Eliezer Sobel is the author of The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist’s Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Consciousness-Raising Adventures, and winner of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel for Minyan: Ten Jewish Men in a World That is Heartbroken. He is also the author of Wild Heart Dancing, and was the Editor of The New Sun magazine and Publisher/Editor of the Wild Heart Journal. His articles and short stories have appeared in Tikkun Magazine, The Village Voice, Yoga Journal, Quest Magazine, and many other publications. Sobel has taught intensive creativity and meditation workshops and retreats at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and similar growth centers around the U.S. You can visit his website at www.eliezersobel.com.
Welcome to Beyond the Books, Eliezer. Can you tell us whether you are published for the first time or multi-published? Can you give us the title(s) of your book(s)?
Multi-published. My most recent book is a spiritual memoir, The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist’s Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Consciousness-Raising Adventures (Santa Monica Press).
I’ve also self-published a short-story in small book form, entitled “Mordecai’s Book,” winner of the 2003 New Millennium Writings’ first prize for fiction.
Before that, a few years ago, was Minyan: Ten Jewish Men in a World That is Heartbroken (University of Tennessee Press), which won the 2003 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel.
In 1994 I published Wild Heart Dancing: A Personal One-Day Quest to Liberate the Artist and Lover Within (Simon & Schuster/Fireside).
!979: The Manual of Good Luck (see below).
What was the name of your very first book regardless of whether it was published or not and, if not published, why?
Manual of Good Luck. It’s a long and funny story:
Towards the end of my tenure as Editor-in-Chief of The New Sun, a New York-based spiritual magazine that published monthly in the late 70s, I received a call from a man in Brooklyn looking for a writer. He sold mail-order how-to books that he published in his basement on an old press, and advertised through the classifieds in the National Enquirer. He had just run an ad, as a test, for a book that didn’t yet exist, and received thousands of orders. So he needed someone to write a book for him very quickly. I took it on.
The ad he ran said something like this:
“Change Your Luck Overnight: Send for Free Introductory Material!”
The free introductory material was a four-page leaflet that had also been produced previously in order to sell a product that did not yet exist. The leaflet declared that “This astounding information has been revealed by the Ancient Secrets of the Essenes. Don’t make a financial move until you’ve read it.” The name of the phantom book was, The Manual of Good Luck, for which thousands of people paid $17.95. They were all waiting to receive their book at about the same time I was hired to write it!
I was actually not at all well versed in the Ancient Secrets of the Essenes, so I dropped that idea, and to produce the manual, I sequestered myself in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in Woodstock, New York for seven days. I spent the first three days in writer’s agony, crumpling page after page. And then I hit on it: I would create the home-game version of the est training—the original and controversial crash consciousness course of that era, which I had experienced and thoroughly enjoyed, despite all the negative press it received. It took the form of a one-day, do-it-yourself workshop, where the reader was asked to literally take a full day away from their normal life, not answer the phone or see anyone else, and go through the whole book in one sitting, which took the form of a guided retreat.
As of 1987, the Manual of Good Luck had sold over 40,000 copies, and was still selling. I received only our agreed-upon flat fee of one thousand dollars. It never occurred to me to negotiate for a percentage. A thousand dollars seemed like a good deal to me then. It was an 8 1/2 x 11 workbook, so for fun, I ripped off the cover and submitted it as a manuscript to Spectrum Books, a division of Prentice Hall. They promptly sent me a contract. At which point I had to sheepishly confess that there was one slight hitch: I didn’t own the rights to my own manuscript. I attempted to negotiate with the Manual’s owner and publisher to buy back the copyright, but to no avail. I had to let it go. I thought about rewriting it enough to submit as a new work, and this eventually led, in 1994, to Wild Heart Dancing, an entirely different book, but which borrowed the take-a-day-off-from-your-life idea for a guided self-retreat.
A friend once calculated that the publisher of The Manual of Good Luck may well have made close to half a million dollars or more on my work, and she said that I had nothing to lose by writing him and simply requesting $25,000. So I did.
She was right: I lost nothing.
Interestingly, just a few years ago, out of the blue, a stranger tracked me down through e-mail, desperately trying to get hold of the Manual of Good Luck. It seems her daughter had discovered a copy of it in the Peace Corps library in Ethiopia, and it had changed her life. I sent her one of the six remaining copies that I kept in a box. Her relatives and friends soon bought up the rest.
I later discovered a pamphlet for sale on the internet called “Manual of Good Luck.“ Suspicious, I ordered it for $10, and sure enough, discovered my own words – including parts of my own life story – attributed to a name I didn’t recognize as my own. My work had been edited from the original 175 pages down to a flimsy, ten-page pamphlet. I successfully put the fear of God into the man responsible and he stopped selling it.
For your first published book, how many rejections did you go through before you either found a mainstream publisher, self-published it, or paid a vanity press to publish it?
After the above story, I got lucky on my second book: for Wild Heart Dancing, I managed to get a great agent through a friend, and within two weeks he had a bidding war going between Simon & Schuster, Bantam and St. Martin’s Press! I was ecstatic, naturally. Simon & Schuster won, and offered me a very substantial advance for an unknown author ($26K) and promised all sorts of PR. Unfortunately, within a month or two after signing the contract, the editor who had made the purchase left Simon & Schuster, as did her assistant, and there was literally nobody left in that huge company who knew me or my book, and it became merely another contractual obligation for them to fulfill, and they published it without fanfare, PR and or any support whatsoever. It was very disappointing.
How did the rejections make you feel and what did you do to overcome the blows?
