How ‘The Science of Yoga’ book might be hurting yogis
Like most yoga-related media, when “The Science of Yoga” came out earlier this year, we felt obligated to talk about it.
Of course, as with a ton of the yoga media, we approached the book with a certain amount of animosity given its big pre-release was via a New York Times magazine article that focused on how yoga can hurt you.
The intent was obvious: controversial title, get eyeballs, gain readers. It’s among the oldest ad tricks around.
But, as I talked about before, I think it backfired. The book pretty much came and went. It never cracked the top 10 on the New York Times best-seller list, as best as I can tell. Within a few weeks of its publication, based on Amazon metrics and other (admittedly) guestimates, it already was just selling in the hundreds, perhaps low thousands, of copies.
With a potential audience of 10 to 20 million, that’s not exactly bringing the agni.
I chalked it up earlier to the book’s marketers getting things wrong. Instead of leading with the salacious, they should have led with something substantive but still surprising. What did that book have to tell us that all of us yogis didn’t know? (We know yoga can hurt us, after all. It just takes one distracted second to learn that lesson.)
From the ‘Roots of Yoga’ kickstarter page
That should have been the first New York Times story. It might have gotten fewer curious, non-yogi readers, but it would have made the potential buyers of the book interested and not, instead, disinclined to shell out $20 or so.
Now there’s a potential book out there that seems intent on telling yogis a bunch of stuff we don’t know. It’s the Mark Singleton and Jim Mallinson project, “The Roots of Yoga.” Singleton is the author of “Yoga Body,” which seems to have been the successful model that the “Science of Yoga” failed to emulate.
Singleton, in other words, has proven publishing credibility. Both have academic and research cred. The research they intend to do? In part it will involve translating yoga source books into English that haven’t been translated before.
By default, it will be bringing yogis stuff we don’t know.
And that’s why I’m still curious that they have gone the kickstarter route to try to raise $50,000 to fund the research of their book. As of this week, about halfway through the time for their fundraising, they aren’t half way to their goal. I think we can say it has an uphill battle.
Why this route? Why not a more traditional book advance, especially given their backgrounds?
I know I bring to these questions a certain preconceived idea of kickstarter. I think of it as enabling people who couldn’t find funding through traditional means — movie studios, publishing houses, art benefactors — to cast a wide net and see if they can find people who believe enough in their idea to put a little something into its creation.
In my mind, Singleton and Mallinson don’t quite fall in that category. And their book — unlike some 20-something director’s short film — could end up making them some real money. (Maybe the emphasis is on some, but that’s still more than a short that runs on Vimeo.)
Right? Or is that the rub?
As I’ve been thinking about their kickstarter campaign, two rationales for it keep returning to me. One is that they didn’t want to lose a certain freedom in their research. But I don’t see how an advance would limit them.
The other, then, is really the one I’m left with. They made some inquiries (ala the comment in our earlier post suggests) and didn’t find any, or the right, interested parties.
And how could that be, with their bringing to millions of potential readers new information about yoga?
The answer: “The Science of Yoga.” I wonder if its lack of big success didn’t poison the well and make their sales pitch an impossible one. (If you don’t think that happens, check out this take down of how Mars movies have crashed and burned.)
If that’s in any way the case, then “The Science of Yoga” now actually is hurting yogis. And while, to be honest, funding this book project strikes me as not exactly what kickstarter is all about (because I feel like they somehow could find the money), I feel like I’ve found a compelling argument to get in on this look at yoga’s roots.
Have you yet? Less than two weeks to go.
Posted by Steve
Hi Steve,
This is Mark Singleton. Thanks for the post–a friend forwarded it on to me. I thought I might take the chance to explain our position on the Roots of Yoga kickstarter campaign. The answer to your question is that we’re trying an experiment to see if there are ways other than traditional academic funding to get this work done. Academic scholarships are fewer and farther between these days. If you add this to the facts that RoY is not an academic publication per se (it’s aimed at yoga practitioners primarily) and that it’s very hard to get academic grants for sourcebooks, you can see why we were encouraged to look at other options.
It was Dr. Dominik Wujastyk from the University of Vienna who first suggested kickstarter to us. Here’s what he wrote a while ago on an academic listserve:
“Partly at my suggestion, my friends Mark Singleton and Jim Mallinson are trying out a completely new way of funding an indological project. They wish to co-author a book on the history of yoga, that they are calling The Roots of Yoga. Rather than going to a traditional academic funding agency, they are appealing directly to the public. They hope that the global public interest in yoga will result in a strong enough response to fund the project….I am personally watching this initiative with great interest. They have raised nearly $5000 in just a few days since launch at Kickstarter, but they are aiming at a larger sum that will give them the time and freedom to do the work over the next two years. I believe this kind of direct public appeal has real potential to help promote and support certain subjects within indology. But at the moment, we have everything to learn about how to proceed with such a funding bid and how to design an appeal to the public that is realistic and will work. Hats off to Jim and Mark for being willing to be pioneers in this.”
That summarizes our thinking quite well. You ask why we didn’t go for “a more traditional book advance”. Well, academics are used to getting *no* advance on the books they write, and I don’t even know anybody outside of academics who is getting such advances these days, what with the financial squeeze in publishing. Also, we’re at the beginning stages: all the manuscripts are identified, but we don’t have anything like a complete book, and there’s a good year’s work to do before we start sending proposals out to publishers. Also, the kickstarter campaign will give us autonomy to put the book together as we see fit from the outset, without having to negotiate with a publishers’ marketing considerations. We think this is the best way to give the project the maximum integrity and usefulness possible.
Once we’ve done this initial work, we’ll approach publishers. We want to make the book as affordable and accessible as possible.
You’re right that we do indeed have an uphill battle in the next two weeks, but we’re confident we can make it. We’ve had an outstanding response so far, which speaks to the great generosity of the yoga community. It turns out we’re probably better at scholarship than social media. We’ve been learning a lot over the past weeks. So if the project sounds interesting, please do help put the word about!
Many thanks for your interesting post.
Mark
Hi Mark.
We’re delighted you stopped by. I did suspect there might be a bit more autonomy from a kickstarter campaign, and my knowledge of the publishing industry does skew away from academic toward more mainstream non-fiction (as well as fiction), where for non-fiction there can be an advance. So what you wrote there is helpful to know.
I will admit to being perplexed that with a supposed audience of 10 to 20 million in just America, yoga books don’t seem to be easier sells. Perhaps we all are too busy reading Patanjali?
We look forward to seeing the project thrive. And if you can find that Yoga Korunta, all the better. (That’s for sure a joke.)
Steve
Steve, thought you might be interested in my “Power Of Yoga” micro-thesis about what is actually going on here: http://matwitts.com/blog/kickstarter-nietzsche-and-the-power-of-yoga/