Spiritual Writing: Write Because You Have To - article

Eckhart Tolle wrote The Power of Now not because he envisioned selling millions and millions of copies but because he had a sense through his own spiritual connection that this was a book that he needed to write. He had no idea at the time what would happen to the book. He actually brought it someone who had never published a book and said, “You know more about publishing than me. Can you help me get it published?” This woman was Constance Kellough, who worked in marketing at the time. She created her company, Namaste, to publish The Power of Now. She printed a whopping 3,000 copies, and the book was discovered by Mark Allen of New World Library, and then it was published in the United States, and over time it became a massive best seller.

Of course, by the time The New Earth came out, Tolle was already well known. He could get a big publisher, and then Oprah chose him to do a webinar, and we ended up selling five million copies of that book. None of that was planned. None of it can be planned. If you’re an author and you have a true and important spiritual message, write it because it needs to be communicated. You can’t really think about becoming the next Eckhart Tolle.

In some ways, spirituality is like any other field. If you want people to listen to your message, you need to become an expert and then get out there and do workshops and speaking events. That’s what Dan Gookin did—and then he wrote D.O.S. for Dummies and sold an awful lot of books. And that’s just as effective a strategy for books on spirituality as it is for other kinds of how-to books. The difference is that if you look at the best-selling authors of books on spirituality, very, very few of them intentionally set out to become financially successful through their writing. They wrote because they felt they had to.

How you get your name out really depends on what your specific area of expertise is. There are many well-known teachers out there already. If you’re affiliated with a large organization, that’s probably something that can help you. All the things that are working for other kinds of books, such as doing webinars, are probably going to work in the area of spirituality. But I think it’s tricky with spirituality, because if you come across as too much of a marketing person rather than a true spiritual teacher, people are going to pick up on that right away. I don’t think there’s an easy answer to the question of how to become the next great spiritual writer. Hampton Roads had a contest called How to Be the Next Spiritual Writer, and they had five thousand submissions, from which they picked one book to publish. I don’t know what book they chose, but I doubt it’s the next The Power of Now or major seller. It’s very hard to predict these things, and in the society that we’re living in today, success breeds success.

Recently, Oprah picked a book that was published about ten years ago as one of her favorite things. Up until then, the book had met with only modest success, but now it’s sold 100,000 copies, and the author has major opportunities. He waited ten years before that happened, but obviously the book must have real value or Oprah wouldn’t have chosen it. So write something with real value. Write something that’s important to you, and share it with as many people as you can. And if it becomes a best seller, that’s wonderful, but even if it doesn’t, you’ve fulfilled your purpose in writing the book.