Special Offer: Book Giveaway

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My publisher has kindly agreed to provide a limited number of giveaway books for silent auctions, raffles, and contests benefiting nonprofit organizations. If your nonprofit is holding an event and would like to offer Leaving India as one of the prizes, please email the following to contact@minalhajratwala.com :
– Your name
– Organization name
– Address to which the book should be mailed
– Date of the event (IMPORTANT: We need at least one month in advance, because the books are mailed at the bulk media mail rate. There are no rush orders for this offer.)
– Publicity benefit (for example: web site listing/link, program listing, program advertisement, announcement at event, etc)

I’m excited about this opportunity to help out good causes. We’ve already tried it twice for silent auctions, and each time attendees were willing to pay above the cover price; one person paid $46 for a book, 100% of which benefited the organization! (Thanks to APIQWTC and Trikone for being the guinea pigs for this special offer.)

Please note that because these books are provided by the publicity department, the event must include some visibility for the book. Examples: exposure on a silent auction table, web site listing/link, program listing, program advertisement, raffle announcement at event, etc. Also please note that the book will be sent to you directly from the warehouse, so if you’d like me to sign it, we will need to make those arrangements after you receive the book. Thanks!

Gay press reports FIA apology over India Day Parade

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Wednesday Aug 19, 2009 — A gay online news site reported today that an executive of the group that organizes the annual India Day Parade in Manhattan apologized for the exclusion of a gay and lesbian organization from the parade.

Nirav Mehta, executive vice president of the Federation of Indian Associations (FIA), told a reporter for EDGE that the exclusion of the South Asian Lesbian Gay Association (SALGA) was due to a volunteer’s clerical error.

“We apologize,” Mehta told the reporter. “There was some confusion and mistakes, and we will be more than happy to welcome them next year. They can be part of our parade, and we will have no problem.”

The latest statement contradicts SALGA’s experience of the application process as well as earlier statements by FIA officials. Emails and phone records retained by SALGA document an FIA representative stating that SALGA’s request was forwarded to the FIA board for approval.  FIA President Dipak Patel, reached by phone last Friday, stated emphatically that the exclusion was not an administrative error.

Additional information:

Latest on the controversy and resource list for journalists & others: http://www.minalhajratwala.com/2009/08/gays-barred-from-ny-india-day-parade-resource-list/

EDGE article (8/19/09) reporting FIA apology: http://www.edgeunitedstates.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=&sc2=news&sc3=&id=95244

Account of Sunday’s protests (8/16/09): http://www.minalhajratwala.com/2009/08/gay-hind-ny-india-day-parade-draws-protesters/

Photographs of Sunday’s protests available for media use (8/16/09) (MUST be credited to Roopa Singh, http://politicalpoet.wordpress.com):  http://www.flickr.com/photos/politicalpoetry/

“Gay Hind”: NY India Day Parade Draws Protesters

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Photos in this post were taken Sunday, Aug. 16, 2009 by Roopa Singh: http://politicalpoet.wordpress.com

By Minal Hajratwala

Sunday, August 16, 2009– Lesbian and gay Indo-Americans and their allies marched and demonstrated along the route of Manhattan’s annual India Day Parade today, with signs reading “Gay Hind,” “Indian Gay Proud,” and “Shame Shame FIA, Homophobia is so last year.”

photo: roopa singh/salga indian gay proud

The demonstrators were protesting the decision by the Federation of Indian Associations (FIA) to bar the South Asian Lesbian Gay Association (SALGA) from one of the largest Indian Independence Day celebrations outside of India. More than 50,000 people attend the annual parade, which stretches from 28th St to 41st St in midtown Manhattan. The FIA’s action came on the heels of India’s recent court decision, in July, that cited “the inclusiveness that Indian society typically displayed” as the basis for overturning a 150-year-old anti-gay law.

FIA Executive Vice President Nirav Mehta, characterized by the online newsjournal DesiTalk as “part of the younger leadership that is coming to the helm of FIA,” told a DesiTalk reporter in July that the FIA “has stood for the entire community on political, social, whatever issues” and hopes to continue to do so.

FIA President Dipak Patel, reached by telephone on Friday, August 14, echoed that sentiment, saying “anyone is welcome to march.”

But Mr. Patel quickly clarified that there was a process for organizations wanting to march, likening it to that of a college where some “some people get in, some people don’t.”  SALGA had filed an application but received no response. When asked whether the exclusion of SALGA was an administrative error, Mr. Patel forcefully said no.

