‘Across Borders’ The Making of a Book – 5
My first photo here with the young girl, is in Park Street Kolkata. I took this photo as the girl reminded me of how I visualized the cover of my debut book to have been.
It was designed by Qazi M Raghib, a Delhi based well known Art Director and I had loved it. I had not given him any additional inputs, other than the synopsis of the book whose cover he was to design and my author profile. He went through my social media profile to choose the author photo and made this cover design, knowing I would like and approve it.
The colours, the emotions, the passion and drive, represented me the author. But my publisher, a man of about 76 then, even though he had initially agreed and paid well for this design and met the designer in Delhi as well, decided it did not suit his publically projected social class and personality or perhaps his religious and cultural identity.
So despite my loving it, as I’m not class biased, and did not see the girl in the photo as the balloon seller but rather the buyer, as my character Maya was well educated – I was forced to scrap it and chose from a series of cover photos that were nice, but did not represent me. The book was published in 2013 with a dull grey sky for the cover that I just could not relate to.
To this day, I believe this bright cover with my mother’s photo on it, totally Qazi’s inspiration and brainchild, would have done better justice to my book commercially. As after all it’s my work and I would know better what it stands for. The media coverage pan-India however was excellent, but I don’t know if it was coincidence that each one of the major newspapers used a bright and colourful photo of me, not of my choice, from those submitted by their press photographers who covered the events in several cities.
I have said this before and I reiterate – Life is not what happens to you – but what you make of what happens to you. I do not take my failures and challenges as the end but the beginning of a new rocky mountain path. In fact sometimes success makes me give up on a particular track once the challenge to overcome the obstacles is over. Those who think writing a book, or making a film and such tasks are a child’s play or let’s say akin to getting a high professional degree or having a successful career(not creative) – may take a reality check. It’s a lot of hard work, perseverance and grit, with tons of egoless mental and emotional resilience to face never ending rejections and over all, that large dollop of good luck.
At the time, just after writing my debut book I had chronicled all my experiences, in my much publicised and often featured Suleka.com blog so that so many bloggers, several excellent writers and wannabe authors would learn from my mistakes and chart their paths knowingly and differently.
My Sulekha.com blog that makes me the poet and author I am today, through the confidence I garnered from much public readership and comments is no longer live and active.
But I have reposted many of the experiences in my current blog, in a series titled “The Making of a Book” Part 1-4, which will give you the story of how difficult it is to write and publish a book.
Many self help books on how to publish a book are there in the market, but I can tell you with assurance that none are as vivid a first hand account of the struggles involved as my chronicles.
I have a trainer and coach mindset from my two decades of corporate experiences, so I tend to do or write anything with that perspective always – so that it may ease and inspire even a few in their life-path.
“The Making of a Book” is in the link below – at the end of every part you will find the link to the next- a total of 4 parts: https://shuvashreeghosh.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/the-making-of-a-book-part-1/
In Chennai, last summer: colour attracts me and how!
I love colour anyhow! 
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