When She Smiled – released on Kindle

When She Smiled – front cover

Yesterday was remarkable. My debut novel – When She Smiled finally got out its incubator and got out in the world – like a raindrop falling into a lake.

It’s been an interesting year. I coded  an entire marketplace from scratch which is now performing incredibly well. I shifted my life from Delhi to Bangalore and settled the dust. I slowly started dipping my hands in the affiliate marketing batter. I announced my wedding which is coming faster than I anticipated. And I checked off ‘Publish a novel’ from my dream board.

This novel business has really impacted my life and future goals in a big way. When I first decided to write the book, I had no clue how much it would end up affecting my future. But along the way, I discovered how important writing meant to me and I resolved recently to keep writing more books.

I want to share my journey with you.

It was May 2014, and I had just finished reading Catcher in the Rye. It was a simple story. Much like yours or mine. I decided to write a book that day. No flying bullets or international spies. A plain ol’ teenage love story. I had stayed in Shimla for a decade and I decided to set the story in Shimla.

Within a month, I had a few sleepless nights when I took audio recordings of all the plot ideas my incessant mind kept bringing up. Soon, I had a list of characters and a basic plot ready. That’s all I needed to start writing – a mistake I won’t make in the future. Its imperative to have a scene by scene description of your entire plot panned out along with detailed character sketches BEFORE you start writing. I didn’t know all that then. So I wrote. I took a long time to write. But I didn’t quit. I focused on writing and kept my mind off the business, marketing, management, programming,… everything.

By the middle of October, the first draft was ready. And that’s when it all changed.

I started to dive into the publishing world and discovered nineteen bucketloads of information along the way. The image I had in my mind of the publishing world was very 90’s. A lot has changed since then.

A lot of self-published authors are more successful than their traditionally published counterparts. I had initially thought about getting When She Smiled published by a big-name publisher. But my research revealed some important points.

Traditional publishers (Penguin, Random House, Harper Collins, Rupa etc.) take about 4-6 months to simply EVALUATE a manuscript.
Then they take another month to finalize the contract and complete formalities.
Then its upto the AUTHOR to do most of the marketing for the book.
Getting published by a big-name publisher does not mean you’ll get full on media publicity and become a bestseller.

I checked Flipkart reviews for several big-name publisher books published in the last year or two. VERY few had more than five reviews in total. I mean, WHAT?

So after writing the manuscript, these publishers want me to wait around for eight months, let go of my copyrights, sign a contract that nets me less than ten percent royalty, and in return I get crap?

If I’m getting crap, I’m getting it on my own terms. So I decided to embark upon the challenging, yet intriguing world of Self-Publishing.

I believe the knowledge that I’m gaining every single day in this niche should be shared. Therefore, I’ll be posting my When She Smiled journey on this blog.