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Is India the Wildest West in the World?
A few years ago, here in Paris, I met one of the most memorably optimistic and entrepreneurial people I’ve met in my life. Nick Booker-Soni’s English, but he’d been living in Delhi for years, where he and his wife run a business called Indogenius.
I knew I’d just met someone who saw the world in an unusual way from his reaction when I mentioned I lived in Istanbul. “Istanbul?” he said. “We just visited. First time! But you know, we were a bit disappointed. Just not that much history there.” No one had ever said that to me before. Was that supposed to be dry British wit? A “Boston’s not a big college town” kind of joke? I looked at his face. He was dead serious.
So I asked a few questions, and pretty soon I realized I was speaking the first person ever to lament that Istanbul lacks in history, the first Westerner since the 1930s to believe that the key to the mysteries of the scientific world lay in the Rig Veda, and the only profoundly optimistic Westerner I’d met since the 2008.
This is Nick’s introduction to India, and it’s also a pretty good introduction to Nick:
He’s absolutely persuaded that India is the new land of opportunity for Americans. I was a bit doubtful, as I’m sure you are. But he invited me to see it for myself. And so I did. I was sufficiently intrigued that I pitched an article about it to City Journal.
I was a lot more persuaded by Nick’s optimism than I expected to be.
I wound up writing a book about it. Now, I wasn’t supposed to do that. I’d been asked for an article of 4,000 words. But it was impossible. I just couldn’t say everything I thought at a minimum should be said about a country of 1.3 billion people and why Nick might be right.
So I’ve had the book sitting on my computer for a while, unpublished. I figured conservative publishers wouldn’t be interested in a book about India — for them, that’s a left-wing hippie book. Mainstream publishers wouldn’t be interested in a book about Indian entrepreneurialism, innovation, and private medical care — for them, that’s a right-wing radical kook book. Just no niche for a book about the entrepreneurialism and ingenuity of the Indian middle-class. It doesn’t fit neatly into any publisher’s idea of “a bestseller.”
Publishers tend to like this kind of book about India: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. That’s deservedly successful, by the way. It’s riveting and beautifully written. I recommend it highly. What’s frustrating, though, is that there’s more to India than poverty, injustice, and telegenic suffering. There’s a reason the venture capital’s flying to India these days. It’s the wildest West in the world.
It didn’t occur to me just to publish it myself until I saw how enthusiastic people were about Brave Old World, which I haven’t even written yet. I figured by self-publishing Screw the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Pleasant, Middle Class, Gated Community in Delhi I’d at least learn something about how to format and design a book for Kindle, how to package it, and how to do it without editors, copy-editors, graphic designers, publishers, and a sales force.
I have to say I miss them a bit. If a major publishing house buys your book, it tells you that at least one other person with a personal, financial interest in the book’s success thought it was interesting. I’ve got no idea whether anyone but me will find this book interesting. I’d feel much more confident in saying, “Buy this book!” if I knew that someone who buys books all day for a living had already read it and decided, “This is a winner.”
On the other hand, publishing this way allows me set the price really low. I’d rather sell it for $.99, which is roughly what I’d pay to buy a random book on Kindle about India, but Amazon won’t let me publish it for less than $2.99. Maybe that’s low enough to be in the impulse, “what the heck” zone. Especially if people have already got one-click set up.
I just saw that Nick gave a TED talk about India. You’ll be able to see pretty quickly why we he and I hit it off:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j6XkQ_B9MQ
If you’re interested, I’m sure he’d be delighted to join us for a discussion about India on Ricochet. Shall I invite him?
If you buy the book, would you give me your thoughts? Do you think things like this are interesting enough to publish? I’ve got volumes of similar stuff sitting on my computer. I could publish many more books like this; they’re basically already written.
Does it seem as well-produced as a Kindle book published by one of the commercial majors? If not, why not? Is the editing up to snuff? Did the cover appeal?
Any other suggestions?
Published in General
In addition to Kindle for PC, amazon, on its author publishing page (I think), also offers a Kindle preview facility that does a pretty good job of letting you see what your book looks like on a number (not all, unfortunately) of amazon’s different Kindle versions.
Eric Hines
By the way, before I re-publish it: Has anyone read it? If so, did you have any substantive editorial comments? As long as I’m putting out a Second Edition (within three days of the First!), I may as well make sure to correct as many of the flaws of the first as I can. Did it hold your interest? Would you suggest I cut any part of it?
The title offended one of my readers, who thought it was vulgar. And it is, I suppose. But I know Indians of the very demographic I believe to be a huge market for this essay/book instantly understand the joke — the play on the title Katherine Boo’s bestseller — and find it immediately hilarious and intriguing.
Many Indians, as you can imagine, get weary of books by earnest Western white women who spend time in India and only notice the slums and the poverty. They’ve been working like stink for a very long time to do some brilliant things, and they immediately appreciate what I’m getting at: No one wants to live in those slums, and the sooner they and the people who write books about them disappear, forever, the better — and the fastest way to make them disappear is to do business with India, a country we’d do best not to patronize.
So what do you think: Keep the title? Change it?
The title succinctly puts forth your position.
Stone the crows. Screw the prudes.
