The Seeker Academy Bookblog

I have so far six Amazon.com reviews, none from people I’d met before the reviews were posted. One is from a reviewer on a social network thematically related to my book. Four men, two women; a romance novelist, a poet, two psychiatrists, a tech writer; one focuses on the story’s relationships, another its ideas. Chance starts to play a part, interesting juxtapositions to emerge.

One reviewer, a physician and professor of holistic medicine with a multi-decade practice, and an inveterate reader, reviewer and blogger, has the background to discuss the novel’s themes. As I read other of his reviews and his blog, I begin to want to know what he will think about my story. He writes this:

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Recovering, Re-connecting and Re-Awakening: A Novel of Hope, May 27, 2007

By	Dr. Richard G. Petty (Atlanta) - See all my reviews

The book is deceptive. When I was asked if I would be interested in reviewing it, I expected a novel about holistic medicine and the spiritual path that I would polish off in an evening. Instead it has taken me three weeks to read. Not because it is badly written: far from it. After a slightly clumsy prologue, the book uses a story as a skeleton around which to wrap a careful examination of some very important ideas. Gussin is a very good writer and some of the prose and the images that they conjure up are luminous.

Grace is a forty-something woman whose twelve year-old niece has been going through the ups and downs of chemotherapy for leukemia. Grace is a former actress who is still acting her way through life. After the turmoil of her niece’s illness and days spent with other sick children, she is emotionally and spiritually drained. Not because of what has happened or what she has experienced, but rather that the events have uncovered a deep existential yearning.

So it is that she finds her way to the Seeker Academy, which could be any one of a hundred personal growth centers that I have visited. Here she meets an interesting and insightful group of people who are among the estimated thirty million Americans who describe themselves as spiritual seekers. The book does a superb job of describing the spiritual and emotional hunger of so many of us. How many of us have an uncomfortable feeling that there is something missing in our lives? That there is something important that we have all forgotten?

The characters have all brought their own emotional baggage, and amidst all the love and peace we still see people who can be mean and defend their positions and beliefs with religious fervor. Gussin captures the narcissism and spiritual elitism that can crop up amongst spiritual seekers and so disappoint people when they meet this world. There are the anti-science counter-culture folk who believe that to reason is to lie, and representatives of an array of beliefs and positions, including those who refuse any help from conventional medicine, even when in serious trouble. Grace samples classes, therapies and ideas like a person who is starving and stumbles into a five star restaurant.

There are discussions of Karma; survival after death; whether there is a purpose and a meaning to life that we sometimes miss because we have to focus on the mundane world; whether it is possible to have a spiritual life and to remain engaged in the material world; the advantages of controlling our reactions to, rather than escaping from the world; romanticism, reason and tragedy; the nature of reality and much more besides.

Grace learns at first hand how emotions can be stored in the body, and how skilled bodywork can release them. She also discovers that the seekers at the Academy are there for a dozen reasons. They are not just trying to heal some ill defined something, recover from trauma or find enlightenment. Most are just trying to re-connect with another human.

A car crash involving some of the characters sharpens the beliefs and actions of the cast, and leads into scenes where concepts and ideas are explored with rare intensity.

Gussin is clearly writing from experience. In the course of the book Grace discovers that real change is possible, and sometimes in a short space of time. But she then realizes that she no longer wants to change. She has a world to go back to. Yet despite her reluctance to change, it is giving nothing away to say that the experiences do change her beliefs and perceptions. Despite some of the difficulties that people bring with them to places like the Seeker Academy, for the person who arrives at the right time in his or her life, the experience can be life changing.

Teaching stories, parables and analogies have been used since the beginning of time, and in expert hands can be an extremely effective way of communicating difficult ideas. I have read some books in which characters discuss abstruse ideas and have sometimes come away scratching my head, thinking that even the most earnest angst-ridden undergraduates don’t talk like that! Gussin, though, succeeds very well indeed. The characters are lively, the ideas clear and the dialogue does not feel contrived. The format allows the author to talk about some complex and important ideas, without the formalism of a book about philosophy.

The best books, movies, articles and scientific papers do not give you all the answers, but make suggestions, challenge us and suggest new questions. More than once I saw parallels with the classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Both books suggest answers, challenge assumptions and pose a great many questions.

It was those questions that forced me to read the book far more slowly than I would normally. Despite the apparent certainties of some of the characters, the author does not pretend to have all the answers, and the book is the stronger for it.

