AUTHORED: Minal Hajratwala on "Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents"

This is the second edition of our Authored series. The first was written by Dilara Hafiz, who wrote "The American Muslim Teenager's Handbook" with her two kids. The point of this series, as we noted earlier, is to allow authors the chance to hold forth on the unseemly promotional end of getting a book out. Given the economic downturn, and the onslaught of social networking media like Facebook, the possibilities of marketing a book have contracted greatly on one hand while expanding on the other. If you're an author or even someone with a book lurking in the back of their mind, we're hoping this will become a good resource. And if you have a book coming out soon, please let us know.

Minal Hajratwala's "Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents" is coming out on March 18, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (here's her website). Minal's a former journalist with the San Jose Mercury News, as well as a self-described "performer, poet and queer activist," who documented how and why her extended family left their ancestral lands in Gujarat for the far corners of the earth, over the course of a century.

Here she writes about how she's doing the standard book readings as well as exploiting social networking sites and developing a video trailer on her book. She also gets into the advantages of being an author with a journalistic background, and the perils of wearing a red sari for your promotional photo.

Marketing "Leaving India" - by Minal Hajratwala

Days away from the launch of my first book, yikes!  Thanks to Arun for asking me to share here on SAJAforum about the inner workings of a first-time author's book tour process. 

Women authors often use the giving birth metaphor. I might too were it not for the fact that both my editor and my agent are literally giving birth to their babies during this period -- one down, one to go. I like to claim that my book has inspired their fertility, since both of them are actively increasing the size of the desi diaspora. It's all about me right now, no?

The tour

So I'm doing a five-city tour in March and April that consists mainly of bookstore/library events and mainstream media interviews, with a couple of wine-and-hors d'oeuvre evenings thrown in for fun.  I'm planning more community-based events/collaborations/readings as a kind of second round, along with other cities.  And I'm doing community-based media with my various communities as it makes sense: alumni magazine, Asian Am, South Asian, queer, etc. 

We've managed some creative leveraging of funds, so I'll use a combination of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publicity budget and a SAWCC/Poets & Writers stipend to come to NY in early March, two weeks before the book launch. That will allow me to be part of the SAWCC lit fest event (http://www.sawcc.org/events) on March 7, which I wouldn't have been able to do if just going with the publisher-subsidized trip only.  I'll also use my extra time in New York to do things like speaking at a diaspora studies seminar at NYU.  

I have a great publicist and it's definitely a collaboration, as many of the venues she has booked are ones where I have an "in." Keeping track of all the logistics and preparations feels pretty much like a full-time job for me right now. We chose the cities using a combination of factors; NY and SF were obvious, with LA, DC, and Toronto rounding out the pack. Toronto was a smart addition by the VP of Marketing who felt the huge South Asian community there made it a good choice.

Will I hire my own publicist? Not likely, unless it's after the initial run of work around the launch peters out. I think generally journalists can do this work themselves, if willing and able, but it also depending on how much other work they're doing.  (At least that's my thinking now. I might be crying Uncle in a couple of months.)  I have hired a very part-time assistant to just help me stay on top of things a bit. 

The technology

The biggest expense so far has been a website: http://www.minalhajratwala.com . My author friend Mary Anne Mohanraj (http://www.mamohanraj.com) took pity on me months ago and put up the first iteration for me for free, and it was absolutely invaluable; I'd say get something up, anything, to start with. It's more essential than a business card these days.

For version 2.0, I wanted a site with not just the basics but also a decent media kit, some embedded media, and a bit of personality (pretty colors!). And of course I needed to be able to update it. So I took a basic Dreamweaver class, which taught me enough to realize that I wasn't going to get up to speed on the latest and greatest web technology in just a couple of months. A friend referred a great designer (http://www.justinemerson.com) who created the site through WordPress, which has a back-end system that now makes it as easy for me to update as a blog.

The next biggest expense was the creation of a video book trailer. Totally optional, but I think it's been helpful in letting broadcast folks and venues get a peek at me as an interviewee and as a performer. Performance is part of my background and also a key element of what being on tour is all about.  

The social networking

I'm learning a lot about Web 2.0 stuff. It's a big deal for me because I basically had to spend the past seven years staying away from internet surfing in order to focus on writing the book. I'm happy that while I was out, someone (or several someones) invented online social networking, just in time for me to make and renew connections. 

