Rashmi Bansal is a name that every reader in India is aware of. Who hasn’t bought and read Connect the dots, Follow every rainbow, Stay hungry stay foolish, I have a dream… and other books that she has written? Obviously then, if one gets an opportunity to talk to her, one is sure to let the discussion move rapidly from the weather to creative writing. You can read my review of one of her books here… and there is another interesting post that I wrote that will be relevant.
One of the first things that I asked her was if it was a good step for any new writer to go first for an E book, and then search for a conventional publisher? She told me that though she didn’t think there was any one universal formula but ‘many authors, new authors particularly, find it difficult to reach out to publishers, because publishers get huge number of submissions, and it sometimes takes six months to reply to you with just one line. No. So in my opinion it is helpful to have been published on Kindle and show that you and your creative output can have some readership. So it’s kind of a test market.’
This short discussion that we were having was during the award ceremony for the winners of the recently held pen-to-publish contest on KDP and one of the facets that worried me a lot was the long queue of writers trying to sell their books. I have always felt that readership was more important than mere sales and so we got talking about difficult choosing the right book to read had become in this literal blitz of self-published works. She smiled and told me that the task was just as complex even for those authors who went through the route of conventional publishing. She then added that a lot of effort to create awareness and do the outreach lay with the author anyway. ‘Focus has to be on your book. Writers need to make sure that the cover does its job because if one gets a good and attractive cover for a well written book, half the job is done. The synopsis should be catchy. And maybe you have to first try to propagate it to your own circle… and I would say that sometimes people may not give you a completely honest feedback so as not to hurt your feelings.’
Talking of a distinct methodology to make a book more visible and buy-worthy, Rashmi Bansal added that ‘some authors have actually, you know, distribute a few copies of their books to discerning readers, cultivate the right environment on the social media, and then let the good word travel intuitively’. I guess this cultivates an appropriate readership base. She recommended that authors need to catch readers young and gifting a few copies to school and college libraries creates a sturdy base for some incisive feedback. ‘Conducting workshops on the theme or subject of the book is definitely a good idea,’ she said, ‘if your subject is finance, you might want to do some personal finance workshops, for instance.’ She did mention that activities need to be out-of-the-box as well because the right opinions have the power to create the right marketing message which helps the book to penetrate through the large number of books that are published in the country.
This was when I wondered aloud if we were not already having a lot of workshops on everything from creative writing to becoming better at everything else. ‘Aren’t these workshops over-hyped?’ I asked. ‘Well, what if I say that I like to sing in a casual sort of way,’ she said with a smile, ‘I might sing in my bathroom, I might sing in front of a small family gathering. It’s not necessary that I have that power or talent to sing professionally but these small sessions do give me enough practice opportunity, right? It is the same with writing. Books are my vehicle to express my thoughts and it gives me some kind of happiness to know that the act of writing gives me pleasure. I feel lighter. I’ve enjoyed. I have shared my skills with a few people. Maybe the charm and effect doesn’t go beyond the workshop or personal session… but if it does and people read my books, I’m happy.’
We all know the orientation of the books that she writes, but what most of us are unaware of is that Rashmi Bansal too has been an entrepreneur and had started a magazine called JAM, two years after graduating from IIM, Ahmedabad. Her first book started as a project from IIM, Ahmedabad and the initial plan was to print a thousand copies to be distributed at a conference being held on the campus. ‘It wasn’t even meant for commercial publication,’ she said, ‘What I did then was what felt right to me and during the writing of that book I was inspired by every person I met. Each person interviewed was someone who shared that emotion, that journey of entrepreneurship. As I had been an entrepreneur myself I understood their pain and they also spoke to me more freely than they would have spoken to somebody else.’
This best-selling author loves reading on her Kindle though mostly those that she doesn’t ‘want to preserve that book and keep it in my house and I have to give it away to someone as I don’t have enough space but if it’s a book of great lasting value and I want to refer to it again and again it is going to remain on my bookshelf’. However, she isn’t absolutely comfortable with the digital format and normally prefers the video… and like most of us, would go for the Kindle version if a book wasn’t readily available in bookstores in India.
During this discussion, Rashmi Bansal admitted that she had never deliberately planned to write a best-selling book. Her aim was simply to write one ‘which I can be proud to put my name on’ and she had spent six to seven months working on the concept, had travelled to six cities and met 25 personalities… and finally completed the writing bit in around three months. This represents a lot of hard work and when I asked her if writing fiction was easier, she replied, ‘I think for me, maybe non-fiction came to me easily, but I wrote it in a style which is close to fiction. I believe that every fact is connected to an interesting story… and stories cannot just be dry facts and figures. According to business experts like Andy Defrancesco, every great business idea starts as a small idea in a person’s mind and then, you know, and gets propagated into the outside world. Other contributors join until the idea becomes a caravan, a social movement, a business, a book, a tale… call it anything, but there will always be hard-work and a lot of patience connected to success.’
Many may not be knowing that Rashmi Bansal is also writing a fictional tale… and when I asked her if her talent for investigation while writing her earlier books would make her write a thriller, she mentioned a few stories that were waiting to be published as an ebook and that her proposed work of fiction is ‘still a work in progress. There’s no point talking about it. It has to develop in your mind and then you know, once the idea fructifies in totality is when I can play around a bit with events and characters. This is different as when I’m writing nonfiction, I have to be true to the reality to the best of my knowledge.’ So far as fiction is concerned, her opinion did have long and unending streaks of non-fiction writing bobbing up and down all the while. Good and wholesome research fascinates this writer and I am sure her work of fiction is going to have more than just stray references to the reality that she experiences in her daily life… which is good as some believe that fiction with large doses from personal memoirs tends to have every diverse emotion in place. However, her ambition is to write a modern biography of Swami Vivekananda.
When there is a writer talking about books, a mention of getting more readers in is bound to finds its way in. Rashmi believes that ‘every book has a million readers. We have to accept this. Now with the KDP too, as is with conventionally published books, it is the book that must hold a reader’s interest. It needs to be relevant to them as they are investing time. The first ten pages are enough to tell a reader if the book is worth their time or not.’ There obviously has to be something unique and distinctive in a book to lead a reader to invest more time.
It is obvious that there has to be an intimate chemistry between a writer, the publisher, the book itself and the reader. Our conclusion was that KDP helps making the process of publishing easier for writers but it doesn’t mean that writers forget about the quality of the text that is finally going to ensure that readers not only read beyond the first ten pages but also go ahead and recommend it to their friends. We live in times when a good word communicated by a reader travels a longer distance than any marketing campaign. Marketing does help but only to bring it closer to a few discerning readers.
Rashmi Bansal has published a lot of books and has a fairly large base of readers. This simply means that she has not gone ahead and insisted that the first draft be published because a lot needs to still be done to make the text precise and sharp and fit enough to hold a reader’s attention.
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Arvind Passey
17 June 2019
