NaNoWriMo-2014-Winner-Certificate

How I Turned My Debut Novel into an Amazon Bestseller (Part 2 of 3) – NaNoWriMo and Online Book Launch

In my last post, I spoke of how I prepared the ground for the release of my debut novel, Maya’s New Husband. I carry that post forward here, speaking about how I actually wrote the book and conducted the launch events.

  1. I joined NaNoWriMo.org somewhere in August 2014. For people who do not know what NaNoWriMo is, this is a worldwide network of writers who come together especially during the November months each year to write their novels. Founded by Chris Baty, the intention here is to motivate people to write 50,000 words of their manuscript, after which they get a winner’s certificate. So, I became a part of this at the right moment – I say right moment because I was able to do my research on it, prepare the book’s outline, and then I could start writing on November 1 at midnight along with tens of thousands of other writers all over the world.

  2. I was also a part of several Facebook groups about NaNoWriMo, along with the wonderful NaNoWriMo Facebook group and the Indian chapter, Wrimo India, spearheaded by ML Sonia Rao. Being a part of these groups helped me in many ways. First of all, I had immersed myself into an environment where everyone around me was writing. Everyone was sharing excerpts, discussing characters, helping people stuck with their plots, and giving dozens of tips each day that helped me understand what I was supposed to do. And I did.

  3. I completed my 50,000 words on 20 November itself, and then took the remaining days to finish the novel (85000 words). The whole month of December, I edited, proofread, and showed the book to some people I trust for their feedback. I had already been sharing excerpts on my FB groups. And the reports were encouraging to say the least. I was revved up to go ahead and self-publish.NaNoWriMo-2014-Winner-Certificate

  4. I decided against traditional publishing for my first book because of several reasons. I did not want to give away all the rights, for starters. But the most important reason was that I did not want to wait that long to know if I can make it as an author. Yes, I am being frank here. Varun Prabhu, a co-author, helped me immensely in my research. And I was finally set to release the book on Amazon.com (through Kindle Direct Publishing) and make paperbacks available in India through Pothi.

  5. Now I had to take an important call. How would I market my book? I already had a reader-base owing to the excerpts I shared on FB and the short stories I put up on my website as I mentioned in my earlier post. I decided to have an online launch event on Facebook itself, since most of my reader-base was online. I created an FB event, and invited people to attend. But here I make an important note – I never did and never will invite anyone I don’t know, even if they are in my Friends list. I only invited people whom I had interacted with about the book. I guess that’s the reason why I received a positive response. Pro tip: Blind tagging and requests don’t help; they are only detrimental.

  6. I now needed to take my online launch event to a higher scale. So I did something unique, something for which people still continue to invite me to discuss and speak at workshops and seminars. I reached out to some of the popular names in the Indian self-publishing world. My offer was simple – I will promote your books my book’s online launch event (which had a good number of people by now) and you will put in a line for my book. And, let me tell you, each and every author accepted my proposal. Some of them told me later that they accepted it not because of the publicity but because they had read my excerpts and trusted my work, and because my request was worded with great politeness and decency. Another pro tip: Being decent always helps. Even if you are making a request, give people something in return. We are all here with a purpose, and it is unfair to expect anyone to help you if you don’t offer anything in return.Maya Event Announcement

  7. The online launch event, which was held on 3 Jan 2015 was a huge hit! Every author brought some of their readers (I had 12+ authors at the event, including India’s leading self-published author Rasana Atreya) and it was conducted brilliantly by an online media team named Spectral Hues. The presence of Spectral Hues got me a few press releases, a few interviews, and the ball started rolling.

  8. On the first day, I kept my book free to download (through Smashwords as Amazon does not allow that). I got more than 200 downloads on that day, and then the true test began.

  9. The reviews started coming in from the next day itself and it said, in no unclear terms, how they had finished the book in just 5 hours because it was unputdownable! Then more of them followed in the same vein. And I was made. Maya Ebook Praise

  10. The book purchases started from the second day. I did an important thing – make banners of the reviews and share them on online media. This encouraged more people to try out Maya’s New Husband, and that only meant more love for the book. Maya’s New Husband ranked as Hot New Release on the second day of its release on Amazon, and subsequently went on to rule at #1 on Amazon.in (horror), which it continues to do this day though not all the time.

In the meantime, there were several other things I did – like creating a teaser video for the book, creating promo banners, sending the book out for reviews, etc. I am going to speak about this in the next post.

