Read on Twitter
In 2018 BC, in my 14th year as a photographer, I self published a photobook on my city, Bombay. I had no idea what I was getting into but it was an unbelievably enlightening, humbling process (not journey)! In the next few tweets, I’ll share some vital snippets of it.
The idea for the book was sown many years ago by a conversation that happened at an office lunch in 2009. Six writers, one bureau chief and me were in this swanky sobo restaurant when the chief proclaimed, “I see six books coming out from this table.”
Apart from this awkward lunch, there were other triggers too. My aunt and uncle were famous Sindhi writers and my mum and sis would often borrow books from their library and read to us. Soft human interest stories, folk tales and sometimes big format Russian graphic novels.
There is also the added realization that my portfolio as a news photographer was reasonably scattered. Nothing held it together, and I was just an assignment photographer like many of my colleagues. The usual rut of festivals, disasters, bollywood and of course, cricket.
In 2014, my dad was unwell and admitted to a hospital by the sea. The adjoining was a place we frequented every weekend when ours was an undivided family. On one afternoon, I made a photo of that place that moved me immensely.
The photograph depicted a fair amount of change in many elements of my childhood. The stone pathway, children feeding birds. Sea Rock hotel was replaced by Land’s End, a bridge on the horizon. And a mammoth crow cutting the square frame diagonally, wings wide open.
I made this image on my phone, and it made me think. What if I were to make a book of pictures, about my hometown, with my phone camera. All square format, all up close and personal, keeping this very photo of the sea as an anchor?
Laboriously over the next few years, my room turned into a mammoth edit table. I made physical prints at Ramesh’s (Idea Creative)I used all the journalistic resources and skills I had, didn’t say no to a single assignment and gave myself a deadline of the last day of July 2016.
I cannot stress on the importance of having a good printer. Things were different int he dark room days, but with digital it is a very different scene. Ramesh and I developed a very fine working comfort. After the second batch, I didn’t even have to tell him what am looking for.
Because I hate big fat bulky books, I was keen on my book being small enough to fit on a dinner plate. Since Bombay was a cluster of seven islands, the book was sized at 7 x 7 inches right from the start. The initial working title was the very meh - GHAR (home).
Akella Srinivas, Harsha Vadlamani, and my partner were most harassed by me right from the start to the end of the production of the book. Many other folks helped along the way but the list is too long for here. However, my family didn’t get a glimpse of it till I made a dummy!
There were however some who went our of their way to make life difficult. Like a book designer who kept me hanging for months till my oatience wore out. A publisher whose contract made me throw up. And another who was hell bent on publishing the book despite my refusal.
The entire publishing model though is wildly screwed up. A lot of publishers want you, the author, to generate the cash for the production. What you get in return is a big print run, appearances at book fairs, contests, lots of press, but what about sales? And royalty?
Most mainstream publishers will sign up established photographers only. my publishers were new in the game and were offering me 15 percent royalty with them pumping in the production money. Book price was obviously going to be above 2000 INR. That was a deal breaker for me.
I dislike buying books that are beyond 2k. This price manages to keep many new readers away and encourages sharing, instead of sales. Many panel discussions blabber endlessly about inclusion yet they forget that the capital intensive nature of photoland excludes many.
Anyhoo, with help I found another designer and I educated myself with the basics of InDesign. I could make a pdf!! Big move from being a single image photographer all these years. Sequencing and seeing how one comes after/before another is therapuetic and often painful.
Needless to say by now I had missed my deadline of 2016. So I extended it by a year. In the meantime, I went one morning with Dr. Radhika to photograph some triathletes who do some intense pre dawn training. Yet another self assignment with potential to be in the book.
On my way back, I decided to walk through some Bandra lanes, looking for those ancient gorgeous manhole covers. I remembered one very clearly, in Pali Naka. The road around it would get a new layer of concrete every few years and fallen leaves would accumulate.
This was the first quarter of the year, I found the manhole, surrounded by leaves as usual. In the cool gentle morning sunlight while I was making pictures a ginger kitten walked in and sat in the light path. She was glowing red and was later joined by her sibling and her mum.
The scene reminded me of a fable my mother used to tell us. About a young man and his unusual friendship with a Red Cat. Like all fables, there were deeper metaphors that I understand better now, and this story is an integral influence of how and what I see in things around me.
I decided to include a translation of the fable in the book. I wasn’t keen on a photograph on the cover since the start, but now I hunted for an illustrator who would sketch for the fable. Multi disciplinary photo book I was aiming for.