If you are interested in some of the big questions in life, or if you feel that hunger that I described above, this is an excellent, well-written and engaging book.

Highly recommended.

To Compete With Amazon.com,

Imitate And Improve On Its Reviewing Platform

I’m an indie publisher, a PMA member, and author of The Seeker Academy, a just-published literary novel that explores the holistic/ mind-body-spirit movement. I’ve also been an Internet media specialist for two decades: consulting in 2006 to Yahoo, and in 2007 to the nonprofit Americans For Libraries Council (ALC). My ALC work concerns how public libraries can best use the Internet, viewed as an emerging publishing medium. As an advocate for local empowerment, I find it natural to switch my concern from the 9,000 public library systems to the 1,800 independent bookstores.

I sense that many indie booksellers do not look closely at the Internet. One told me recently to take the Amazon reviews I’d brought to show him off his counter. He seemed to think he fully knew his business.

In fact, though, this bookseller’s business is being shaken, and uncertainties abound. For one thing—the subject of this letter—the reviewing infrastructure that sits upstream from retail on the book business value chain is coming apart. Two Internet-driven shocks are causing this to happen:

The print periodical business model is being upended. Much of the ad revenue it depends on is moving to the Internet—a more effective medium for most niche market advertising… for reaching fly-fishing enthusiasts, etc. Fewer print ads means fewer newspaper and magazine pages, thus fewer reviews. The book editor role is being reduced or consolidated.

The Internet’s emergence as a social space challenges the book editor’s cultural authority. A city with two daily papers and a weekly paper has at most three book editors and a few dozen freelance reviewers. Yet it also has many thousands of readers. With collective opinions about every topic, used to reading reviews and responding only rarely with letters to the book editor: these readers now can choose to also write reviews and to engage in more open-ended online conversations.

These shifts redefine the bookstore business. Customers, who until now consumed reviews, can have more of a say; they can join the taste makers. Amazon.com has begun to figure this out; ABA has not.

A book’s Amazon page displays editorial and customer reviews. If the customer reviewing platform can be abused—if an author’s cousins can write reviews—it is transparent enough to be reasonably credible. One can read and compare reviews, see reader comments on a review, and look at a reviewer’s other reviews. Once a number of reviews are posted, they give taken together a sense of what the book is like.

The ABA in its Web presences provides, on the other hand, a closed system, weak features, and a poor showing of its value. It has no customer reviewing platform. It only points to Booksense Picks, a tallying of the favorite books of member stores. Browsers see signed blurbs—not reviews—and lack a way to discuss a book or a blurb with other readers. ABA booksellers, rather than invite engagement, rest on what they must see as their positions of influence.

This attitude is shortsighted, as it sees neither Amazon’s game nor the chance ABA has to compete. The game is about online social networks, joining published works to conversations. These networks make print culture-exclusive bookstores (and libraries) relatively less valuable.

In fact, though, this network model points to an advantage ABA can have over vendors like Amazon, and to how ABA-member bookstores can extend their local reach. If the Amazon reviewing platform lets one gauge a book by browsing it, by comparing reviews and evaluating reviewers, and by tapping into reader discussions, it remains ungrounded: it offers no physical connection. It lacks the warm local presence and the communal air of, say, a Main Street Books.

Building An ABA Reviewing Platform

Booksense Picks samples at a miniscule rate the staff-written reviews displayed in most indie bookstores. Yet in the space-is-cheap frontier of online social networks, value resides in volume, not samples. Among 1800 ABA members, how many current and recent reviews have been written, on average, by staff—50 per store, or 90,000? And, was there a value to the staff reviews that carried beyond the local store, and offered prizes, how many might be written in the next year—again, 50 per store, or 90,000 more? And finally, could customers write reviews that would display across the network and be eligible for prizes, how many might they write in the next year—once more, 50 per store, or 90,000?

In this scenario, using what may be low estimates, we see gathered 270,000 reviews. Add the discussions that can augment reviews and you see the potential of an ABA-managed community-reviewing network. Then let it build over time. Readers would know that each review and discussion linked to a bookstore that, like our Main Street Books, is a local anchor. Each store would add its local accountability to the network. And each could use the network as a promotional tool: deepening its local ties by letting its staff do more than sell and by letting its customers be more than just consumers.

The ABA, by imitating the Amazon reviewing platform and by adding its based-in-the-local credibility, can build an online-and-physical social network more purposeful than those of its corporate competitors.