Claire, Fwiw, the Aussie author I mentioned earlier just offered a free version of one of his novellas using an app called Bookfunnel. You might find it a way to have your readers advertise your books. If you asked to be on his email list he sent you a code. Anyway, this is what he said about it: http://cheeseburgergothic.com/show/6575
Ok, Screw the Beautiful Forevers is now my second ever Kindle book purchase! :)
Yes, it held my interest. There were certain things that might have benefited from an introduction for the reader unfamiliar with the concepts. I am embarrassed to admit that I had to look up BRICS, for example. I had to look it up the last time somebody dropped it into an internet conversation, too. It was handy to have Google while I was reading.
I would be glad to read more of this sort of thing, though. In fact, I sort of did when I read Bryan Lorber’s bicycle tour journal:
Your book is a good companion for his writeup and vice versa. I’m now going to tell him and his readers so.
I agree with the others who say to keep the title. Screw the ones who are easily offended; you’re not going to please everyone; don’t try.
For future reference: you do tend to repeat yourself, like this passage from pg 19% (8 of 43) [emphasis added]:
India’s economy will for the next thirty years keep growing. You’ll go insane if you spend too long trying to make sense of any official statistic about India. But it’s safe enough to say that the real growth rate has been positive, every single year, since 1980. This will continue. How positive? Doesn’t matter. Could be almost-stagnant, could be as high as 12 percent, but as long as the number isn’t negative, we’re talking about 1.3 billion people (give or take—those numbers aren’t solid, either). There will be massive economic growth. Even dozens of (predictable) catastrophic natural disasters won’t set it back much. No matter how fast it grows—no one knows; and everyone fudges the numbers; so believe no one who says he knows—it’s still a massive emerging market.
This works for a pamphlet of this nature, but it adds little over the course of a book.
I’d also like to see this pamphlet expanded into a book, but I don’t know how you’d do that without losing your broader target audience. This is a good overview of India, but more book would be, I think, more statistics, or more examples (more repetition), or more travelogue….
Regarding production: when I’ve gone through Kindle’s self-publishing routine, I’ve written my stuff in MS Word, using a pitch of 10 (because that’s comfortable for me) and a Tahoma font (because it’s easier to tell the difference between a 1 and a lower-case l). Then I feed the thing into Kindle’s routine, and out comes a quality rendition in .mobi format that Kindles then can render easily. Submitting the Word (rather than a .pdf) also lets Kindle render the text in its default font, which is easy to read, and expand/contract the size of the font with the expansion/contraction of the page IAW each reader’s own desire.
I don’t get fancy with formatting, though (and neither have you in this pamphlet), so I don’t know what the easy upper limit is on Kindle’s self-publishing conversion. Kindle handles imagery well, by reputation, but I’ve not seen that empirically, only the final product.
Tarot pack? I use ouija; it’s easier to control the outcome.
Eric Hines
Don’t be embarrassed — that’s a good point and one a professional editor would have caught: Acronyms should be spelled out on first usage. If it’s not too much trouble (please don’t feel obliged), I’d be very grateful for a list of terms that made you have to use Google. You shouldn’t have to use Google to understand a term in its context.
And Eric, about the repetition — you’re right. I spotted that too once it had been published; I didn’t see it in the original document because my eye had become too used to it. I hate to say it, but being one’s own editor isn’t ideal. In the published version I immediately saw typos; I saw repetition; I saw paragraphs I’d cut-and-pasted that no longer quite made sense after they’d been moved to another section; I saw clumsy or absent transitions; and I saw sentences that made perfect sense to me when I wrote them, but obviously wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. A couple of rounds with an editor would have done this no harm.
I may not have a chance to revise it this weekend because my brother and my nephew will be visiting, but this will all be fixed, and those who purchased it will, I understand, be able to download the new version automatically.
Please keep any suggestions or corrections coming — and also, if something didn’t make sense, don’t assume it’s because you should be embarrassed, assume it’s because I wrote it badly. Let me know if there’s stuff that doesn’t make sense.
(Although I was a bit disturbed when I published the article based on this: My editor told me that I needed to identify the author of the words, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth,” because otherwise readers wouldn’t know what the heck I was referring to.)
Well, you know, that would be for the benefit of all those polytheists in India, of whom we’re willing to be tolerant, so long as [they never] tried it again.
Couldn’t possibly be for the benefit of ignorant Westerners.
Eric Hines
Is this movie sort of timely with our topic or what?
Depends on whether you want to limit your audience. People who read on a Kindle Fire or via the Kindle app on an iPad can access it as though it were a well-formatted PDF (meaning that the text is at least 18 point type). But the Kindle readers that are most common out there, small enough to carry in your pocket, and were the format for which the idea was invented/marketed essentially read mobi-compatible files. Not Print Replica. I have an iPad, which is too bulky, power-hungry, and heavy to use for anything other than Facetime with my wife when she is out of the country. The Fire is similar.
If I were you, I’d put it out in standard Kindle as well as Print Replica. It can still include graphics, but also works with audio, WhisperSync, etc.
I bought it on my Kindle app but for some reason it won’t download….I will have to email them or something
and you advanced the page? some have found that the first page is blank and they think it didn’t download.
Successfully bought. Australia check.
Success!! Appears to have been a incorrect expiration date on my credit card info. Yes I noticed that too about the blank page, was about to be mad that is still wasn’t there . Lol
Ugh. That movie goes on forever …
It’s not even two hours long. Guess infinity isn’t very engaging.
Finished the “booklet” or whathaveyou. Interesting and if I had money I’d look to invest in India! Yes, as mentioned before, there is some redundancy. I think, Claire, that you could make chapters/headings if you do a 3rd edition. Medical care, education, . . .
Hope you had a good day with Mischa and family!