March 2, 2007

Yesterday I crashed.

Over the past month I've been pushing myself very hard, trying to make as much progress as I can on both the book and my business, the HR Forums. And of course there's the rest of my life that I try to stay present for and current with, things like my marriage, friends, spiritual community and family.

Do you ever get caught in an updraft of activity where something's very important, you're excited, you jump in all the way, the adrenaline is flowing, and you feel -- wow, this is great, I'm really making stuff happen!!? That's how I've felt the last couple of weeks. The thing is, it's extreme, it's unsustainable. It's like a speculative frenzy in the stock market, it can only go so far, until one day some bad news arrives that triggers the crash.

My bad news yesterday was an email from the Levine Greenberg Literary Agency. It was a form note, boilerplate, sent by Jim Greenberg's assistant:

Dear Author:

Thank you very much for your query. However, at this time we don’t feel that our agency could represent this work successfully.

Remember that this is a very subjective business, and we wish you the best of luck on your quest for publication. Please feel free to send us any additional projects you may have in the future.

I checked on the web site for who wrote this. She's about 25 years old and "loves all things related to feminism, beads, and black licorice."

It's not like I'm not expecting rejection notes. In fact, I've half seriously set myself a goal of collecting at least 100. I ought to collect them all and post them on my web site. But when I read this, I just crashed. It's like someone turned off a switch inside me. I became like a zombie, totally disfunctional, complete depression. I had a meeting I was supposed to be at, but I didn't go. Instead I took a walk near the beach, looked out at the skyful of stormy clouds reflecting the sunset colors, and let my mind spin like a giant flock of seagulls in crazy circles.

Holy Beggars is the story of 40 years of my life, the lives of dear friends, and I believe an important chapter of both Jewish history and spirituality in America. It's about the heart and soul of my journey in this world. Up until now, having a manuscript and working to get it published has beeh fun, like a game that's challenging, but where you know there's a happy ending.

Now the game has become rough. What if no one wants to represent the book, and no one wants to publish it, and no one wants to read it? I've never had this thought before.

Do I really have the toughness and faith to keep believing, to keep going forward, to stay joyful and positive no matter what?

March 1, 2007

As of this morning I still hadn't heard back from the Levine Greenberg Literary Agency, after contacting them a month ago via their web site with my book proposal formatted according to their specifications, and following up by phone and email two weeks ago. So I decided to phone them again.

On the web site it says not to try to reach a particular agent. So when I got the voice mail tree for their system, I chose "general mailbox." The message there had a cheerful woman's voice which said:

Our office is closed for the holidays. We will be returning on January 2. Happy Holidays!

Okay, I thought, time to break the rules. I called again and managed to get through to one of the principals, Jim Levine. I could tell he was busy and in the middle of stuff, somewhere up there on the 27th floor in his office on 7th Avenue in Manhattan.

"Sorry to interrupt you," I said, "but I got the impression that no one was paying attention to your voicemail box." He was very appologetic and said that if I re-sent everything to him, he would route it to someone in his agency, and make sure they got back to me next week. That commitment, which sounded sincere, actually made me feel a lot better.

My thinking and language in the book proposal keeps evolving, and the version I had sent a month ago looked sadly out of date. So first I spent an hour revising and polishing the proposal; then I sent it.

As a former New Yorker and current citizen of the San Francisco Bay Area, I'm always paying attention to how much California sunshine I want to use in a situation, and how much New York elbows. Today's lesson -- lead with California sunshine, try to treat everyone with respect the way they want to be treated. But when you're not getting their attention, consider breaking the rules.

February 26, 2007

I got a another rejection note yesterday, by email, from yet another literary agent. It came while Wendy and I were watching the Oscars. Ellen DeGeneres was talking on the the screen about honoring all the nominees, not just the winners. Then she made a bunch of jokes about pretending it wasn't all about winning, when it really was. The note I received said:

Thank you so much for contacting me. I read through your website and I think you have a very valid book. I'm just afraid that I don't think I can be helpful. I think that this is a book that will probably work best and be of most interest to a smaller house and that simply isn't my area of expertise.

I wish you the best,
Alice

On the one hand, it's very nicely stated, and Alice sounds like a nice person. But what do you mean, "of most interest to a smaller house?!!" That's what people keep telling me. Be realistic, this is your first book, you haven't paid your dues yet, you haven't established a name for yourself, be modest in your expectations, don't aim too high, self publish. Yeah, yeah, they're all right, but what about my dream, of getting this story to millions of people? How am I supposed to keep the dream alive without becoming delusional?

I felt a little like those losers in the Oscar ceremony. Yeah, I got treated respectfully, and that's nice. But what I really want is to get the book out.

The thing is, as a spiritual person, I know it's in God's hands anyway. So what I have to do is to do what I can each day to get the story out to millions of people. Then let go and turn it over.

Journey's Next Step

For me, the second step of a journey is usually harder than the first. Taking the first step I get excited; I've started something new. The second step means, okay, now I've got to follow through and keep going. Am I really ready to blog from now until the book gets out to the world? I don't know; we'll see.

Today it was time to follow up on contacts I've already made. One of them was Jewish Lights Publishing. I sent them a book proposal last month, 50 pages of paper by snail mail, with the content and format they specified. They seem like a good potential publisher for me because they say their intention is to bring primarily Jewish books to "people of all faiths and backgrounds [who] yearn for books that attract engage, educate and spiritually inspire." That's the intended audience for Holy Beggars.

Since I had sent out the proposal a month ago, I figured that this would be a good time to follow up and see how it's going. Right? It seemed like a good idea until I took another look at their web site, where it said, "After sending your material, please allow approximately three to six months for a reply." Yikes! What are they going to do with it for six months? Do they expect me to wait around for a reply?

Well, moving right along, I decided to follow up with a literary agent in New York, Levine Greenberg. I also sent them a proposal last month. I like their process better, because they ask for your stuff on-line, which I find much faster and easier and seems designed to provide faster turn around. I double checked their web site to find out how they feel about authors following up, and came up with this ambiguous statement: "We will let you know within two weeks if we would like more information about your project." Does this mean they will contact you within two weeks, or that they'll contact you only if they would like more information? If they don't want more information, what does that mean? I decided to call them anyway. Since their policy is for authors not to try to contact specific agents, my only choice was to leave a voice mail in the "general mailbox."

The thing that's taking me a while to fathom is that the literary agents, at least those with any kind of track record of getting books published, seem as hard to contact as the publishers. Go figure! I thought that when they took a look at my manuscript, maybe they'd be discerning enough to see how great it is, and maybe they'd actually want to represent me. I thought that maybe my biggest problem would be sorting through the promises that each would make me, and deciding whom to believe, and which one to trust with the success of my valuable property.

The good news is, that's one problem that so far I don't have.