ST21 | The Realities Of Being A Part-Time Author

Can the passion and flair for creatives be a potential career option for you? Rishi Piparaiya, one of the top executives in the corporate world, is one such creative soul who dived into his passion for the written word. But he did it with planning and deep knowledge. This helped him steer clear of unpleasant surprises of the writing world and stick to the core- the fun of the writing process. If you are desirous of stepping into any creative field, this episode of ShopTok is a must-listen for you!

An Economics graduate from the University of Rochester and a Master’s degree holder from the Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management, Rishi Pipariya has seen it all in his corporate career of more than 20 years- from heading Sales at Aviva to taking care of strategy as Vice President at Citigroup. It was his love for writing that made him quit his well-paying job to venture into the field of literary escapades. He is now a well-known author of some of the best-selling books like Aisle Be Damned and Job Be Damned. He is also well known for his adventure-based books for children.

Discussion Topics: The Realities of Being a Part-Time Author

• Sharing your creatives with your friends
• The practicality of pursuing your passion
• Financial stability before entering creatives
• Publisher versus Self-publishing
• Self-promotion and marketing your books
• Passion and fun should be your primary motivators

Transcript: The Realities of Being a Part-Time Author

Amit Ray: Hey, so had a pretty interesting life or career, or maybe you have a wonderful idea for a story or deep knowledge on a topic that you really care about. And it’s something that you think people want to know more about that topic. And maybe the idea has crossed your mind that perhaps you’d like to write a book about this someday. And business leaders are clearly doing it all the time. And so are celebrities. And you probably think you can write better than many of them.

You may not be wrong when you come to think of that. But is it actually possible to make a living as a published author? So today, we talk to Rishi Piparaiya, author and CEO of Imaginara Legacies, who’s actually written quite a few books, both through publishers as well as on his own. And we’re going to ask him how one gets started as an author, and what it takes to get published. Is it really something that one can aspire to, and most important, is it something that one can make a living at.

So with that said, Rishi, thank you so much for joining us today. Welcome to ShopTok. It’s a pleasure to have you with us. And maybe before we begin, perhaps we could start with a short intro. And you could tell us about your journey so far. And also a little bit about Imaginara Legacies. It’s actually a really interesting name so I’m very curious.

Rishi Piparaiya: Thank you so much Amit. Thank you for having me over. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here. So well, I’ve had a pretty traditional career to start with. So after business school, I got into banking. I worked in a Spanish bank, for some time Santander, moved to Citigroup, in New York, then moved to Citi in India.

So I spent about seven to eight years with Citi. And then I moved into insurance, with Aviva life insurance, again, out here in India. So a very, very traditional career doing marketing, doing sales, doing strategy. But on the side, I always had an interest in writing, and you’ve worked in banking how much bureaucracy there is, what crazy stuff goes on. So I used to actually write humour and satire.

And this was, frankly, in the early days of email, and all that, so, I write some stuff, and emails out at work, making fun of the bureaucracy all around us. So those get forwarded around quite a bit literally there would be Citi bankers globally, who knew of me because of my writing. So that was my first stint in writing. At Aviva, I was heading sales. So I had a team and I literally had 2000 people around the country.

And I was taking two to three flights a week, and I am the most paranoid flyer you will ever encounter, I just absolutely hate it. And every time I’d fly, there would be some story or the other, I would be sitting next to the CEO of Unilever. And this is true, it happened and the plane would take off, they’d be turbulence, and I’d clutch him.

I would be sitting next to some Bollywood actress and annoy the hell out of her over the flight. And I’d come back and tell all these stories to my friends and colleagues. And they’d be like, in splits as, what’s wrong with you. So at some point, I said, anyways I’m sitting on flights, I’m not enjoying it. So let me write down these anecdotes.