Learning to deal with rejections really happened with my novel, Minyan. I accumulated a fairly large pile of rejections from publishers and agents over the course of 15 years—well over 30, most of them impersonal form letters. My favorite came from a fairly big-time Hollywood agent, who was looking at Minyan as a possible film. She read the first chapter and wrote me a very enthusiastic note, saying she “Loved it!!” (with two exclamation points) and emphasizing that she was someone involved in “Very big projects in the movie industry!” so naturally I got very excited and hopeful. Her note also informed me that she was leaving for a vacation in Greece, and would take my manuscript with her to finish reading. A few weeks later I received a generic white postcard in the mail—not even a picture on the front—with a short, scrawled message from her that said, “I’m afraid I cannot use this material, and since I am traveling, I am discarding the manuscript here.” I imagined the pages of my novel floating in the Aegean Sea, my characters flailing and thrashing about.
How did I deal with all the rejection?
Often I would give up in despair, shove the manuscript in a drawer, and vow never to write anything again. Then after a year had gone by, I would take it out, re-write it for the umpteenth time, and start the query process all over again. I actually did stop writing for a long time, because unlike J.D. Salinger, if I wasn’t going to get published and read, I had no interest in continuing to write. So I sort of went on strike until I finally got Minyan out there.
When your first book was published, who published it and why did you choose them?
I’ve answered this about Manual of Good Luck and Wild Heart Dancing. Minyan was published by The University of Tennessee Press because they were joint sponsors of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, a literary contest I discovered in the back of Poets & Writers Magazine. I entered and won, and the prize was $1000 and getting published by the UT Press. For my current book, The 99th Monkey, I again had to endure about five years worth of rejections from agents and publishers before I finally managed to place it with Santa Monica Press. One publisher held on to the manuscript for a full year, telling me every few months that “We really like it, but we’re still on the fence, we need more time.” After a year I couldn’t bear it any longer, and demanded a decision. They chose not to publish it, saying, “We decided that the central character’s story just doesn’t hang together.” I hung up the phone and actually couldn’t help laughing. This was a memoir, it was autobiographical. I was the central character! So I’ve had to live with the fact that my story doesn’t hang together.
How did it make you feel to become published for the first time and how did you celebrate?
For Manual of Good Luck, my girlfriend and I went to the publisher’s house in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where he printed the books in his basement, proudly picked up a copy, and then we took a walk on the beach and had an egg cream.
What was the first thing you did for promotion when you were published for the first time?
Absolutely nothing, I’m sorry to say. With Wild Heart Dancing, when it slowly began to sink in that I was not getting any support from Simon & Schuster, and that my book would die a slow death, I sprang into action and tried to help it along myself, but I didn’t do nearly enough: I printed up postcards and flyers, did a handful of appearances—perhaps 4!—took out a few ads. I didn’t do much better with Minyan. Self-promoting is really not my personality style, but for my current book, The 99th Monkey, I’m forcing myself to do whatever I can, because I just can’t let yet another book disappear without a fight.
If you had to do it over again, would you have chosen another route to be published?
Obviously I never should have taken a flat fee for Manual of Good Luck, instead of negotiating for a percentage. As for Wild Heart Dancing, I couldn’t have known that a big publisher and a big advance would turn out the way it did. After 15 years or more of rejections for Minyan, I’m just grateful it got published. And I’m very happy with Santa Monica Press, who published my current book, The 99th Monkey, because I finally have a personal relationship with a publisher who is a kindred spirit.
Have you been published since then and how have you grown as an author?
Well hopefully I’ve grown as a person, and that is reflected in what I write.
Looking back since the early days when you were trying to get published, what do you think you could have done differently to speed things up? What kind of mistakes could you have avoided?
I published my first short stories in literary journals when I was about 22, and also got a film review into the Village Voice at that time. So you’d think that would have encouraged me to continue, but the fact is I have been very erratic and undisciplined as a writer, often literally going months, or even years, without writing a thing. Of course, as The 99th Monkey explains, I was dealing with chronic depression most of my life, and that was a major factor. Also, writing is only one part of my life and identity. There are many things I like to do that require time and attention, including being a musician, retreat leader, and amateur painter, so despite the books and all the published articles, I don’t actually go around thinking “I’m a writer” except when I’m actually engaged in a writing project. It’s a very Zen point of view: I’m a writer when writing. Most “real” writers would probably say this attitude is a mistake, and would recommend a far more one-pointed focus on the craft, and the discipline of daily output. But that just doesn’t seem to be my way. I write when I have something to communicate.
What has been the biggest accomplishment you have achieved since becoming published?
Getting married for the first time at 47, and being together for 12 years now.
If you could have chosen another profession, what would that profession be?
A rock and roll musician or film actor.
Would you give up being an author for that profession or have you combined the best of both worlds?
I would have given up being an author if I could have toured with the Beatles, or even the Moody Blues. Or played opposite Scarlet Johansson in a steamy R-rated love story.
How do you see yourself in ten years?
Hopefully, I see myself as 66!
Any final words for writers who dream of being published one day?
Yes: just like it’s hard to convince someone who has never had a car or money that cars and money won’t really make them happy, it’s also difficult to tell someone who dreams of getting published that that too will not make them happy. It’s a temporary rush of good feeling, but in my experience, it wears off pretty soon and you need to go back to being your ordinary day-to-day self, for better or worse, so it’s important to cultivate a happy and satisfying life independent of whether or not you ever publish. I had one friend whose books held the numbers one and two slots on the NY TIMES non-fiction bestseller list at the same time, and he told me it happened to coincide with one of the most miserable periods of his life, emotionally. There was no correlation between his publishing success and his personal well-being.
The other sobering reality to face is that after you DO get published, you discover that there are literally hundreds of thousands of new titles released in the U.S. every year, and yours is likely to disappear into oblivion rather rapidly, unless you make Herculean efforts to promote it yourself.