On the same day in Mumbai, India’s largest city, thousands of people joined the city’s annual Gay Pride march to celebrate a recent court ruling that was a landmark for gay rights in India. On July 2, the High Court of Delhi read down a ban on gay sex that had been introduced by the British when they ruled India.

In a statement, SALGA expressed dismay with the FIA’s decision, particularly in the wake of the Indian High Court ruling. “The court stated powerfully and succinctly that intolerance is not an Indian value,” SALGA said in its statement. “Despite such a monumental victory for sexual minorities in India, we are outraged and disappointed that … the FIA is once again trying to make Indian sexual minorities invisible through its discriminatory acts.”

The two organizations have a long history of conflict over the India Day Parade, dating back to the mid-1990s. Over a period of years, the FIA came up with various explanations for why SALGA could not participate. As reported in the New York Times, in 1995, only “Indian” rather than “South Asian” groups were allowed; in 1996, only “dues-paying” organizations were allowed; and in other years, “Federation officials had also said they considered displays of gay pride to be incompatible with a parade celebrating Indian pride.”

To combat such shifting policies, according to a Samar magazine article by activist Svati P. Shah, SALGA and its allies were able to “galvanize a coalition of progressive South Asian organizations, provisionally called the South Asian Progressive Task Force, in 1997.” After years of protest, and with the intervention of a local government body that required the FIA to sign a non-discrimination pledge in order to gain a permit for the use of public streets, SALGA was allowed to march in the India Day Parade in 2000.

Since then, the annual event has been a non-issue, until this year’s surprise action by the FIA. This is the 29th annual parade in New York and the first year that the parade was webcast live and televised by TV Asia. Privately, some community members have speculated that the plans for television coverage led the FIA to take a more conservative stance.

Whatever the cause, progressive South Asian activists and bloggers have spoken out against the FIA’s action. Sapna Pandya, coordinator of the South Asian Health Initiative in New York, called it “one giant leap backwards for Indian-kind” in an email circulated last week. SAKHI, the New York-based domestic violence organization, invited SALGA members to join its contingent in the parade.  Commentaries were published on the well-read Sepia Mutiny and Desicritics sites, as well as on blogs by lawyer Leena R. Kamat and writer/academic Roopa Singh. Desis United created an online petition drive to protest the FIA’s action.

But responses to the blog postings have been mixed, with some anonymous commenters agreeing with the FIA’s decision to exclude the gay group because, for example, “I am sure that the organisers would have objected to something like ‘Lip and eyebrow piercing association of south Asia’ participating in that event as well.”

On the West Coast, activists gathered signatures in support of SALGA at the large Festival of India celebration in Fremont, California, on Saturday and Sunday.  The gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender organization Trikone participates regularly in the Fremont celebration, which is run by the Federation of Indian Associations Northern California (FIA-NC) and is independent of the New York organization.

Longtime Northern California community organizer Shambu “Sam” Rao said in an e-mail,  “Over the course of the many years of the festival, Indian senior citizens (straight) and housewives had spoken up at the FIA-NC meetings to continue invite gays to the Festival. … Gay Indians and supporters are welcome.”

—By Minal Hajratwala, with additional reporting by Barnali Ghosh and photographs by Roopa Singh.  This article may be reprinted with attribution.

Minal Hajratwala is a San Francisco writer and the author of the nonfiction epic Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), which has been called “incomparable” by Alice Walker and “searingly honest” by The Washington Post.

Additional photographs from Sunday’s India Day Parade in Manhattan are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/politicalpoetry/ and may be republished; MUST be credited to “Roopa Singh: http://politicalpoet.wordpress.com”.

For further background and sources on the India Day Parade, please click here.

salga reppin.14 by paleolithicreality.

Gays barred from NY India Day Parade: Resource list

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The Federation of Indian Associations barred the South Asian Lesbian Gay Association from the huge annual India Day Parade in Manhattan on Sunday August 16. This is a roundup of community statements and developments on this breaking-news controversy, intended for use by journalists, activists, and interested community members.