So I pretty much wrote down a whole book on my Blackberry while half of it was while I was flying. And then at some point, I said, Okay, why don’t I give it a shot and get it published? So I put it together in the form of a book and started a search for the publisher, which was a challenge in itself. But eventually, I did get it published. And surprisingly it turned out to be an absolute bestseller. It was like a national bestseller out here in India, people loved it and it was all over the airports. It was a humour book on flights. So well that was a fun process.

And like you said, you work in business, you’re in the corporate world, there’s a lot of knowledge that you pick up which you want to share. And at some point, I thought look is writing something that I could do full-time? Because after a while you get tired of your career. I mean, things are going great, but after a while, and once you reach the senior levels, it’s all on autopilot, you’re not challenging yourself as much. And so that’s when I decided that look, maybe let me look if I can pursue writing full time. But before I jumped into it, it looked very, very glamorous from the outside, right?

You can be on a beach; you can be writing when you want. But I thought, let me test it out. So I took a sabbatical for a few months unpaid sabbaticals, I went to Cambridge, I did a writing course over there, I took some time to travel, to just figure out whether I can spend time on my own, without the corporate environment. And it was quite nice. I tested it out, and I got my finances in order, which was important so I took a year to just get that sorted.

And then I took the plunge. So I went over to my boss and said, Look, I would like to just do something else. And I was not going to the competition. So they were fine with it. And I was willing to give them enough time.

So I literally spent, I think, seven or eight months transitioning the team, and then moved into writing pretty much full-time. I set up this company, Imaginara Legacies. It was just, I mean, we had the structure. At some point, well, my first two books were published by a traditional publisher, Jaico, which is a large Indian publisher. And my next book was with HarperCollins, which was a satire on corporate life.

So I had the manuscript, but I published it after I left the job. I don’t think it would have been appreciated too much while I was working. But at some point, I’ve wanted to also test out self-publishing. And for that, I set up this company, and one of its main roles is to self-publish my books. I do spend some time mentoring startups and entrepreneurs. So we sometimes make some small angel investments in companies.

I’ve called it Imaginara Legacies, the whole objective is to leave a legacy of work, rather than just a balance sheet or income statement or shareholder growth. So the whole point is that whatever we do, are we creating a legacy, or whatever companies we support, are we creating a legacy, whatever, I’m writing so that’s all objective.

And we’ll talk about it, but in writing you spoke about, can you make a living. More than a living, I think you can leave a legacy, and that is the primary driver, at least for me. So that’s been my journey, in the last five, six years, and I have got about six or seven books out, I’m enjoying the whole creation process. It’s fun.

Amit Ray: That’s amazing. Actually, I have one question before anything else, when you decided to leave your job, and you went and told your boss or I guess your peers that you wanted to do this, what was their reaction?

Rishi Piparaiya: I would say, disbelief, surprise, and scepticism. I mean, the first thing they thought I’m making it up, and at those levels, when you want to leave, chances are you’re going to competitor, chances are you don’t share where you’re going, so they really thought I was making it up. So, there was disbelief. But then the fact that I was willing to serve out, six, eight months of notice was, I couldn’t be going to a competitor.

So that I think was some relief. But the other thing was that why would you do this at the top of your career, when things are going fine, everything’s great? Why would you want to do this and why would you just literally do something as much risk of just being a writer, and something that’s so unusual? But at some level, I think people would love to do it, and people would love to take this kind of plunge, and there are a lot of things that stopped them, and when you see others doing it, you kind of think that maybe you could do it yourself as well. So, it was a mix of both, stuff that I wish I would be doing this, but also why are you doing this?

Amit Ray: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I’m sure everybody was 50% jealous of you and 50% sceptical that it is going to work out. So I think that makes sense. So, you have written your first book, I think while you were still at work, and the second one you said you had the manuscript, but you got it published afterward, for good reason. So for the first book, how did you actually manage to do this on the side? Like, did it take a lot of discipline to make this happen? Or was it just because you were writing it on flight so it just got done somehow?

