Sleepy
So, now I’m verified. Many verifications are necessary these days. I’m not, for instance, a verified scholar on Google Scholar. You have to have a university email for that. And I don’t. Not anymore. But Medium has kindly verified me as a book author.
I’ve had six books published, although I’ve written many, many more than that. The one that put me over the top for Medium is my poorest selling book, Sleepy Hollow as American Myth. Still, how it came to be written is, I think, an interesting story.
Back in 2013 Fox began airing what would become a four-season series called Sleepy Hollow. In those daysI still had hopes of getting back into the academy, so I wrote an academic article about it. That led to a book, my third, titled Holy Horror. I then responded to the pleas of employed academic friends and wrote Nightmares with the Bible, which is very expensive.
Frustrated that academic books were priced out of the range of mere mortals — I’m a writer who avoids jargon and technical language — I decided to write for a popular series called Devil’s Advocates. A horror-film series published out of the UK, it priced the books reasonably. I pitched a book on The Wicker Man. They caught my pitch and just as it was about to publish, they decided to up the prices from about $20 to $40, just a small jump, I’m sure you’ll agree.
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I liked the format, however. Then I heard that Lindsey Beer had signed on to write/direct a new Sleepy Hollow movie. I’m not a slow writer, but I have a very demanding job and can’t always get a finished book, sufficiently polished, to a publisher swiftly. I decided to write my Sleepy Hollow book for a trade publisher. The important thing was to get it published before Ms. Beer’s movie came out. I wrote, polished, rewrote, polished some more, and repeated that process a few times. Then I began looking for an agent.
I’ve always found it interesting that agents don’t take seriously someone who works in publishing. I would be professional to work with. The idea was fresh — very few books are out there on “Sleepy Hollow.” A few agents thought it was interesting. One sent it out for peer review. Finally, one said yes. He had me rewrite it again, and then decided he couldn’t sell it after all.
By this time a couple years had elapsed. I was concerned that the movie would come out and I’d miss it. I went back to McFarland, since they’d published Holy Horror. They were glad to have it, but they had to go with their $40 pricing. And they changed my cool title, The Myth of Sleepy Hollow to the more academic-sounding Sleepy Hollow as American Myth. Publication beat the movie, which still isn’t in production, but it also failed to catch many imaginations. The agents were right.
That’s how my sixth book was written. My advice is this: anyone seeking an academic job, don’t waste your time if what you really want to do is be a writer. You get type-cast, no matter how great a stylist you are. Unless you get a good university position, then agents will swarm you like a rotting pumpkin.
The book itself, my few readers have said, is my best yet. It really is fun. If you can see past the price point, I think you’ll enjoy it.