What’s happening:

The gay lesbian group SALGA and its allies fought a long battle in the 1990s for inclusion in the India Day Parade, which draws more than 50,000 people to march down 13 blocks of Manhattan to celebrate India’s independence day. The group won inclusion in 2000 and has marched without incident for several years. This year, the Federation of Indian Associations (FIA), which puts on the annual event, failed to respond to the gay group’s application to march, effectively barring it from the August 16 parade.

Activists organized protests within the march and along the parade route and urged supporters to telephone and email the parade organizers. This was the 29th annual parade in New York and the first year that the parade was televised by TV Asia and webcast live.

The controversy came on the heels of India’s recent court decision, in July, that cited “the inclusiveness that Indian society typically displayed” as the basis for overturning a 150-year-old anti-gay law.

Please post a comment or send an email request if:

• you are a working journalist and would like names and phone numbers of individuals who are willing to be interviewed on this topic.
• you are a writer, editor, photographer, etc. with images, commentary, or other coverage to share.
• you are an activist or community member and have news, a statement, links, or photographs that you would like to have included on this resource page.

Please feel free to repost or quote from this posting, with attribution to the original writer where appropriate.

Contacts

ºº Federation of Indians in America (FIA)
Dipak Patel, President
973-464-4515
dipakpatel@fianynjct.org
Other FIA Executive Committee members phone numbers and emails

ºº South Asian Lesbian Gay Association (SALGA)
 salganyc@hotmail.com
Latest information is on the SALGA Facebook page
SALGA spokesperson: Priyanka Mitra, office@cb5.org

Breaking News

Gay press reports FIA apology over India Day Parade

NEW: Wednesday Aug 19, 2009 — A gay online news site reported today that an executive of the group that organizes the annual India Day Parade in Manhattan apologized for the exclusion of a gay and lesbian organization from the parade.

Nirav Mehta, executive vice president of the Federation of Indian Associations (FIA), told a reporter for EDGE that the exclusion of the South Asian Lesbian Gay Association (SALGA) was due to a volunteer’s clerical error.

“We apologize,” Mehta told the reporter. “There was some confusion and mistakes, and we will be more than happy to welcome them next year. They can be part of our parade, and we will have no problem.”

The latest statement contradicts SALGA’s experience of the application process as well as earlier statements by FIA officials. Emails and phone records retained by SALGA document an FIA representative stating in July that SALGA’s request was forwarded to the FIA board for approval.  FIA President Dipak Patel, reached by phone last Friday, stated emphatically that the exclusion was not an administrative error.

Desis United urges supporters to sign online petition

This link <http://citizenspeak.org/node/1720> leads to this petition:

From: Your Name <you@example.com>
To: dipakpatel@fianynjct.org, niravmehta@fianynjct.org, jmody@yahoo.com, hareshhemrajani@fianynjct.org, devenpatel@fianynjct.org, ahmedshakir@fianynjct.org, ypsoi@aol.com
Subject: Shame on NY/NJ/CT FIA for excluding LGBTQ Indians

Your Personal Statement
I’m deeply disappointed that the tri-state FIA chose to exclude gay and lesbian Indians from the 2009 India Day Parade in New York City.
2009 was a special year for all Indians, because it marked the beginning of the end of the British-era restrictions on gay and lesbian Indians. All people of Indian origin have reason to be proud, seeing India throw off antiquated colonial laws and enter the 21st century.
Why was the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association’s application to march in the India Day Parade ignored, and their follow-ups not acknowledged?
Why didn’t the FIA directly contact SALGA or other Indian LGBTQ cultural organizations to participate in the Parade on this particularly historic year?
The FIA’s actions are an embarrassment to our community. I hope you will get in touch with SALGA to resolve this issue, and ensure that any issues are resolved before next year’s India Parade.
Thank you.
Your Name
Your Organization
123 Your St.
Yousville, YO 12345
Phone: (123)456-7890
Fax: (123)456-7890×123

Photographs available

NEW: Photographs from SALGA’s march in the India Day Parade are available here as a Flickr stream and may be used freely by news organizations; MUST be credited to “Roopa Singh (http://politicalpoet.wordpress.com).”

India Day organizer says exclusion is like rejecting a college applicant

Two community members spoke separately with FIA President Dipak Patel on Friday afternoon, August 14, 2009. During the first call, from Anirvan Chatterjee, Mr. Patel vehemently denied any knowledge of the SALGA petition. By the time of the second call, he apparently knew more.  From an email written Friday by community member Barnali Ghosh (published with permission):

I just got off the phone with Dipak Patel, president of the tri-state FIA, the organizers of the New York FIA Day Parade. We spoke for about 10 minutes.