Stay tuned.

How I Turned My Debut Novel into an Amazon Bestseller (Part 1 of 3) – The Groundwork

I released the first eBook version of my book Maya’s New Husband as a self-published author on 3 Jan 2015. It immediately hit the Amazon Hot New Releases charts at #1 the first day itself and then the Amazon India Bestseller list, peaking at #1 several times. In fact, even now, eighteen months after its release, the book continues to be at the top of the Amazon India charts, almost always in the top 10 positions. Even on Goodreads, it has a solid rating of 4 out of 5 stars, and as many as 65 reviews and 130 ratings.

People often ask me what I did to bring my book to this kind of acclaim. Hence I thought I would rather blog about it and keep it here for posterity. So, here goes.

In this first part of this three-part series, I talk about the things I did before actually beginning to write even the first word of my novel. Yes, if you plan to be a recognized author, the groundwork is extremely important.

(Disclaimer: The following strategies worked for me. They may not work for you, or they may. And they do entail a fair amount of work. If you are expecting a magic trick, this is your cue to bail out of this page.)

  1. I created a blog six months before I wrote my first book. You definitely need a website or a blog if you are going public. Once your name is out there, people will want to check you out. That is what the website/blog helps you achieve.

  2. Once the blog was made, I started putting up short stories on it every Friday. I went all out to make these short stories as interesting as possible, working on them over and over again, each word and phrase, till I thought they were ready to go. One thing I would like to say here – at every step of my public writing journey, I have always been conscious of being read by a large number of people, and even judged. I make no mistake about that. I might be bordering on paranoia to be thinking of that at all times, but that paranoia helps me create good stuff.

  3. I made a Facebook author page. I kept, and still keep, this page clean and only about my writing work. I promoted the page on my timeline.

  4. I joined several author groups on Facebook. There are tons of them that are really great. I joined not just national but also international groups, because that’s where the real fun lies. I participated in them with meaningful discussions and contributed with my knowledge of the language and the craft. I helped other aspiring authors with my feedback. It helped me make some good friends.

  5. I made a Twitter account, a Pinterest account, an Indiblogger account, a LinkedIn profile, everything. I may not be active in all of these places, but I do have all those accounts and I try to keep them updated.

  6. I started sharing my free stories on these accounts. But not just like that. I designed cover pages for all my stories. Yes, the visual representation is very important. I cannot stress that enough. A lot of people have told me that they have clicked on my page just because the cover page looked appealing. Knowing that, I design cover pages for even a 1000-word short story.

  7. I shared free stories on Wattpad and Figment. I participated in their swap-stories-for-review exchanges. I got great reviews everywhere. I made sure I posted one story every Friday. A time soon arrived when people started waiting for my stories each Friday. A reader actually told me he expected to see a new story from me each Friday. It made me feel high!

  8. I started talking with people who had already gotten published. I found out about their process, and I did research on publishing houses. I saw how traditional publishing compared with self-publishing. I ruled out vanity publishing entirely because that is only another way of insulting your own work before others do it.

  9. I then began outlining my first novel. This happened around August 2014. I spent a lot of time thinking over it, and I spoke with my family about it. Their encouragement was a huge motivating factor.

  10. Around sometime there, I joined a phenomenon that changed my life. It was www.NaNoWriMo.org. I had joined its unofficial Facebook group earlier and I was also a member of its India page, Wrimo India. And then, when the month of NaNoWriMo 2014 started, my journey as a writer truly began.

In the next part of this series, I shall be talking about how NaNoWriMo helped me emerge as a writer, and how I actually went through the writing process. I shall also be talking about the groundwork I did to launch my book.

Stay tuned.

Nayee Duniya (Oct 4, 2015)

Press Mentions

Press Mention in Nayee Duniya (Indore Edition) dated October 4, 2015:

This was a brief coverage of the Rising Litera event titled The Writers Perspectives which was conducted at Cafe Terazza in Indore on October 2-3, 2015.

Nayee Duniya (Oct 4, 2015)

Press Mention in Dainik Bhaskar (Indore Edition) dated October 6, 2015:

This was a brief coverage of the Rising Litera event titled The Writers Perspectives which was conducted at Cafe Terazza in Indore on October 2-3, 2015.

