This post is part three of a series.
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series I described some of the lessons I learned during the process of publishing my first two books for the public, which detailed some of the amazing stories of my patients who learned how to heal themselves with the aid of clinical hypnosis.
Unfortunately, hypnosis has a negative reputation among the general public, in large part because of how it’s been portrayed by the movie and…
This post is part three of a series.
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series I described some of the lessons I learned during the process of publishing my first two books for the public, which detailed some of the amazing stories of my patients who learned how to heal themselves with the aid of clinical hypnosis.
Unfortunately, hypnosis has a negative reputation among the general public, in large part because of how it’s been portrayed by the movie and entertainment industry.
Also, I was aware that in the late 19th century there were many false positive and negative claims about hypnosis that soured the public on the possibility that hypnosis could be helpful.
I did not want to create or add to a 21st-century perception that hypnosis was quackery, and therefore chose to withhold telling about some of the most amazing events that I had encountered with my patients when I first wrote about hypnosis, because these stories might have been too hard to believe.
Most of the stories involved information and wisdom shared with me through my patients’ subconscious. They’ve included tales of other realms and beings, as well as circumstantial evidence of their veracity, including details that were clearly out of the scope of knowledge of my patients’ conscious.
But a decade later I decided it was time to tell many of these stories, because they greatly influenced how I viewed difficult personal and world events with an improved and calmer perspective. I hoped that they would similarly influence readers of my third book that I am now writing, Interviews with the Subconscious.
The Rest of the Story
In a previous post I described the story with which I went the farthest afield in my first book, *Changing Children’s Lives with Hypnosis. *My patient, a 12-year-old girl, reported (outside of her mother’s presence) that she was visited by a ghost every night. The ghost told the girl that she should kill herself, which led her to twice attempt suicide.
Despite intensive in-patient and medication therapy, the ghost continued to “haunt” her. My general approach to patients has been to meet them where they are. Therefore, I suggested that talking to the ghost may be helpful, and the girl permitted me to question the ghost through her while she was in a state of hypnosis.
The ghost explained that by killing herself the girl would be able to relive her difficult childhood in a better way. As an alternative, I suggested that the girl was learning how to better deal with her childhood through her counseling with me.
The ghost accepted this idea, and asked if it could now turn into the girl’s guardian angel. The girl agreed to this request as long as she never had to see the ghost again, and the ghost agreed to this plan.
Over the next half-year the girl no longer reported ghost sightings, tolerated well discontinuation of several psychiatric medications, and completed her therapy.
It was the next part of the story that I left out of my first book, and is representative of the type of stories I plan to describe in my third book. Sharing this event reminds me of legendary radio broadcaster Paul Harvey’s introduction to the last segment of his most famous show, “And now you know…the rest of the story.”
After the ghost agreed to disappear I was unsure what would happen next. After all, they do not teach you in medical school how to deal with ghosts. Given that my patient had already twice tried to end her life, I asked her permission to tell her mother what had occurred at our session, so that her mother at least would be aware of the new turn of events.
Hypnosis Essential Reads
In the girl’s presence, the mother listened carefully to the details of the counseling session. She asked only one question. “What did the ghost look like?” The girl responded that the ghost appeared to be a 3-year-old girl in a white dress.
The mother paused, and then said, “So that’s who I’ve been seeing around the house some mornings.”
The ghost was never seen again, by my patient or her mother.
Trouble Finding a Publisher, Again
Once I finished my book proposal for Interviews with the Subconscious I sent it to the publisher of my first two books. (A first draft of the cover for this book, left, was created with the aid of AI. However, the artwork was drawn by the subconscious of one of my patients!) Unfortunately, the acquisition editors who reviewed my proposal did not feel that the book had a clear audience, and turned it down.
My agent again told me that because of the poor sales for my first two books no major publisher would be interested in bringing my new work to light. So, I looked up books written about the subconscious, and identified whether their publishers were small.
Fortunately, most small publishers do accept proposals submitted directly by authors. Unfortunately, half a year after I submitted my proposal to 16 small publishers, 14 had turned it down, while two were still considering it.
It was then that I began to wonder if AI could help. To be clear, I would never want AI to write a book for me. After all, I want to tell original stories in my own voice, which AI could never do. However, AI can act as a super search engine.
I queried Claude, one of the major large language model AIs: “Tell me the names and contact information for publishers that have published books about the subconscious.” Within 10 seconds, Claude responded with a list of 20 publishers, including nine of which I had been unaware.
I checked out the websites of these nine, and decided seven seemed like good fits. I submitted the proposal to those publishers, and within a month found a publisher that seemed to very much appreciate the potential of my new book. I gladly accepted their offered contract.
Without AI, it is likely that I would never have come across my new publisher.
Takeaway
Today’s major book publishing business tends to focus on sales potential more than the quality of books’ content. Fortunately, today’s search engines can help us identify publishing venues still willing to take a chance on books that offer non-conventional, groundbreaking stories and wisdom.