Not Just an Author, I'm an Authorpreneur

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Writing is the easy part.

You've heard it. I heard it.

You don't believe it. I didn't either.

Writing is the easy part. Truly.

Two and half years ago, I resolved to write my first book. I had the title in my head for eight years - Black, White and the Grays in Between. I knew it was going to be a story about Kanak and Neil. Somewhere along the way, I found Rukhsar and Ashar. The story in my head was soon becoming a Word document on my Mac. I managed to stick to my rhythm - fifteen hundred words every week. A little under nine months and my labor was real. I had a shiny manuscript, ready to be edited. I could have finished it sooner, but I had knowingly built a feedback loop into my writing process.

As a product manager, who builds high-technology products, I am a firm believe in testing your hypothesis, developing a minimum viable product (MVP), and being agile with your product development and feature backlog. You want to develop, test, tune, and repeat. I used the exact same approach with the book. I enlisted my closest friends to be the innovators and tasked them with reading finite sections of the manuscript while I made progress with the plot. Their reactions and feedback went into the subsequent phases of writing and helped flesh out the story before I actually worked on the narrative.

In an ideal world, I would have a team of editors, laboriously poring over my work. They'd look at every comma and at every that. They'd make sense of every independent clause and every subordinating conjunction. However, for a debut author, that is seldom the case. You may get some support, but the quality of your work is largely a function of your own diligence and desire for perfection. Binge-watching on Netflix had to make way for a methodical approach to reading and making edits to what seemed like grammatically accurate sentences.

Finding a publisher is perhaps the toughest task in the whole process. You may have moments of self-doubt, but you truly believe that your work holds real merit. Unlike a linear career choice - where you study hard, go to a good school, make good grades, get a decent job - writing and publishing is a business based on perspective and instinct, which seldom are data-driven. You scout, and you pitch. You hope, and you get rejected. You find someone that wants to invest, and you doubt. The motions that any entrepreneur goes through, an author does. The book is your intellectual property and like most inventors, you don't want it to end up in the wrong hands.

With a publisher selected, you assume that it would be smooth sailing from then on. You assume wrong. The designer will do a great job with the cover, but only you know your vision. You know that Charminar, Gateway of India, and the Houston skyline have a significance. You know exactly why you picked the title, and why you insisted on a bluebonnet to be on the cover. You rely on your instinct, but you seek feedback. You know the release is imminent, but you know that you need to package it right. You write the blurb and your biography for the back cover. You write your elevator pitch and more.

And then comes the release. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat (I am still amazed with this one), Instagram become as frequently used on your iPhone as Outlook. You reply to emails and send tweets. You setup a website. You also know that you're an author doing it on his own, so you use GitHub pages and brush up your coding skills so that you don't have to pay a hosting provider or a developer. Just as you did with the manuscript, you get your innovators to try out the website on devices with different form factors. You contemplate an app-only approach, but you dismiss it. The world is still not there. You design a theme for your social media posts with a 30-day free trial of Photoshop. You monitor your social media diligently - Bitly usage patterns, Facebook post reach and engagement statistics, favorable hashtags and Twitter handles.

You are not just an author when you write your first book. You are a writer, an editor, the cover designer, the web developer, the social media marketing manager, the public relations manager, the data scientist, and a lot more. You are a dreamer. You are an Authorpreneur.

Unfortunately, you are not the reviewer.

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