Some connections are fairly random: A woman who went to high school with my brother and now works for a major national magazine saw my Facebook page through my brother, and offered to pitch a story on the book. 

Others are just a matter of greater convenience: I've been out of daily journalism for eight years, but thanks to the magic of Facebook and LinkedIn, I can be in touch with dozens of former colleagues and folks from my active days in NLGJA and AAJA (yes, I'm old enough that my career actually pre-dates SAJA). It's so much easier than what I would have needed to do in the old days, which is go through my rolodex, figure out where everybody went, and then write individual 'let's get back in touch' notes.

I'm also just getting on sites such as GoodReads.com, where users can rate, discuss, and swap books. There's an author function and we'll see how helpful it is. Amazon also now allows authors to post blogs, connecting directly with users.  It'll be a question of how much time I can actually afford to spend on each of these sites.

The stereotypes

 Mary Anne Mohanraj (http://www.mamohanraj.com) recently presented a study at the South Asian Literary Association conference showing that the vast majority of books out by South Asian American women have a red sari on the cover. Really!  Sheesh. Mine does too, and I inadvertently compounded the problem by choosing *one* of my three author photo outfits as... a red sari.  I had been asked to choose three different "looks," so I chose a sari for one of them, and the red one didn't happen to need ironing that day, and ... guess which author photo ended up on the cover?

So in the face of this sort of dominant image, where my writing actually aims to crack through stereotypes, one thing that's at the top of my mental list is checking in with myself frequently about how am I positioning myself, how do I talk about my work, while also how do I roll with the punches and keep a sense of humor about it all?

The fears

I worry about becoming a stereotype. I worry about selling myself short by not having the capacity to take advantage of every opportunity. I worry about the sheer logistics of surviving the travel schedule, how to not get sick from lack of sleep or performance anxiety, trying to be vegan on the road ... oh, the drama! 

It's intense to switch gears from the highly introverted, hermit-like life I had to lead in order to actually write the book (think seven years in Ishi's cave on a foggy San Francisco hill), to the suddenly extroverted personality I must now become. I worry about losing track of the things I know I need to stay sane and healthy, such as yoga and eating enough protein and being in touch with close friends, not just strangers at bookstores.  I feel lucky that most of the places I'll be going on this initial round, I do have dear friends and family, so that's great; then there is a different question of how much to balance fun/social time, or at least enough sleep, on what is essentially a long business trip.

And of course, I do worry--though I try not to--that there will bad reviews. Or worse, no reviews.

For journalists

I think it's super helpful to actually be a journalist when putting out a book:

• You know what it's like inside a newsroom and how decisions get made. Author friends of mine who have a more creative writing/MFA/lit background are befuddled by the media and tend to take things more personally. 
• You actually know journalists who might cover the book. 
• You have a sense of audience and of how to pitch the book. Although my publicist is doing most of the direct pitching, I've been able to help her by making initial contact with people in my own networks and by writing some of the pitch language for key letters.
• You have the opportunity to reach a wider audience by writing op-ed pieces and the like. I'm not doing this yet, but it will be something to consider after this initial launch phase.
• You can function on deadline, without agonizing over every word of an email, without rehearsing every phone call. You have years of daily training in just doing it.

The economy

I'm trying not to think about it. La la la la, what recession? What publishing industry meltdown? Every editor or editorial side person I've worked with at my publishing house is gone, from the assistant all the way up to the VP in charge of the division, all laid off in the post-Thanksgiving madness. HMH also put a freeze on acquiring new titles so I guess that's why they don't need editors anymore.  So far the publicity and marketing folks are holding on to their jobs; I'm hoping they will still be in the business of selling the books they've already published, at least for a while.  It's much harder to pitch a book right now than it was a year or two ago,  so it's the people who are trying to send out book proposals now who are really screwed. My timing was really lucky. 

If only the stimulus package included a tax credit for people who buy books.

--by Minal Hajratwala

Minal will be reading in New York, DC, California over the next few weeks - check out her tour dates.

Earlier: "Authored: Dilara Hafiz on 'The American Muslim Teenager's Handbook'"