Can YouTube lead mystic and healer Nancy to publishing success?
I am one of those ex-editors of newspapers (in my case the Sunday Mail in Glasgow) who still can’t resist exclaiming, “Wow, that’s a great story” when they hear of something they think deserves to be in print.
Nancy: Just an ordinary mum.
I had one of those moments a year ago at Halloween. Introduced at a party in Boston to Nancy Torgove (wearing angel’s wings, just part of the fancy dress), I heard myself saying to her after a two-hour conversation, “Your story deserves to be a book!” In fact I could even see it as a movie.
The God business has been doing rather well in the US book market. Dr Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven book about his near-death experience is still at the top of the New York Times paperback best-seller list after a year (2m hardback and paperback sales).
Another doctor, Mary Neal, has also had great success with her book to Heaven and Back about how she was dead for 30 minutes after being drowned in a Chilean river during a kayak trip. Mary was also the subject of an Anderson Cooper Special Report on CNN the other weekend.
Nancy, “just an ordinary mother of three young children,” as she describes herself, however brings a completely new twist to the story.
Her out-of-body experience, when she was undergoing massage therapy for excruciating back pain, has led to her becoming an amazingly successful healer.
In the 17 years since - with no publicity - she has been called in by more than 150 people, mainly cancer sufferers, including many with professional medical backgrounds. Some have made full recoveries, some have had years added to their lives. Some she has helped to a more peaceful death.
With my encouragement Nancy began compiling her book - in which many clients tell their stories in their own words. Dr Badri Rhicki, the eminent Canadian psychiatrist, says on the record that Nancy is “a genuine mystic".
I showed the outline to a book editor at one of Britain’s biggest publishers. She wrote, “Nancy Torgove certainly sounds a most unusual woman, and her stories are extraordinary. But, she suggested, “since she lives in America, and so do you, I wonder if it’s worth submitting to US houses in the first instance?”
But how best to do that? Through an agent? Through a direct approach to publishers? Stories are legion of now-famous authors who went down that road enduring countless rejections before striking gold. J.K. Rowling, Agatha Christie, Frederick Forsyth and Beatrix Potter know that story well. Louisa M.Alcott was told, “Stick to teaching.”
Then there’s self-publishing. One Massachusetts author self-published a Salem novel called the Lace Reader - and ended with a $2m contract from Harper Collins. Beatrix Potter eventually self-published 250 copies before going on to sell 45 million.
But I had seen Nancy on video speaking at a near-death conference and knew what an impressive speaker she was. So we decided on the YouTube route initially, for Nancy’s true story, entitled Heaven’s Gatekeeper.
By luck, a Boston-area TV producer, Eszter Vajda, thought this would make a great documentary, and an hour-long video is now in the can to be shown later this month.
Part of that film Eszter has turned into http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZLaGhCDfFs&feature=youtu.be">the YouTube video you can see here
We will still pursue the more conventional routes of getting to market. The letters - “queries”- are going to dozens of publishers.
I will let you know how Nancy gets on.