Someone introduced me to Anupam Arunachalam, and he made some fantastic illustrations. Took us about six months more. Deadline extended again. Everyone who saw the illustration found them to be great but a total misfit. Till one day, I saw it too.
Just like the protagonist of the Red Cat story, I had lost my way. The number of images in the book had ballooned to 144, from 90. The new designer and I had placed colour backgrounds for text, and I absolutely hated the font and now, the TITLE too.
There were several times when I wished to abandon the project altogether. I mean, in the larger scheme of things, this was just a book of pictures, by a small time photog in a dillapidated island masquerading as a metropolis. Should I have held on to that publisher? (Hell no!)
One such depressed evening I met Chaitanya Tamhane for many drinks at my favourite shady bar. He heard me out and directed me towards his mentor @BoodhuRamu who managed to give me an immense amount of clarity and helped me streamline my printing choices.
By now I dropped the pretentious title, and made a zerox paper dummy that I showed to @shilparao11 . I avoided showing my work to too many photographers for obvious reasons. Not because I am suspicious or insecure, I just wanted different opinions.
Shilpa was one of the first to catch on the 24 hour pace/timeline of the narration. She helped me further streamline it. Mind you, she didn’t read a word of text. She just saw the b/w hastily folded gravy smudged dummy and that is all it took for her to decode.
My enthusism was doubly refreshed by an introduction to Peter Bialobrzeski by Avani, one of his students. Peter was to be in Bombay to photograph the city for a project and was looking for someone to assist him. Someone who knows the suburbs.
Now Peter looks at cities very differently. Our styles are diametrically opposite and that is what made our evening walks very interesting. He zooms out of a scene and foces the viewer to step in and observe minutely. And we’d wrap up each walk with some chicken tikka masala!
Over several skype calls, Peter helped me murder many darlings in the book. From a long, boring, indulgent edit, we brought it down back to an ideal number. Not once dis he pressure me to do as directed, like all great teachers, he’d simply nudge a bit, till I convinced myself.
I was simultaneously working on the layouts but sadly my relationship with the designer was on the edge. She found me to be very scatter brained and confused which I was. But the thing is, if its your first book, you are bound to falter a bit every now and then.
I started looking for back ups on the side. I threw my problems with the font online and Neha Vaswani stepped in and sent me hundreds to choose from. Sajid, my former colleague at Hindustan Times, taught me some more In Design.
Sabeena Karnik agreed to design the title font. She made it by merging the handwriting styles of my two sisters. While she did that, I visited many printers in Bombay and had an excel sheet full of quotes and a folder of paper samples of various gsms.
Things were going good, I put out a crowd funding call. I didn’t think and nor do I know how to write grant applications so I didn’t bother with that. I had roughly 200 pre orders and that was very encouraging. And then the designer gave me an ultimatum. Her way, or the highway.
I had paid 50 percent advance to the printer in Hyderabad, I was to begin production in a few days and boom. I cancelled my flight ticket, hotel reservations. Lost money on both, but I was in no mood to be steamrolled into accepting a design I wasn’t okay with. Neither should you
I also had to stick to my new deadline which had stretched from 2016 to 2018. And am so glad for all the delays in a way else that version of the book would have been terrible. My mentor’s birthday is on 16th of May and I saw it as a good day to begin printing.
I forgot to mention about this fabulous excel sheet that one of Peter’s publishers sent me. It was to help me keep a track of quotations, paper samples, dates, orders, shipping, everything. It was one of the most valuable contributions made by someone I have never met. Yet.
Now I had never stepped into a press before. I knew of the process by reading but those big machines and that intoxicating fragrance of ink was something I wasn’t ready for. A week before I reached Pragati Offset, they had sent me a digital dummy that unnerved me a bit.
The dummy was made on the 130 gsm paper I had chosen, Mont Blanc Extra White. But the damn glue at the spine had come off. I was pissed but hey it looked nice. Like the exposed pipes and wires of the concrete buildings of our island.
130 gsm was making the book very fat and killing something I had thought of while making the sequence. Dropped it to 100gsm. Could have gone lower too, but this was perfect. If you hold up some pages against the sun or in front of a light, two images merge to create a new one.
A day before going to print, I was aghast at the tones set by the pre-press chaps. They had done intense corrections and bumped up colours, saturation etc. While I didn’t want that at all. If you gonna make phone photos look like they are from an SLR what is the point of it all?
