The Hazards of Writing a Cross Over Book

In the late 1980s, my sister, Suzy Prudden, was very famous as a Fitness Expert. She had 8 national tours behind her, had appeared on all major morning shows and on a thousand radio and television shows. What neither she nor I realized at the time was that she was totally burned out. She had discovered metaphysics, she was fascinated by the body-mind connection and she wanted out of Fitness. Shortly after Suzy and I became writing partners Suzy became friends with Louise L Hay of Hay House fame. Suzy had been talking for some time about combining her love of metaphysics with her fame in fitness. The result was MetaFitness: Your Thoughts Taking Shape. Suzy and I wrote it in the late summer in her marvelous little guesthouse in Topanga. I had flown in from New York for a two week writing intensive and the book just flowed out of us.

It came out in a variety of formats a year later. Suzy and Louise had created an exercise video with Suzy doing the exercises and Louise reading affirmations. They had created tapes with the same thing. They had combined metaphysics, physical exercises and body-life information in the book. Oprah plugged it on her program and it took off and became an overnight best seller. Then it died.

Oprah may have liked it, but the rest of the press didn’t, and the market wasn’t happy with it at all. People who liked fitness hated the metaphysics. Metaphysics people didn’t like the exercises. In Tampa one radio host screamed at Suzy, “There’s a serious problem with fitness in America, have you ever heard of hypokinetic disease?” My response was, “Yes. The term was coined by Dr. Hans Kraus and Bonnie Prudden, our mother, in our living room in 1956 shortly before the two of them presented their work to the AMA which led to their presenting their work to President Eisenhower at the White House and the founding of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.” Of course we knew about the trouble with fitness in America, but we felt that combining the body and the mind in sports activities was part of a solution. I think our presentation was a little light on that connection.

We followed MetaFitness with Change Your Mind Change Your Body a Harper SanFrancisco publication which, once again, didn’t satisfy either market.

As I moved on in my writing career and started teaching, I came to understand the hazards of the crossover. We had not prepared the market – either market – for these books. We were a good ten years ahead of where the market eventually went. Being avant garde is all well and good, but then you have to take the fact that you are well ahead of your time into consideration and focus on links that the different markets can relate to. I think if we had focused on the fact that using affirmations during exercise protects against injury and enhances performance might have helped with the Fitness market. I think focusing on the fact that your body is the house your spiritual being lives in and must be nurtured and cared for might have helped in the metaphysics area, but those are two different books.

My students see cross-eyed when I bring up marketing and selling, but publishing is all about selling books. It’s not just about writing them. You must identify a market, a place in the bookstores, people to talk to questions they have, things that might help them relate to your books and then write your book. The problem starts with the bookstore. Where does your book fit on the shelf? Look at the problem for the MetaFitness book in the bookstore. MetaFitness had Suzy in a pink leotard on the cover. Hay House always had their books in the Self-Help section of the bookstore. In the late 1980s, when the book came out, Self-Help people wouldn’t look at, let alone buy, a book with someone in a leotard on the cover. Fitness people, who would, didn’t go into Self-Help. The bookstore wouldn’t double the books exposure by putting it into two sections, that’s a waste of valuable space. And, we had written the book more for the spiritual people than for the fitness people. When we got around to Change Your Mind Change Your Body, I argued for a more spiritual cover – no leotard. Harper SanFrancisco compounded the problem by putting ten pictures of Suzy in a leotard on the cover. So, where did this one go in the bookstore and who did it satisfy? It went into Self-Help and it didn’t sell.

We had by now identified the problem but we still had a problem. Suzy was still recognized as a fitness expert and our agents would go to publishers and talk to them about Suzy the Fitness Expert. Publishers would come back that yes they wanted a fitness book and we would talk about spirituality. It was a complete mismatch.

So what do you do when you are prematurely in a mixed field? I would suggest focus groups. Who can you reach best in your two groups and how can you reach them? If they won’t buy what you want to write, what will they buy? Which part of the bookstore will you be in and how will your market find you there? How do you prepare your market to receive your information?

Constant focus on the market may seem very boring to the creative mind, but it’s the path to publication and success.

Cyrano de Bergerac and the Metaphysics of the Nose

Louise L. Hay pioneered the meaning of body parts. What became exciting was the discovery of how those meanings played out in literature long before Ms. Hay began her work. Suzy Prudden and I wrote a book called "The Wisdom of the Body" and we accompanied the book with "Body Wisdom" cards. On one side of the card was the body part. On the other the significance and an affirmation written to deal with the problem the body part represented. When we would attend Carolyn Myss conferences, where Suzy would do energy breaks, we would have our product table in the back of the room. We put a basket with the cards on it so people could draw cards with an eye to buying them. It never ceased to amaze me how every person who drew a card told us that either they were having physical problems with the body part – or they were dealing with a life issue connected to the body part. When I started working on character development, and wrote "The Character Book," it became obvious that body parts ought to be included.

The Nose

The nose represents self-recognition, how characters see themselves in the world. How comfortable the character is with that vision of himself. Among other things, it indicates whether or not the character wants to be noticed or if he prefers to be invisible. The nose symbolizes a character’s ability to know what he wants and how to get what he needs. Remember the power of the Roman nose? The nose is tightly bound to its function – smelling.

In addition, the nose is very idiomatic. It can represent how willing a character is to listen to his intuition and his ability to “sniff out” information. Some characters have a “nose for news.” “Nosy” is a nose word that indicates “sticking your nose into other people’s business.” There is a certain degree of honesty in the nose. People come to understand things because they are, “as plain as the nose on your face.” By the same token you can, “cut off your nose to spite your face.” You can “count noses, “win by a nose,” “follow your nose,” “hold your nose and do something you don’t like doing,” “keep your nose clean,” “brown nose,” “keep your nose to the grindstone,” “be led by the nose,” “look down your nose,” be precisely "on the nose,” “pay through the nose,” “rub your nose in it,” find something you’re looking for "right under your nose,” you can be “snooty” (for snobbish), and people can “walk with their nose in the air.”

Stories have been written with nose or smell themes.

Cyrano de Bergerac is the classic story of a man and his nose. True to nose-issues, this is not a story about who the man is as much as it is a story of how the man thinks someone else will find him; a story of self-limitation or self-selection because of the perception that another will find him ugly, with tragic results for everyone. Cyrano is a man who is in every way superior except for his perception of himself as physically attractive. Because of his gigantic nose, and his belief that the love of his life will reject him, he refuses to declare his true feelings to his cousin, the gorgeous and intellectual Roxane. Christiane, has no problems with his nose, his concerns are with his brains – or the relative absence thereof. But Christiane is beautiful and Roxane is attracted to him. Learning that he is about to become part of Cyrano’s company of guards, she asks her cousin to protect him. Cyrano does more than that. He uses Christiane as a surrogate through whom to woo and win Roxane’s heart – even if that means handing her over to Christiane. Like a true man with nose issues, Cyrano chooses to stay invisible in the shadows. Christiane dies. Yet even after his death, Cyrano never dares to proclaim his feelings to Roxane until, on his death bed, he reveals himself to have been Christiane’s voice all along. At that moment Roxane learns that she has lost the love of her life twice. This is a story that deals with – how a man reveals himself to the world, how he remains unseen to the person who matters, how he reviles himself when looking at himself through her eyes. The issues of the nose both obvious and subtle are the centerpiece of this story.

Other Cyrano-like, Nose or Smell stories include:

Roxanne staring Daryl Hannah and Steve Martin
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind
Perfume the movie starring Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman
Penelope the movie starring Richard E. Grand and Catherine O’Hara