Work­ing on the “Frag­ments of Evolv­ing Man­hood” series has pretty much con­vinced me that I want to give the book on man­hood and mas­culin­ity that I started writ­ing in the 1980s another try. It will be, obvi­ously, a very dif­fer­ent book than the one I was work­ing on back then, if only because I am twenty years older and so my view of the over­all sub­ject and of the mate­r­ial I already have writ­ten will be cor­re­spond­ingly dif­fer­ent; but the idea of the book itself, a series of per­sonal, lit­er­ary essays that explore, from a fem­i­nist per­spec­tive, in inti­mate detail, a man’s expe­ri­ence of man­hood, remains com­pelling to me. As far as I know, there was no book like it on the mar­ket twenty years ago; and, as far as I know, there is no book like it on the mar­ket now; and I think we need such a book. (Whether or not the book I want to write will ulti­mately prove to be that book is a ques­tion that is not for me to answer; I just know that I want to try.)

I have also decided that, just like I did the first time around, I want to try to find an agent to help me sell the book. In prepa­ra­tion for going through that process again, I recently read through all the cor­re­spon­dence I have saved from the agents and edi­tors who read my pro­posal dur­ing the six years that I or my agent – because I did have one for a brief time – were try­ing to sell the man­u­script. It’s been an instruc­tive expe­ri­ence, both encour­ag­ing, because of all the seri­ously sup­port­ive things peo­ple had to say about my work, and dis­cour­ag­ing, because with very rare excep­tions everyone’s bot­tom line response expressed, more or less, the same sen­ti­ment expressed in the title of this post.

I don’t remem­ber what I felt receiv­ing these responses back then, but read­ing them now, it’s hard for me not to feel that all the peo­ple who wrote to me or my agent had gone to the same com­mit­tee meet­ing, where they’d all been given the same instruc­tions for how to respond to pro­pos­als like mine. My point is not that any of these agents or edi­tors were being dis­hon­est or insin­cere. Rather, the con­sis­tency of their responses sug­gests to me that the state of the mar­ket was indeed as they described it, though I did find one agent who was will­ing take a chance on me. Hers was the sec­ond response I received in 1994, when I first started send­ing the pro­posal out. The first one, though, turned out to be the prophetic one:

This is a good piece of work you’ve sent me and one that well deserves to find its way into pub­li­ca­tion. But unfor­tu­nately I am already involved with one men’s issues book which I will admit to hav­ing trou­ble with so rather than take on some­thing else which is a bit com­pet­i­tive I think I’d best con­cen­trate my efforts and wish you the best of luck in your pursuits.

I don’t have any­more the accep­tance let­ter I received from the woman who became my agent, but I do have some of the responses she received from edi­tors. The first was from Pocket Books:

It’s a pow­er­ful, unre­strained, philo­soph­i­cally intrigu­ing and poten­tially con­tro­ver­sial exam­i­na­tion of the issues of male social­iza­tion and sex­u­al­ity. As intrigu­ing as it is, how­ever, it doesn’t quite have the huge com­mer­cial poten­tial that would make it right for Pocket Hardcover.

The sec­ond response was from Put­nam. “The book is strong stuff. Ether you like it or you don’t, and although I am inter­ested in the ideas, there is no chance that this would suc­ceed at Put­nam.” The let­ter did not say specif­i­cally why, but in con­text, it was clear that the rea­son was the editor’s lack of con­fi­dence in the book’s com­mer­cial poten­tial. Basic Books had a sim­i­lar response, “I read por­tions of the mate­r­ial with great inter­est. New­man is a good writer and this is an inter­est­ing sub­ject. How­ever, I am skep­ti­cal about the com­mer­cial prospects of such a work.” Finally, after a year with­out suc­cess, with­out even so much as a nib­ble, my agent gave up. She, after all, had a busi­ness to run. This is what she wrote me:

The men’s books I’ve worked on this year have been met with noth­ing but resis­tance and “there is not mar­ket” and “all the men’s books, even Bly [Iron John] and Keane [Fire in the Belly] did not do well.” I think it is there­fore wise for me to stick with what pub­lish­ers know me for, that is books about and for and by women.

To hear over and over again how com­pelling the sam­ple chap­ters were and how timely the topic was only to be told, Sorry, no. We just don’t think the book will sell, was not only frus­trat­ing; it was also con­fus­ing. I was per­fectly will­ing, within lim­its, to revise the book to make it more com­mer­cially viable, but no one seemed inter­ested in even ask­ing me to try. So, to give myself some dis­tance and the oppor­tu­nity to look at it again with fresh eyes, I put the pro­posal away for about six months and devoted my time to work­ing on other projects. Then I revised it, devel­oped a new list of agents and edi­tors to try and started send­ing the pro­posal out again. The answers I received were tellingly sim­i­lar to those I’d received dur­ing the pre­vi­ous year.