It took four years to get to the printing floor and the entire book was printed in 8 hours. I have terrible handwriting but I had to sign off every sheet. The signing off made me feel so important, so brave that I raised the print run from 500 to 1000 copies 
Jokes apart, it made economic sense to pump in a small amount now and increase the print run than print lesser at higher costs later. A few hours before I boarded the train back to Bombay, Soyaz gave me two freshly bound copies to take home. The rest would arrive two weeks later.
On 1st June, I had fifteen huge boxes of books at home. And over 400 had to be dispatched to various folks in the city, in the country and outside of it. Before I could plan shipping, I received a call from a friend who was passing through Bombay, enquiring if the book was out!
Since I didn’t have a courier plan in place yet, I told her I’ll meet her coffee and hand over the book myself. Her reaction on receiving the book, our conversation thereafter made me want to go deliver every book by hand to all my readers.
For the next few months, I’d pack my car and head out every weekend for books drops across the city. I’d even take an extra day if I was travelling on assignment to other parts of the country and fulfil orders, if any. This was an amazing experience, for me and the readers too!
I also reached out to editors of several mainstream publications requesting a weekend feature about the book. @writemeenal , @gaurivij , @utterflea were kind enough to feature it in the initial stages.
A rookie mistake I did was to offer free copies to 3 people hoping for a review. As self publishers we don’t have the luxury of throwing free books at people. Some folks can, I couldn’t. But I fell for it and learnt a good lesson since the reviews never did happen.
It was also very stupid of me to go after this insipid validation. I was going house to house getting reviews every weekend. Nothing is more amazing than a reader’s feedback. I could make one more book with those experiences but me thinks that would be too indulgent 
Self publishing requires a different and uneasy level of persistence. Something I had never done before. I agree that it gets irritating to witness a 24/7 sales pitch, but boss, that is the only way. Especially when likes and heart reacts are many, and readers are a handful!
@aslam_saiyad and @SloganMurugan were very helpful and promoted my book at every stage not just during the production but post launch as well. Even now, Gopes doesn’t shy away from mentioning it to people he thinks would be interested in it. The two have a heart of gold.
I was scheduled to officially launch the book at the Indian Photography Festival. I was asked by Aquin if I wanted any of the visiting photographers to launch it. Felt weird to let some rando launch it when they have no idea about my work or the book.
I wanted the team at Pragati Offset to come and launch it, but it was a Sunday and they were like, nice gesture thanks for the invite but we gotta sleep! Anyhoo, as a fitting metaphor, I launched my own book, after some 300 people had alresdy got their copies.
If I had to strip it down, the book is not just about the city. Bombay happens to be the setting, that’s all. The core of the book is our hunt for affection, peace, our own island of calm, of love in these turbulent seas. Arrivals at these junctures are never in a straight line.
Just before the start of production, I had received a message from an artist wanting to contribute 25k towards the printing. The money was to go directly to Pragati and although they don’t agree to multiple sources for payments, they made a concession after too much emailbaazi!
Owing to a final miscommunication the money never came and that made me wonder. If one really wishes to help, just go ahead and pay the photographer. Packaging, couriers, outreach etc, there’s just so many ways that this sum could help. Contributions with caveats are the worst.
Management of payments was yet another thing I learnt the hard way out. Initially I was handing out account details and then getting addresses and then adding it to my sheet. @arhemant mocked me for being ancient and I started using UPI. Followed by @instamojo
The good thing about @instamojo and this is not a paid tweet, is that it allowed me to have all details at one go, and download/update the excel sheet directly from the dashboard. Their shipping is still sucky, but am sure they’ll crack that. I only wish they’d make an iphone app
So I had the books, payments, addresses, very strong word of mouth PR, but I was a bit stuck with couriers. I had factored for the cost of the right packaging and shipping charges, but this was monsoon, delays were inevitable and things were getting erratic and annoying.
Simple solution. Break it down. Instead of one service I deployed four, each handling a different sector, and thanks to the competition that arose from them all being next door to each other, the pricing was in my favour. You’ve still got to track it yourself though.
Size, thickness and weight of the book ensured I get the right pricing. You don’t want to pay one fourth of product MRP on postage. Last few books I purchased weighed a tonne, and were packed in multiple layers of bubble wrap and envelopes. Who finally bears this cost? The reader
Forgive the topsy turvy timeline of this thread, that is just how memory works. Now before I did the crowdfunding call I had to redo my old website. Not redo, I had to abandon years of crafting my window display. I was helped immensely by Sunny Agarwal, whose wedding I had shot!
Sunny is in Norway, and am here in Bombay. He quickly bought a wordpress template, hosted my site on some server and I was very clear that a single page should house all details and a purchase button. No bullshit like email for price, write to order, and other douchy things.