Rishi Piparaiya: It’s a good question. As a writer, you get a lot of your ideas, a lot of your material, and a lot of your content from stuff that happens around you. If you’re writing nonfiction, then exactly it’s what you’re learning, what’s happening around you. If you are writing fiction, a lot of the characters, a lot of the situations are based on real-life stuff, and then you kind of adapt it towards writing.

So my first book was a book on flights on air travel, and all this stuff was happening around me. And it’s just a question of, kind of putting a switch on your brain that either you’re a passenger, or at least for me, you turn the switch, and suddenly, I’m a writer on a flight. And so you just switch that thing. And suddenly, you get all this content.

The other thing in writing is, once you have an idea, or once you have something you want to put on paper, you just put it on paper, that’s what you should be doing immediately. Because if you just park it, oh, I’ll do this later, I’ll write it six months down the line, or I’ll go on holiday, and then I’ll write all this if it doesn’t happen.

So the best way for a writer, I feel, is to be very occupied, be aware of what is happening around you, and put it down on paper. So like I said, half the book was literally written on Blackberry while I was on the flight because there was nothing else I could be doing. And either I could be stressing about the journey or I could devote myself to my Blackberry.

Ironically, I was probably more disciplined about writing when I was working than I am now. Because now you kind of tend to progress Oh! I will do it later, oh, I don’t have a deadline, when you’re actually working, when you’ve got 10 things going on you can find some time to do this. So, I think I found it easier to be disciplined while I was working because I could just carve out time.

And because there was just so much happening around me. If I’m writing children’s books, I mean, I write a lot more when my kids are around, or when I’m in a park, or when I’m just around kids. So I think you should just make the best of your environment and try to get some writing done in as disciplined a manner as you can.

Amit Ray: So I think essentially, what you’re saying is, number one, you should be always at least jotting down notes. Not like okay, mental note, I’ll write this in six months, because that will not happen and you are not able to write. And second, it’s an interesting point about being more productive when you’re actually working, or rather being more productive as a writer. And that’s, I think, because you have the constraint, like I only have this one hour now in the evening, so let me use this productively versus I have 24 hours in a day, I can do it whenever I want.

That is very different. So that was about how you did things on the side. But then you actually did plan this whole process of becoming a full-time writer. So why don’t we dive a little bit into that, which is, how did you plan to be a full-time writer?

Rishi Piparaiya: Well, one is getting pulled into writing or getting pulled into something you enjoy, and the other is getting pushed out of what you’re currently doing. For me, it was a mix of both. In the sense, as I said, I had reached the top of my career, and the next role was CEO of some organisation. And at that point, you kind of look at the incremental benefits versus what you’re giving up.

So I was, I think, reaching the stage where you’re taking the next step in my career, I don’t think the incremental benefits are going to be worth what I’m going to be giving up, what I was going to be giving up was a lot of my time, health, the ability to not pursue your passions in such a way. Right now, I could literally take a few weeks off or take a few months off, I’ve been in Goa for the last few months. And stuff like that is not possible when you’re in a corporate job, and equally is the pool of something that interests you.

And writing was something for me, I mean, there’s not much that you get out of writing, but you do get the opportunity of sharing what you know, and giving it back and like I said, leaving legacies. So there was a lot of stuff across genres that I wanted to write and share. And that was the pool of writing.

I was quite aware that there is really no money in writing books as such. So if any of your audience is thinking that we’ll be making a lot of money as a writer, that’s not going to happen. And we can go into the maths of it, but there is absolutely no money for I would say anyone other than maybe the retailers in writing so neither do the writers make money nor do the publishers make money.

The retailers probably make some money but they offer it all back as discounts. So that is no money for writing books. Now there are ways to make money as a writer. I mean, if you’re in nonfiction you could make money. I mean, if you establish credibility or expertise in an area, you might be called for guest speaking opportunities and stuff like that.