Dainik Bhaskar Oct 6, 2015

Author Bio – Neil D’Silva

Neil D’Silva is a teacher by profession, editor by vocation, and writer by passion. He considers all his attributes to be the means to an end, which is authoring a book that might one day be remembered as ‘that game-changing book Neil D’Silva wrote’. As an author, he made his debut with Maya’s New Husband, a tale of the vilest horror imaginable, and soon wrote The Evil Eye and the Charm, a collection of three short stories about the Indian lemon-chili charms. In addition, he periodically puts up stories on his website http://NeilDSilva.com/, all in different genres but common in the way they make people think beyond the words ‘The End’.

He is also the occasional cook, though his culinary experiments are only enjoyed by his little family of his wife Anita and two children, Gilmore and Felicia. He travels when his schedule and finances permit him, each of these journeys helping him hone his writing style. Always on the lookout for plot bunnies, Neil D’Silva is more like a human sponge who absorbs experiences and observations around him and then squeezes them out into this writing. He usually has this unspoken disclaimer for people he meets: “Be careful, or you’ll end up being eaten by bugs or something in my next book.”

Speaking of his next books, he is working furiously on Sapna’s Bad Connection, a psycho-horror tale with e-haunting as its theme. He has also prepared the initial manuscript for Bugfeast, a horror-comedy, which will go to the editing desk soon. At the same time, he has stories submitted to at least three anthologies, all of which are expected to be out sometime this year. He is also known for Micro Horror Chronicles, a short horror fiction collection that is slowly gaining its presence under the sun.

Connect with him on Facebook (neilvalentinedsilva) or Twitter (@NeilDSilva, @MayasNewHusband) or email him at [email protected]. A courteous reply from him is always assured.

The Birth of Maya’s New Husband

The Calling at Calangute

In the pleasantly warm month of August 2014, my family and I went on our annual food, fun and frolic pilgrimage to the wonderful carnival and cashew feni state of Goa. Over the years, this has become almost a ritual for us, a way to unwind from the hectic mores of the routine Mumbai life.

The Calangute Beach Residency where Neil D’Silva’s novel Maya’s New Husband took birth

Now my family consists of me, of course, my wife Anita, and our two lovely angels, Gilmore and Felicia. The kids are quite a handful, but they keep our spirits high. Most of our trips are centered on them, as they should be; there’s precious little that we do for ourselves.

Every year, our trips to Goa turn out to be the annual highlights. We begin looking forward to them from March itself, and the year of 2014 was no different. However, that was only as far as anticipation goes. For, when the trip actually began, we suffered, right from the outset, from a severe case of Murphy’s Law. For the uninitiated, this Law states: If anything has to go wrong, it will.

So, in Goa, this year, everything began going wrong. We decided to go by train this year, which turned out to be a bad idea. Blighted by gregarious co-passengers and facing inordinate delays, we somehow reached Goa. We alighted during a sudden torrential downpour, in which we traveled to our destination — Colva. This was a long and onerous journey because of the rain and a major road accident ahead of us. The next day, we had to go to Calangute, our final destination, and that journey turned out to be misery personified as well. In any case, when we reached Calangute, we were told — horror of horrors — that there was an issue with our booking. Despite having a two-month advance booking, due to an oversight (mea culpa), we had to give up the reservation and then footed it along the beach to another hotel I knew had rooms available.

Finally, we downgraded ourselves, and found ourselves in a passable accommodation, where we would pass our next three days in bliss.

But, alas! Bliss it was not meant to be! For, the very moment that we dumped our bags at our hotel, Anita caught the chills. She ran a temperature, which was brought down by the antipyretics we carried with us, but she was too emaciated to travel anymore. She could only join in the fun from the hotel room.

So, this was the trip in summation. But, what has all of this got to do with Maya’s New Husband?

I’m coming to that.

The one most wonderful thing about our impromptu accommodation was that it gave us a magnificent view of the salty Goan sea. We were right on the beach, and the balcony opened out to the sounds of the lashing waves at every hour of the day.

On the second night there, after the kids had slept, Anita and I sat on this very balcony, close to each other, snuggled in one warm blanket, and looked at the stars. We spoke of general things, mostly about our lives back home, because that ghost never seems to leave us. But, somewhere midway through this conversation, I was reminded of Longfellow’s brilliant phrase: Footprints on the sands of time.

This created a passion in me like no other. I began thinking aloud, with my patiently-listening wife for company. What would happen of me when my journey here is done? Would I be obliterated just like that? Would I be one of those nameless, fameless grains of sand? Or, would I leave a few of my footprints on the sands of time?

