Hal Zina Bennett - Writing Spiritual Books: A Bestselling Writers Guide to Successful Publication

Inner Ocean Publishing,Inc.
P.O. Box 1239
Makawao, Maui, HI 96768-1239
www.innerocean.com

2004 by Hal Zina Bennett
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means
or in any form whatsoever without written permission from the publisher.

Printed on recycled paper

Publisher Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bennett, Hal Zina, 1936
Writing spiritual books : a bestselling writers guide to successful
publication / Hal Zina Bennett. Makawao, Hawaii : Inner Ocean, 2004.

p. ; cm.

ISBN: 1-930722-37-0
1. Religious literatureAuthorship. 2. AuthorshipStyle
manuals. 3. AuthorshipMarketing. 4. Religious literature
Marketing. 5. Spirituality. I. Title.

BR44 .B46 2004
808/.0662dc22 0411

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Writing and publishing a book is the work of a great many people, something thats not easy to see as we hold the finished product in our hands. Only the authors name is on the cover. But getting the book to you, the reader, involves literary agent, editor, book designers, assistants of various kinds, the secretaries that answer the phones, the librarian who checks facts, the printers, the sales reps, the distributors, the bookstore owners, and finally you, the reader.

And what would any of us not give for a sound support group at homeSusan, our dogs Maddy and Cicely, and K.C. the maniac cat whose favorite trick is to leap on my keyboard at the most inappropriate moments. (She knows!)

Thanking everyone is always a daunting task since inevitably someones name gets left out, not because their contribution went unnoticed but because the authors memory failed him that day. Risking all that, Id like to thank the following people, more or less in the order they became involved in this project: First and foremost, I want to thank all my students and clients whose challenges motivated me to seek answers that Id later share with others.

Thank you, Barbara Neighbors Deal, my literary agent and friend, whose focus on higher purposes helps me keep my priorities straight.

Roger Jellinek, editor, writer, and literary agent, guided me through several revisions of the original plan for this book, ultimately improving it immensely.

Next came Karen Bouris, associate publisher at Inner Ocean, and a fellow author. Her rare combination of humor, firmness, and skill kept things on track and made it fun.

For the second time in my career, Ive been blessed with the fine artistry of Kathy Warriner, book designer extraordinnaire.

Thanks, Heather McArthur, whose editorial suggestions for improving the manuscript were golden.

And where would I be without a good copyeditor? We authors are blind to typos and misspellings (sic). So I owe a debt of gratitude to Valerie Sinzdak for an eye much sharper than my own.

Last but certainly not least, I thank the Wiz who keeps my soul searching and the ink flowing.

I remember as a child of four or five asking my mother, Where did I come from? The answer I got was anything but satisfactory. I was told that babies were born out of the mothers body. This I already knew, of course, since I had seen my aunts belly get big and was told there was a baby in there. I tried asking my question another way: Why did I come into the family I did? If I hadnt come to this family, where would I have gone? What was I before I was born? My parents shrugged and smiled when I asked these questions. But my questioning continued.

At first I sought answers to these mysteries in the woods and open fields around our home. I found a dead bird one day and held it in my hand. Clearly the life was gone from this tiny fragile body. But how could that be? Where did that life go? Could it come back? Im told I was six or seven years old at that time. I placed the bird in a cardboard box, with air holes Id punched in the cover. Every morning, and several times a day, I opened the box to see if life had returned to the bird. Of course, it didnt, and in time my parents suggested that I bury it, which I did, even placing a stone on its grave to mark where it lay.

There were times when I thought I saw things very clearly, when the veils of everyday life seemed to lift, revealing a truth about my own life and life around me that even today defies words. But the mystery I pursued always felt just beyond my reach, sometimes so close I felt my heart lift ecstatically. I didnt know what any of this was, nor could I even talk to others about it since nothing I said seemed to communicate what I was experiencing.

When I first considered writing this book, those early childhood memories came back to me. I realized that the questions I was now asking as an adult were the same as those Id asked as a child. I did not know it as a child, nor were there people around me who were able to put words to it, but even at that tender age I was aware of the spiritual. And regardless of how intangible it might be, I knew it was real.

As I recalled those experiences, I realized that things hadnt changed all that much, even to this day. Hardly a day passes that I dont stop with wonder and ask pretty much the same questions I asked at six and seven and eight. But I also know that Im not alone in this. I doubt there is a person alive who has not, however fleetingly, been touched by those spiritual breakthroughs that cause us to look with new eyes on the meaning of our lives.

Today Ive learned the contentment of living with a deep inner peace around my questions, no longer requiring the answers but knowing its enough to bask in the mystery. I suppose this position was what caused the initial resistance I felt to writing this book. Many people from my workshops had urged me to write the book, though I dont think I began to take it seriously until Id heard the same suggestion for about the hundredth time. My resistance had to do with my belief that there is something almost arrogant about presuming to have the words to speak of the spiritual. It took me years, at least five, to get over my resistance and actually sit down to work out the problems this book posed for me.

The breakthrough for me came when I realized that you, the reader, would bring to your writing the material you would be teaching with your words. All I had to do was show you the ropes of how to put a spiritual book together. I started asking some new questions: How was a spiritual book different than any other nonfiction book one might write? Were there aspects of a spiritual book that were different from a nonfiction book on any other subject, say a book about organic gardening or health? Yes, I decided, there were differences. I knew this from having written a number of spiritual books and from helping other authors write them. And so I set out to define those differences and explore them in a bookthis book.