If you’re writing fiction, there could be money in it and now most fiction writers are writing from the objective of I’ll convert this into a web series, I will sell the TV rights, film rights, there could be money in all of that. But in pure books, there isn’t.

So I had to prepare for that look, I’m assuming there’s gonna be no money coming out of it. Have I saved enough and have I invested well enough so that I can generate enough passive income to sustain myself. So if you are looking at being a writer, you also need to, I mentioned early on, I took literally one or two years to just make sure I had my finances in order.

So I would suggest that you need to do that and just assume that nothing will come out of writing other than pure satisfaction and pleasure. But you need to have other sources of income and all to sustain yourself.

Amit Ray: So, generally speaking, if you do want to be a full-time writer, you first need to take care of your financial health, because chances are, the writing alone is not going to get you there. And so therefore, number one is you should be ready financially, to sustain yourself for potentially years if you want to write like that.

And the second thing, which was a very interesting point is that more likely, you will make money in things that are ancillary to the writing. So you write, but then you make money on other downstream stuff like speaking opportunities, or maybe screenplays, like you said, or anything that is peripheral to the writing itself; the writing is just a vehicle to get yourself out there. So I think that’s interesting. So, the most important thing is to prepare to make sure that financially, you’re okay.

So let’s move to the next point, which is, now that you have a manuscript and you’ve obviously set yourself up to be a full-time writer, how does one actually find a publisher? Because, as far as I’m given to understand, publishers get tons of manuscripts and mostly unsolicited, I’m sure, and they don’t have time to go through all of this. So how do you actually find your way into a publisher like that?

Rishi Piparaiya: I am telling you, Amit, I think writing is actually the easy part of the journey, it is probably the easiest part of the journey. But the tougher part is finding a publisher to publish a book. And the toughest part is actually marketing the book and making sure you get it out to readers. So finding a publisher, really, it’s, I mean, I don’t to dissuade again, the audience, but it is incredibly difficult for a couple of reasons I mean, the main thing, like you said publishers receive 1000s of manuscripts a year, most of them are unsolicited, they are Word documents or PDF files.

And you can just visualise, after email with a manuscript, with each writer believing that this is the best work out there. And a typical publisher, I don’t know, they probably publish 100, 150 books a year. So how do they pick who to choose? Publishers are in it for the money.

They are going to be picking manuscripts that they know will sell and authors that will sell. You said it earlier I mean, they’re looking for businessmen, they’re looking for celebrities, they’re looking for influencers, anyone who has a readymade audience who will buy the first 1000, 2000 books that is a much surer bet, then someone who they don’t know.

So what you need to do is one is you need to start building your audience more than the quality of the manuscript, they are really going to be looking at the quality of who you are as an author and who your audience is, and whether you can get the first 1000, 2000 copies started. So you need to be out there on social media, building your audience, you need to be out there on Twitter, you need to be writing blogs, you need to just have people who are interested in your work.

So when you go to the publishers, they say that look, he is marketable, he is sellable, he or she can get the first few books out, the first few 1000 copies out. Number two is what I did, and it was again, I’m a marketing person by background. So what I did was, I actually went out there and I wouldn’t say self-published but I actually created the book. So I didn’t submit the Word document because I don’t yet understand how people can choose a book basis just a Word document.

So I actually went out there and I created the entire book. So I got one of the self-publishing companies, I got the whole thing typeset, formatted and I made a very nice cover, I made a brochure of it. And I was marketing the book to publishers. So I went to the Delhi Book Fair, which is the largest Book Fair out here in India every year, and had a little docket with the first chapter of the book with the cover, with the brochure.

And I left it with all the leading publishers. And then of course I followed it up with emails and all and there were two or three publishers who said, Okay, please come in, and talk to us. And so I think that got them interested. So if you can do anything I would say which gets their interest, which makes your manuscript stand out from the 1000s of other manuscripts that they’re receiving that will certainly help.

