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September/October 2002 Living Now
How I Got Published, Easily!

by Thomas Lipsett

A bit over ten years ago I began Siskiyou Racer as a way of learning word processing on my new computer, to help struggling mankind on their journey towards fulfillment, and because I had always been a writer type but without having much to show for it except some poetry. I just started typing the novel and events in it began to unfold.

Ostensibly it’s a love story is about an American car racer and his girlfriend and begins in the 1930s. The real impetus for the novel, though, began on the Upper Eastside of Manhattan, during a time that seems to have sparked a lot of spiritual development: the late 1960s. My friend, the late Lex Hixon, had gone to buy a book that had been on one of his reading lists at Yale. He was impressed by the Swami (also the author of the book) that sold it to him and accepted his invitation to attend a lecture. He and his wife were immediately hooked by their first taste of high-power Eastern spirituality. They insisted that I go to the Vedanta Center and check it out. After putting it off for almost a month, I finally did so, and I too was immediately hooked on the divine bliss the Swami and his Center radiated. When I left the lecture and boarded a bus downtown to drink with my buddies and buddettes at Max’s Kansas City, I was astonished to find the blissful feeling only intensified. For many years I have referred to the experience of this power of a great teacher as "Fifth Avenue Bus effect." It and the notions of religious pluralism I learned along the way are the real energies behind my novel.

After I finished the book with the help of my writers group here in Portland, I spent a year sending it off to agents and publishers with some encouragement but no contract. A helpful editor at Harper’s San Francisco suggested I consider self -publishing. The publishing house I spoke with in Berkeley originally quoted $7000, but two weeks later offered me their "special deal" of $3500. After hearing those figures you can imagine how elated I was when a friend, who manages a Sufi bookstore in New York, told me of a new form of publishing called print-on demand that cost around $100!

I lost no time in heading for the web-site she mentioned: iUniverse.com. It was indeed true, although their rate has since gone up to, I believe, $159. The process went like this: I rendered my manuscript into Word format (which it had not been), then sent it to them electronically; they did a cover, which I really liked, and sent me back the proofs in about a month for the final edit; finally they had me write cover blurbs and promo information. This process, by the way, is not to be confused with e-books, which is where the book is offered to readers to read online.

Barnes & Noble were the first to have Siskiyou Racer on their web site. It can also be ordered at their customer service desks in the stores and picked up without the person having to pay postage. The other major retailers such as Amazon now have the book too. Wal-Mart.com offers it for a buck less at $11.95.

I am completely satisfied with the service I received and the only flaws in the process were the result of my too-hasty editing. For a small extra fee, I plan to go back and correct a few of them that have lingered on. All in all, it was a quick, easy, inexpensive way to make the transition from writer to author.

An interesting side note--out of the relatively small number of people who attended Swami Nikhilananda’s center just before and during the time I was there, five of them are or became authors. The most well-known is the sublime J.D. Salinger, whose work, along with that of T.S. Eliot, kept me going spiritually until I discovered the East; then my friend Lex Hixon, who currently has 13 books in print on various traditions. A girl named Leona (whom I thought could not be really spiritual because I used to see her in my Greenwich Village neighborhood) became a nun in New Delhi and has written a biography about one of the early Western women disciples of Swami Vivekananda.

Another was Shelly Brown, who was a young ballet student when she met the Swami in New York. He suggested she give up dance to study and become a physician. She did so with considerable success and has recently published a biography on one of the important recent Indian Swamis.

Then there is yours truly, who may be open to disqualification because of the explicit nature of some of the love scenes in Siskiyou Racer; but who, by my count, and after my Tantric dispensation, makes the fifth writer from that small Vedanta center.