What legacy would I leave behind?

I thought aloud, and she listened. And then I told her that I have to follow my dreams. Because, well, ars longa, vita brevis. I decided, then and there, that from that moment on, I will give wings to my fancies. I will leave my footprints in the form of my stories.

I brought my laptop out that night when everyone had slept, and sat through the dead of the night, in that quaint hotel on Calangute Beach, Goa, chipping away at the machine. It was around 3 in the morning that the initial words of Maya’s New Husband began to take shape.

The Inspiration

The story of Maya’s New Husband chose me. I did not choose it.

Horror had always fascinated me, but, for me, horror isn’t just about spirits and ghosts and vampires. It is much more. Real horror is that which you can feel. Real horror needs to have its element grounded in reality. Horror stories that play out in our real world are the ones that are the scariest.

Here, again, my marriage with Anita became an inspiration for the story. Ours was a so-called ‘arranged’ marriage. We knew each other just for a little less than a year before we got married. This is too short a time to understand each other, their likes and dislikes, their pet peeves and fond fancies, or anything for that matter. Despite that, we took the plunge.

From that first day of marriage itself, I had an awareness of how much harder the marriage must have been on her than on me. She was the one who had left everything behind and made a home with me. I was still in the same house I lived in. Her stakes were undoubtedly higher.

Millions of women marry in this manner in India each year. Knowing practically nothing about their husbands, they aspire to make their homes with them. And, a lot of times, they face unspeakable horrors at the homes of these unknown husbands.

What if, a woman married someone who held the most terrifying secret within him? Won’t each moment with such a man be present a new horror for the poor woman?

This was the basic grain of the horror element of Maya’s New Husband. The horror is not because of the themes; it is because of this desolation that Maya surrounds herself with in her new house.

My inspiration took form from my personal observations, and Maya took shape.

View from balcony of Calangute Beach Residency that inspired D’Silva to write MNH

 

The Process

I could not have written the story if I hadn’t been introduced to National Novel Writing Month in 2014. Towards this end, many things had been instrumental. My brother, Roy, helped me in creating an author website. As the website was created, I saw how my short stories got a concrete platform. My interest was piqued, and I started sharing my stories with people, and got a heartening response.

This was what made me confident of writing a full-fledged novel. It was time to give Maya’s New Husband a shape too. During the NaNoWriMo month, I started writing right from November 1, 2014. I wrote all through this month, religiously clocking in several hours every day. Finally, the manuscript was finished on November 21, 2014.

I won the certificate as a NaNoWriMo 2014 Winner. I proudly shared it with everyone I knew.

When we were a week into December, I sat with the editing of the novel. Anita sat next to me all through those hours, and as she read it, I saw the expressions on her face and realized this was something that could hold people’s interest. I shared the story with a few other people and found similar reactions. I knew I had something monumental in my hands; now all I had to do was to edit it thoroughly and share it with the world.

Maya’s New Husband underwent three complete revisions. I added scenes, deleted fluff and when the third version was done, I got the feeling that this was ready to go.

Around this time, I did some research on self-publishing. This is really an amazing thing! Writers no longer have to grovel at the feet of traditional publishers; they can hold out on their own. The Internet is a wonderful place.

On January 1, 2015, I put forth the eBook to the world. It earned strong reviews right from day 1. Maya’s New Husband had taken off.

On January 18, 2015, I was ready with the print version. This was launched at a happening online event, where some of the best self-published Indian authors attended. The event was buzzing through the night, and the book arrived in its print form.

Today, as I see the print version of Maya’s New Husband, I get a feeling that cannot be described in words. Yet, I am only humbly reminded of the beautiful words of another masterful poet, Robert Frost:

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep

And miles to go before I sleep.

 

Read the entire success story of Maya’s New Husband here.

Interview with Spectral Hues

Author Neil D’Silva’s debut book Maya’s New Husband, the newest entrant in the Indian horror fiction world, has been released in its print version at a unique online event. We catch the author on the sidelines of the event. Here are the excerpts of the interview:

Congratulations, Neil, on your debut novel Maya’s New Husband. Please tell us about the book.

Maya’s New Husband is a novel in the much-unexplored Indian horror genre. At the core of it, it is a horror story, but what inspired me to write it was the concept behind it. It is about a woman named Maya, living in the Mumbai suburbs, who finds a strange attraction towards a mysterious man in her life.