Amit Ray: This is a new piece of advice, by the way, Rishi. I mean, as you know I’ve written a couple of books and I’ve read a little bit on this topic. Nowhere have I read this particular tidbit that you just gave which is just go to a book fair with a mockup of your book. This is excellent, because normally the general advice is, oh, look for their email, try to find somebody up the chain. don’t submit it to the standard email address, but it doesn’t really work. I think this at least has a better shot than emailing anyone frankly.

Rishi Piparaiya: It totally does and it just shows that you are passionate about it. Literally one publisher when he saw the whole thing was a bit downcast. Actually, that was Jaico, who I ended up doing with it. I mean, they were a bit disappointed because they thought I’d already self-published the book. And they said, Oh, man, we would have liked to, and they thought I was just looking for distribution. And I said, no, no, I just want to show you what it might look like. And I’m open to all sorts of changes.

But this is what I’m talking about. And because it was a very different book, anyways, it was air travel, no one had ever seen anything like it so it was all the more important. But equally, I think it’s very hard to convey your ideas and your passion in a Word document or PDF file. If you’ve made all the effort to spend months or years writing the book, take another few months, and get a graphic designer to do everything that you would have anyways liked to do.

And we can probably get into it. But chances are, it might be very difficult to find a publisher, not because your book is not good, but just because they are flooded with manuscripts. And secondly, they are looking for celebrities and the people who will sell. So chances are you might anyways want to self-publish, and all this effort will not go to waste, because you will still need to typeset it, you will still need to make the cover.

You will probably define the manuscript a lot more when you see what it looks like in person. So I would highly recommend that you write the manuscript but also don’t give it as a Word document, just take your baby to fulfillment and do everything around it.

Amit Ray: Yeah. So in fact, I think we may as well move on to that point. So essentially, you’re saying that whether you’re publishing or self-publishing, do this much of the work and at least make sure that you have a ready-to-read kind of version of the book. And then if let’s say, the publishers don’t take it, and this approach doesn’t work, for whatever reason. And it’s mostly a numbers game.

So, therefore, chances are, it won’t work, because just the sheer statistics of book publishing is so poor. And then you might want to self-publish it anyway. Because why waste all of that effort? So how does one go about self-publishing? Because I know you’ve taken that route for your more recent books.

Rishi Piparaiya: So for my more recent books, my children’s books series, I consciously took the self-publishing route. To be honest, I did not even approach publishers. Because for a couple of reasons I wanted the flexibility, I wanted the speed, I wanted the scale, it was a lot more risk-taking than a traditional publisher would have taken.

So I went to the self-publishing route. And it is actually fairly straightforward. I mean, self-publishing is very, very simple now in the sense, you can find experts in every field, you can find graphic designers, you can find cover creators, you can find illustrators, you can find typesetters, editors, there’s a host of great editors available. And you can do it at your own pace with your own vision.

So I would say if you’re fairly clear on what you want to put out there if you’re very clear on what you’re writing, self-publishing is a very, very viable option. Amazon, of course, is one of the leading sites where it has all the tools that you need. But also, I mean, there are a lot of independent services, which for a reasonable fee can take the charge of a lot of this.

So my advice would be, I mean, early on, if you can find a traditional publisher, there are benefits for sure. For your first one or two books, it’s great if you get a traditional publisher, because you understand the process through them, it gives you some more credibility if you have a big name behind you.

It’s like I mean, if I come out of business school, people advise me. go join a big organisation, because the name will stay with you throughout. But that doesn’t mean you retire from a large corporation, you just get that kind of stamp. So if you can get it great, but if it’s coming at the cost of just a lot of heartache, it’s coming at the cost of a lot of time, if it’s taking a lot of effort, I would just say don’t be disappointed, because it is very easy to self-publish.

And at the end of the day, I’m telling you the success of a book is not who has published it, it is how well you have marketed it. And no matter if you get the top publisher to publish it or you self-publish it, the marketing has to be done by you. You have to make all the effort over there. So, the decision whether to self-published or traditionally published, I don’t think will impact the sale of your books as much.