Mr Patel was polite and willing to talk. He said “anyone is welcome to march,” but quickly clarified that there was a process for organizations wanting to march, likening it to that of a college where some “some people get in, some people don’t.”

However, when asked if the exclusion of SALGA was an administrative error, he very forcefully said no.

When asked what he thought about this possibly becoming a larger scandal (given that the exclusion was already on Facebook and Sepia Mutiny), he said “you’re using words like scandal now, I have to ask you to stop.” He then went on to explain that the media has already seen all the good work they’ve been doing.

When asked if someone at FIA could contact SALGA to resolve the issue, he said he’d refer it to his media team.

Patel made a big deal of the fact that the event will be televised live, for the first time ever. (I wonder what he’s going to think of annoyed queer Indians marching in the Sakhi contingent, being telecast live.)

Protests planned at Sunday parade;
email campaign targets celebrities, organizers

Statement from SALGA/SAKHI on Friday, August 14, 2009 (see Facebook event page):

On Thursday July 2nd, the Delhi High Court delighted gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Indians and their allies by reading down Indian Penal Code Section 377 to not include consensual gay sex.

It is most disappointing therefore that in this year, with such a monumental victory for sexual minorities in India, the FEDERATION OF INDIAN ASSOCIATIONS decided not to respond to our petition to march at the annual India Day Parade.

We ask LGBT South Asians and other progressives to stand with us and against discrimination.

Hey everyone,

Thanks for your emails and interest in the protest against SALGA’s exclusion from the India Day festivities in New York City. If you are in New York City on Sunday, Aug 16th, you could either join SALGA as it marches under the banner of SAKHI, a local women’s group that campaigns against domestic violence OR you could join a group of us as we stand on the parade route and protest against SALGA’s exclusion from the festivities.

1. Join us as we prepare protest posters at the Starbucks Coffee on Madison Ave and 41st St at 10 AM on Sunday August 16th. Feel free to bring your own posters to the protest.

2. Join us as we gather before the march and protest at 11.15 AM with the SAKHI contingent at 41st St at Madison Ave. If you’re looking for us, call me (Mario) on 646-884-3945 or Sapna on 202-641-8207.

If you are not in New York, you can write to Shilpa Shetty, who will be the Grand Marshal for the festivities asking her to speak against SALGA’s exclusion. Another of the chief guests for the evening is the artiste Jay Sean. You could write to the managing directors of his representative agency. Alternatively, you can write to the FIA (Federation of Indian Associations), the organizers of the festivities. It is imperative that we inundate the FIA with protest emails! Contact details are provided below:

Parade Grand Marshall Shilpa Shetty: shilpa@shilpashettylive.com
Billy & Rob (reps of Parade Special Guest Jay Sean): billy@2point9.com, rob@2point9.com
FIA President Dipak Patel telephone 973-464-4515, dipakpatel@fianynjct.org
FIA office: info@fianynjct.org, 732-369-6626
Other FIA Executive Committee members phone numbers and emails

West Coast FIA includes gay group; solidarity petition planned

Shambu “Sam” Rao wrote, as part of an email discussion on the South Asian Journalists Association listserve, on Friday, August 14, 2009:

Just to make the point,  Gay Indians and supporters are welcome and part of the largest Festival of India — West Coast — in Fremont, CA. The Festival is in its 17th year run by FIA NC [Federation of Indian Associations Northern California] and the non profit activist group Trikone has been a part of the Festival of India Fremont with a booth and even in the parade couple times. Members of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) another non profit also have taken part in the festivities. … Over the course of the many years of the festival, Indian senior citizens (straight) and housewives had spoken up at the FIA meetings to continue invite gays to the Festival whereas NY had even gone to court to bar participation.”

Trikone, the oldest South Asian gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender group in the United States, will have a booth in the India Day festival in Fremont, California, this weekend, August 15-16, 2009.  Members plan to gather signatures on a petition in support of SALGA. The Trikone Co-Chairs are available for comment: Rakesh Modi, rakesh@trikone.org, (510) 757-5726; or Priti Narayanan, priti@trikone.org.

