Hello dear friends,
In this post I want to share with you a decision I’ve made. I hope it will excite you as much as it does me.
Many of you, I think, are aware that I spent much of 2023 writing a book. I mentioned it in a post last summer in which I wrote about the experience of being “monocular”—sighted in only one eye. Even though the topic had nothing to do with nature, your response was kind and supportive, which told me there might be an audience for this work.
So I plunged ahead with writing the book. Whoa, was that fun!
And now at last it’s ready to be sent out into the world. I have decided not to go with traditional publishing—through a literary agent and a publishing house. That is a long (very long!) and often frustrating process. Self-publishing was another option, but I ultimately decided against that, as well.
One morning I woke up with an idea so sparkling, it rivaled the sunlight streaming in my window. Crazy, but another option was right there in front of me all along.
A new road
In short, there’s a third way to birth a book. It’s not traditional publishing. It’s not self-publishing. It’s an altogether different road, a road you and I are already walking together: Substack.
I have so enjoyed this first year and a half of writing about nature, sharing my thoughts with you, finding others who are writing/reading about nature, and creating a global community of nature lovers. It’s a totally positive experience, and I’ve come to believe that Substack is a vibrant alternative to the chaotic, ill-tempered, slithering state of social media. I am thrilled to be putting my work on this platform every week.
Which leads us to this li’l announcement:
I’m going to publish my book here on Substack
in serial form,
as a multimedia package.
What does that mean?
I’ll release the book, chapter by chapter, in a newsletter similar to this one. Each week a new chapter will drop into paid subscribers’ e-mail inboxes, just as they do with your Rx Nature subscription. And you’ll receive much more than just a good read. Each chapter will include extra content inviting you to engage with the material in lots of different ways. More on that in a minute.
Because this book is unrelated, thematically, to Rx Nature, it will appear in a different newsletter, called Good Eye, Bad Eye (the title of the book). Even if you’re currently an Rx Nature subscriber, you will need to subscribe separately to Good Eye, Bad Eye. More on that in a minute, also.
(Let me pause here to offer my heartfelt thanks to all of you wonderful Rx Nature subscribers. Your support means the world to me. If you’re not interested in the subject of this book, no worries at all. You can keep hanging out with me here on Rx Nature and I’ll keep throwing what I hope is quality content your way. We’ve built a vibrant community of subscribers: almost 700 nature-loving folks all over the globe! And I intend to keep growing us. My goal is for us to reach 1,000 by the end of 2024.)
How it will work
Let’s say you want to subscribe to Good Eye, Bad Eye and read the book in its serialized form. What do you do? You have two choices:
You can sign up for the $5/month option. This is the one I recommend, as it’s most economical. The serialization will span four months, June through September. You’ll pay a total of $20—about the price of a paperback these days.
You can sign up for the $50/annual option. This certainly isn’t necessary or expected, but if you’re feeling angelic and have some extra cash lying around, I obviously won’t turn you down. And for you angelic ones, I will be printing a limited edition of the book at the end of the serialization. You’ll receive a signed paperback copy, mailed to you with my blessings and thanks.
Okay, have I fired you up? Are you ready to sign on?
The Good Eye, Bad Eye newsletter is already up and running. I will be posting there occasionally over the next two months, and subscriptions during April and May will be free. Once we start the serialization in June, a paywall will appear on each chapter as it’s posted. You’ll be invited at that time to convert your free subscription to a paid one, using one of the two options I listed above.
All paid subscribers will have access to the entire book as it rolls out week after week. Each installment will come to you in an e-mail or you can read it on the website. If you miss a week or if you sign up after the series starts, you’ll have complete access to previous chapters so you can go back and catch up.
The history of serialization
This method of releasing a book bit by bit has a long history in literature. Everyone from Charles Dickens and Tolstoy to Stephen King, Frank Herbert and Salman Rushdie have published novels this way. Tom Wolfe’s 1984 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities was first serialized in Rolling Stone magazine.