Amit Ray: Because I think even the publishers ultimately anyway, still go through the Amazons and so on. Of course, they have a retail-like physical book distribution network that you may not have if you self-publish, I guess. But again, I think many books are bought online now and as a starting author, like you said, chances are anyway that you won’t sell a million copies of your books.

So in smaller numbers online, is just fine, the same as trying to sell offline. What about in terms of the numbers like in terms of how much money you make versus the publisher makes, etc. in traditional publishing versus self-publishing, like, are you better off somehow, in self-publishing?

Rishi Piparaiya: You’re slightly better off, but like I said the margins on books are not great for anyone you know, as an author, you get 10% of the royalties, the retailer takes 50%, roughly 20%, I’ve calculated is the cost of producing the book. So that leaves 20% for the publisher, and then you have overheads, you have marketing, and all that.

So the publisher probably gets another, that 20%, maybe becomes 10. So as a self-publisher, your 10% royalty goes to maybe 20, or 25. And that is not much. You retail a book, even if I had let’s say in Singapore even if it’s $10. As an author, you will get $1, for a book, as a publisher, you might get $2, for a book, a best-seller in India is 10,000 copies, and that’s a best seller. So that’s $20,000 if you write a bestseller, which is incredibly hard.

And the money is the retailer, if anything, you need to open a portal and compete with Amazon and that’s how you make 50%. But otherwise, you’ve got to look for other sources of income. And you’ll end up spending a lot more in marketing a book than you actually will make in royalties, at least in the first few 1000 copies.

Amit Ray: Yeah, and I’m glad you shared these numbers with us because I think it underlines the fact it’s not going to be your next career most likely, essentially, like it probably takes a person a year to write a book, that also one that’s going to be a best-seller unless they’re super lucky. And so that’s $20,000, at most.

And that also if you’re a publisher, if you are the author of $10,000 for a year’s worth of work, which even by Indian standards is not an incredible amount of money, it’s okay. Maybe you can feed your family, but that’s about it. So that’s not a crazy amount of money. And I think it underlines essentially the point you made earlier.

The other thing you mentioned is or rather frankly, all of this is boiling down to how you can get more books sold. Because it’s a numbers game at the end of the day. And you have mentioned that marketing is one of the biggest things that you can do as an author. So there’s the writing part, which is what all of us think, is the hard part. But then you said, Well, it’s also getting the publisher, which is true. And then it ultimately is, with or without a publisher, it’s the marketing. So how should one or how does one go about marketing their own book?

Rishi Piparaiya: So, marketing I think someone you really need to build a social media presence early on, whether social media and whether as a blogger, as a columnist, you need to be out there known as a writer, and people need to be looking forward to your writing. So a book is actually just a culmination of what you have been doing for a long period of time. So maybe you just have a very, very popular blog going on, maybe you have great podcasts going on, but you have an audience, which is looking to hear what you have to say.

And a book is just one more form of content. So I think that’s the number one thing you need to do, you need to be out there creating your presence, and you have to establish yourself as a kind of authority figure. And second, you have to self-promote yourself. And it’s not easy. And writers are actually I mean, it’s a genetic my experience, I mean, you’re generally a bit more introverted, you would rather be creating content, than marketing and promoting yourself. And there are only that many Facebook posts, and Tweets, you send about your work at some point, and you get kind of tired and embarrassed about it.

But the reality is you cannot you know, you’ve got to be a bit shameless and just be out there touting your work. Because if people don’t know about it, and they don’t see it, they’re not going to buy it or read it. So I think it’s a mindset shift as well that look, I just have to be out there and put myself up front.

And the third thing is and again, I’m still kind of working through it, but Amazon ads, Facebook ads, end of the day they work. Again, financially, like I said, financially we are X bankers. I mean, financially none of this makes sense. You will never get the ROI on an ad, or the ROI that you’d expect, but I think it just needs to be done.

