with the first round of editing revisions. Way back last summer she had never received it. And for some reason she hadn’t written to follow up, probably believing that I was having a hard time of things. I was having a hard time of things, but then again, I always was and that wouldn’t have kept me from trying to edit the book. Because, that’s what I do. I do my best to honor my commitments. And that is why I am so hell bent on being more thoughtful about what my commitments are these days.

Part IV