In Dickens’ case, almost all his books were released in serial form. He also wrote weekly sensational tales called “penny dreadfuls.” They were sold in Victorian England for one pence apiece, hawked by young boys who rushed the freshly printed broadsheets, ink still wet, to eager crowds waiting on street corners.
More than just a book
Serializing here on Substack offers three major benefits that traditional publishing can’t touch:
We’ll create a community of people at Good Eye, Bad Eye who are reading the book together, in real time. Sort of like an online book club or a community read. Through the comments on each weekly post, we can literally have a conversation about the book as we journey through it. You’ll have the opportunity to offer me feedback—what you’re enjoying or not, what you’d like to see more of or less of. If you spot a mistake (find the misplaced comma! the split infinitive!), I can fix it and I’ll list your name in the Acknowledgments at the end of the book.
Publishing the book online means that I can offer you sooo much more content: photos, videos, audio, hyperlinks to related material, and an Author Q&A—all collected in one convenient space. And here’s the best part: I’ve already scheduled several fascinating experts who will join me for online webinars tied to the themes of the book. Suddenly Good Eye, Bad Eye morphs from words on a page into a richly textured multimedia experience that has many different ways for you to engage with the content. I am wildly excited about this and can’t wait to share it all with you. The webinars alone will be worth the cost of your subscription.
Online serialization is, without a doubt, the greenest, most ecofriendly method of publishing. No paper, no shipping materials, no fossil fuel burned delivering books to buyers or bookstores. No involvement of a profit-driven giant retailer like Amazon. Just you and me, in a direct exchange. The carbon footprint is joyously low.
Now that I (hopefully!) have you onboard with this idea, I want to tell you a little about the book you’re going to be buying. Consider this to be like when you’re browsing in a bookstore. You pick up an interesting book and read the blurbs on the back cover. Maybe you also read the table of contents and skim the foreword. If you’re book shopping online, it’s the same process, only you’re clicking through sample pages. You’re deciding if you want to plop down your $ and read this work.
What you can expect in this book
The full title of my book is Good Eye, Bad Eye: A Memoir of Trauma and Truth. That tells you something of what to expect, but it doesn’t tell you everything. Here’s what else I want you to know:
The book includes a lot of Buddhist concepts. My spiritual path, for 40 years, has been Theravada Buddhism, aka “The Way of the Elders.” You’ll read how I discovered Buddhism, the stable foundation it has provided for my adult life, and how it played a key role in helping me recover from trauma. My heart is filled with gratitude for the Buddha’s wise teachings, so of course that is part of my story.
There’s also a fair bit of psychology sprinkled throughout the book. Some of that happened early in my life, but most of it flowered when I went back to school in midlife and studied to become a psychotherapist. I’ve learned a lot from working with my clients over the past 10 years, and I share that in the book. This is where I think Good Eye, Bad Eye could be helpful to anyone struggling with the aftereffects of trauma: anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, relationship problems.
I’m not a perfect human being (far from it!), so those of you who thought I was a paragon of virtue might be shocked by what you read, especially in the early chapters about choices I made in my youth. Be ready!
As the subtitle hints, there’s a strong theme in the book about truth. A “subplot” concerns my lifelong search for the truth of what happened to me in childhood. Near the end of the book, when I finally find the truth, that’s the puzzle piece that provides the final dose of healing. So this is also a detective story.
My greatest hope for this book is that it will inspire you and other readers about how any of us can overcome adversity. How we weave our way through the jungle of afflictions and heartache, and break out into the sunlight.
If that’s a message you need to hear, please consider becoming a subscriber. And tell somebody else about it, too. You’ll be part of the next great wave of book publishing!
One last thing, to whet your appetite for Good Eye, Bad Eye: a one-minute promotional trailer, iMovie style.
Once again, my friends: Thanks so much for your support. I know you have many choices of where to spend your time, your attention, and your money. I deeply appreciate you spending some of it here with me. My vow is to work hard to make that worth your while.
I am IN on this new book of yours. Signing up now.
What an interesting concept! As someone who shares your aversion to Amazon, I think this is fantastic! Very exciting!