You need to get that initial momentum. And once your books pick up and once there’s word of mouth happening, and in children’s books, for example, if you have kids, talking to their friends, hey, you need to read this book, at some point, it’ll cross that resistance and take off. And that’s what you got to hope that you’re making all this effort in marketing, and then it crosses that resistance, and then books will have a life of their own. But you need to invest in advertising on Amazon, and Facebook or wherever your audience is, and reaching out to them.

I would say stuff like, people do all these book launches, and they go out to bookstores and do these readings and all, I personally, I don’t know how much that works, I think it’s a tick box item, you need to do it. But at the end of the day, at least all my book launches, there are 20 friends and family and 20 people who were roaming around in the bookstore around that, who happened to be at the bookstore at that time.

But no one really comes to just listen to an audience, expound wisdom about his book my view. But that said, books get sold by copies, you will never get an order for 1000 bucks or something, it’s 5 books, 10 books, and then that picks up. So whatever you need to do you need to spend a lot of time though being out there is my overall view.

Amit Ray: Yeah, I think everything that you said, seems about right. Essentially, you need to build your audience, and it’s your responsibility to market to that audience. And that’s effectively it. And you have to kind of discard that shame and lack of self-promotion because nobody else is really going to do it for you. So you have to basically push forward.

Rishi Piparaiya: Yeah. If you take a traditional publisher, the writers or authors believe that I’m going to give this to a traditional publisher, and they will do everything. So, as I said, a traditional publisher, if they’re publishing 150 books a year, let’s take 100 books a year that still means there’s a new book coming out every three days. And there are 100 writers, authors who are counting on the publisher to put all their muscle behind it.

So one is they don’t have the time, they have literally three days before the next book comes out. So in reality, literally, there is a window of a month, or two months at best, where they will really support your book. And after that, they are hoping that the momentum kicks in.

And secondly, I told you about the budgets, I mean, they themselves do not have much budget, I mean, to market. So how much can they put in? They’re getting 20% of the sales, maybe they put 5% I don’t know, but that’s hardly anything on $10,000 that’s $500.

That’s literally Amazon ads for a few weeks. So you’re not going to get that much support in marketing from publishers, they will get your book out there, and they will give you a lot of support in other ways, but they’re not going to be throwing big dollars, or their major resources behind you unless you are celebrity, author or someone who’s for sure going to be a bestseller.

Amit Ray: So, honestly, all of this sounds like a, let’s say, a difficult journey, not for the faint-hearted, let me put it that way. It is something that you need to be aware of, push through and be quite clear that this is what you want to do for at least a long period of time. Are there any other challenges of the writing process itself maybe or anything else?

Rishi Piparaiya: The biggest challenge is there is immense competition. But the interesting part is your competition is not writers. I mean, it’s great to have writers, because they’re encouraging people to read. And 10 years back, I just used to consider my competition was television. That people could either read a book or they could watch TV.

Right now competition is, I mean, it’s everything. It’s video games, it is TV, it is Netflix, it is Instagram reels. I mean, people could spend an hour just scrolling through, I mean, I do it sometimes I just mindlessly scrolling through reels, and that’s 30 minutes gone. And that 30 minutes could have been spent reading a couple of chapters of a book. But you say competition, you’re competing for people’s time and attention, which is incredibly difficult.

And you’ve got a lot more competition out there right now. So I think that is the biggest challenge. How do you get people to read your book, and whether writing is the right medium who knows? I mean, 10, 15 years down the line writing would not be the best medium at all. It could be a podcast, it could be video, it could be the metaverse, it could be some form of content we don’t know which doesn’t even exist now.  So I think that is one big challenge.