One agent who responded pos­i­tively asked me to  make some changes, which I did, but even after revis­ing the sam­ple chap­ter in the way I was asked to, this is the response I received:

Read­ing over the revised pro­posal that was sent to our office, which was care­ful and respect­ful of our com­ments, I was quite impressed. How­ever, upon a sec­ond read­ing, it became clearer to me that we are not the right agency to rep­re­sent a book like yours. One of the aspects of your chap­ters that I admire the most, the intel­li­gent link­ing of piv­otal auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal moments to major cur­rents of thought and impor­tant thinkers, is what makes them inac­ces­si­ble to the kind of audi­ence that pub­lish­ers we nor­mally work with cater to.

I appre­ci­ated this agent’s hon­esty, of course, and I appre­ci­ated as well the way in which the changes he asked for improved the pro­posal over­all, but I still did not have a pub­lisher and his com­ments about audi­ence depressed me, since I began to won­der if all of the pub­lish­ers the pro­posal had been sent to catered to the same kind of audi­ence. Another agent con­firmed this for me when she wrote, “It is a rich blend of per­sonal, philo­soph­i­cal, and polit­i­cal ele­ments, but I ulti­mately came away from it decid­ing it didn’t work for me. As oth­ers have told you…the blend of ele­ments I’ve just men­tioned also makes it more ana­lyt­i­cal and aca­d­e­mic than what most larger pub­lish­ers are look­ing for.” She then went on to sug­gest that I try smaller presses or uni­ver­sity presses, where I could sub­mit an una­gented man­u­script with­out a problem.

I had decided after my agent dropped me that I would be per­fectly happy to pub­lish with such a press, and I had a list of poten­tial pub­lish­ers ready to go. So, in 1998, I gave up search­ing for an agent and started send­ing the pro­posal to small and uni­ver­sity presses. The first response I received was from Indi­ana Uni­ver­sity Press. “Although the project looks very inter­est­ing and excit­ing, I do not feel that your…book fits in with our cur­rent list. You might want to try a com­mer­cial publisher.”

The small presses to which I sent the pro­posal were either oth­er­wise com­mit­ted or not inter­ested in the book because they didn’t think it fit their list. Then, with a refer­ral by some­one with some influ­ence, I sub­mit­ted the pro­posal to Tem­ple Uni­ver­sity Press, and the edi­tor liked the pro­posal enough that he sent it out for anony­mous review. This is how uni­ver­sity presses vet the projects that are sent to them. Aca­d­e­mics in the field read the pro­posal and make rec­om­men­da­tions to the press about whether they think the man­u­script ought to be pub­lished. There were either two or three reviews of my pro­posal, I don’t remem­ber exactly, but I do remem­ber that, in addi­tion to the very pos­i­tive one of which I still have a copy, there was a com­pletely neg­a­tive one that I wish I had saved.

The man who wrote the neg­a­tive review rejected com­pletely the entire premise of the project, since I was not call­ing for the end of man­hood, the end of gen­der. The man who wrote the pos­i­tive review, on the other hand, not only had some won­der­ful cri­tiques and sug­ges­tions for how to make the man­u­script bet­ter; he also com­pletely got what I was try­ing to do:

This is an attempt to har­ness the cur­rent mem­oir craze to polit­i­cally cor­rect effect – that is to write the mem­oirs of a pro­fem­i­nist man. To my knowl­edge this is a first. I think that the mar­ket is ready for a male con­fes­sional that spec­i­fies the ways in which “typ­i­cal” male social­iza­tion involves coer­cion, bru­tal­ity, and a sig­nif­i­cant amount of pain – with­out ever los­ing sight of the larger issues of priv­i­lege and patriarchy.

Unfor­tu­nately, because the reviews of my project were so mixed, Temple’s edi­tor did not feel he would be able to per­suade his board to pub­lish the book and that, near the end of 1999, turned out to be the last straw. I just did not have the strength to go back into the mate­r­ial one more time to fig­ure out how to revise the sam­ple chap­ter and the pro­posal, and so I decided the mar­ket was sim­ply closed against me. I put every­thing into a folder and turned my atten­tion to writ­ing poetry, where, as it turned out, I had a good deal more luck get­ting pub­lished. The Silence of Men, which deals in verse with a lot of the same ideas I was writ­ing about in Evolv­ing Man­hood, was pub­lished by CavanKerry Press in 2004, and I became as well a trans­la­tor of clas­si­cal Per­sian poetry. So far, I have pub­lished two books of my own and one as a co-translator.

It has been more than ten years since I set Evolv­ing Man­hood aside, and, as I said above, I am ready to try again to pub­lish it. My own sense is that the book will sell, but that it is more likely to sell by word of mouth than any­thing else, which would seem to make it a per­fect fit for a small press, and I will try small presses again. I want first, how­ever, to try one more time to find an agent. Obvi­ously, there are advan­tages to me as a writer, finan­cial and oth­er­wise, if I do and he or she can sell the book; but I also like the way the process of find­ing an agent forces me to be at the top of my game in terms of the sam­ple chapter(s) I sub­mit and in the way I artic­u­late what I have to say in the book pro­posal. It is a lot of work, and, frankly, the pos­si­bil­ity for a greater finan­cial return that exists with an agent helps to make all that work worth­while, even if, in the end, I don’t get an agent and the press that pub­lishes the book is too small to be worth an agent’s while.

In any event, wish me luck!