And the other challenge is just trying to keep yourself motivated. Okay, just being out there, getting to the desk doing some writing, and whether or not like I said, sales happen where you get positive, negative reviews, keeping yourself motivated. If you’re there in the corporate world, you have colleagues, you have bosses, you have team members, you have a whole support network out there, and motivating you, as a writer, you really don’t have a lot of that network, a lot of people around you will not understand what you’re doing, why you’re doing it.

Other writers are busy in their own worlds. And there’s actually not that much interaction, right, you might go to a literary fair, I mean, or something like that. But there’s not that much interaction. People come there, do their thing and go back. So that is another challenge. But that said, there are huge benefits, and it’s a great lifestyle, and it’s very, very satisfying. So you kind of have to balance out these things.

Amit Ray: Yeah, I think, ultimately, you have to write for more than the money and the fame. Because if you’re writing for money and fame, then I think all of these challenges are going to probably bog you down. And you probably gave up after a point.

But if you’re writing for personal satisfaction, or to get some message out to the world, or entertain people, like you’re doing right now with your children’s books, then I think that has its own purpose and reason for being so maybe you don’t focus so much on these kinds of things. And you focus really on writing and getting the message out there.

Maybe I think the takeaway from all of this, is, despite all of these challenges, one should be absolutely aware of these before one starts. You don’t write, or hopefully, you don’t write for making money, because you could have made that money much better and easier in a regular job. You write it for the purpose and the passion.

Rishi Piparaiya: Definitely with all these challenges and all but I would not exchange this life for anything else. You don’t really get these opportunities where you wake up every morning, and you’re dying to run to the computer and dying to write the next few chapters or edit. So I was working on these children’s books, children’s are based in different cities around the world, and the entire pandemic, I’ve literally been locked in at home.

But I have not felt that because you wake up and you can transport yourself to Copenhagen, Sydney, Melbourne, or wherever, whatever book you’re writing. So you have just so much freedom. And it’s actually very, very liberating, to be able to do what you want to be able to express yourself the way you want. So if you just set your expectations as to why you are doing this and if you’re very clear why you’re doing this, then it is like you said, it’s not about the money, it’s not about the fame it is just about what you want to convey. There could be really no better career than this.

Amit Ray: Yeah. So thanks a lot, Rishi. I think this has been very insightful for me, as well as like a one-time writer anyway, and I’m sure it’s very insightful for the people listening to this call, and I’m sure more than half of them, I’m sure at some point want to write a book.

So it’s good for everyone to know. So thank you so much for peeling back the curtains and helping us understand what it means to be a writer. And before we close, maybe let me just summarise a few points that I took away from this.

The first point was to be financially prepared because it’s going to be very hard to make a living out of writing unless you really get a lot of traction, which is rare at an early stage at least.

The second one, which I thought was a great tip was to mock up your book, once you’re done with it as a marketing tool, and if it doesn’t work as a marketing tool, and you can’t get it into publishers anyway, then use it as the self-publishing, go down the self-publishing path. And you can use the same mock-up design, etc. for that. And self-publishing can be faster and potentially earn you a little bit more on a per-copy basis than traditional publishing would.

The other point that I took away, which was a big one is to build an audience. So it seems like actually along with financial prep, maybe you should also be audience building, maybe even before you decide to become a writer, if you have an audience, you have a far better chance of actually getting your books sold, assuming the audience obviously is relevant for your kind of writing.

And I think the final point was around promotion and self-promotion. So you need to invest time and effort into promoting either through ads, or through book fairs and readings and stuff like you said, and you shouldn’t be afraid of self-promotion. I mean, that’s part and parcel. And I agree it feels a little cheap sometimes to keep talking about your one thing all the time. But look I mean, people are doing it about their work just in different ways. So you may as well do it about your work, which is to write.

Thanks a lot, Rishi. I think these were good points. And once again, I really, really appreciate you being here with us. And for everyone listening, thank you so much for tuning in. So thanks once again for tuning in. Rishi, thank you so much for joining us today. We were Rishi & Amit with ShopTok. See you next time.