Commentary: One giant leap backwards for Indian-kind

The following was circulated to journalists as an opinion piece / letter to the editor on August 12, 2009, written by Sapna Pandya, and may be reprinted in full with attribution to her:

On Thursday, July 2nd, I awoke to very exciting news from my native country of India. A decision was being made 10,000 miles away that would not only impact thousands upon thousands there, but also the community of Indians living in America. After over ten years of intense dedication and advocacy by lawyers, human rights advocates, public health professionals, civil society and many others, the Delhi High Court read down their decision to repeal Indian Penal Code Section 377. This antiquated law, left over from the British Raj, criminalized certain forms of sex that were defined as “against the order of nature,” among which consensual sex among two adults of the same sex was included. In other words, Section 377 made it illegal for gay Indians to have sex, but the Delhi High Court decided what many of us already knew was true: that such a law is unconstitutional and oppressive. This landmark decision, a true victory for human society as a whole and India in particular, was even beautifully linked to the ideals of equality and justice central to India’s freedom movement, as Justice Murlidharan quoted lines from Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘Objective Resolution’ from December 13, 1946 in the official Delhi High Court ruling.

It is disturbingly ironic then, as the community gears up to celebrate India’s 62nd year of independence, that the Federation of Indians in America (FIA), host of the annual Indian Independence Day celebration in New York City, has decided to shut out the area’s Indian American gay community. The South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association (SALGA), a volunteer organization that has served the community for over ten years, submitted an application to participate in this year’s Independence Day festivities, only to be completely ignored and rebuffed by FIA. Despite SALGA’s participation in the same event in the past (which also only came about due to intense advocacy efforts, and at which only limited freedom of expression was enjoyed), the exclusion of SALGA this year of all years represents a backward move on the part of Indian American community organizing: a shameful reminder that while India may be moving forward on human rights issues, our immigrant community here is regressing to the point of ignoring its own members.

With all the progress that India has enjoyed lately, we should not allow FIA’s regressive actions remain unnoticed. Bring banners to the Independence Day festivities showing support for the area’s South Asian gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, and for the repeal of Section 377.  Let the FIA know how you feel about their discriminatory practices (contact information below). We must take a lesson from the Delhi High Court, and represent ALL Indians this Independence Day, marching with history and not against it.

Latest blog commentaries

Not Welcome at the India Day Parade, on SepiaMutiny.com
Gay Ho Denied, by Leena R. Kamat; a lawyer’s perspective
Desicritics post by Deepti Lamba
Vande Matram, by Roopa Singh
UltraBrown blog post

Background and links

For those interested in covering or learning more about the story, below are backgrounders on the long history of this controversy. Journalists, please email me if you would like names and cell phone numbers of individuals who are willing to be interviewed on this topic.

On current FIA leadership:

DesiTalk.com article (July 2009) discusses younger leadership coming to the helm of FIA, wanting to stand “for the entire community on political, social, whatever issues.”

On the 1990s debates over SALGA’s exclusion from the India Day Parade:

New York Times news stories

1996:  http://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/04/nyregion/gay-south-asians-sidelined-at-parades.html
1997:  http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/17/nyregion/groups-plan-protest-at-india-day-parade.html
2000: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/30/nyregion/neighborhood-report-flatiron-new-tolerance-at-an-old-tradition.html

Official New York governmental resolution

New York Community Board 5 is in charge of granting permits in Manhattan for parades and other street activities. Here is the New York Community Board 5 resolution of 2005 approving FIA application to hold the India Day Parade, noting that “The applicant has signed and agreed … that participation in the applicant’s events will not be denied to any group on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression.”

Analyses

Article: Professor Svati P. Shah’s analysis about the controversy as it relates to South Asian American identity, as published in Samar magazine, 2001:
http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=60

Book excerpt: brief chronology and narration of the movement built around SALGA’s exclusion from the India Day Parade, p176-178 of Becoming American, Becoming India: An Immigrant Community in New York City by Madhulika S. Khandelwal, an Urban Studies professor at Queens
College:
http://books.google.com/books?id=jZsZKj0FrBgC&pg=PA177&lpg=PA177&dq=salga+india+parade&source=bl&ots=XElVtWUQdP&sig=82Z8ABNr0gMpJwwiwYNYRHcmEUE&hl=en&ei=Y0yFSqWiFIKltgeH5YSvCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=salga%20india%20parade%20sakhi&f=false
[If this link does not work, go to http://books.google.com/ , search for “salga india parade” and click on the first link that comes up]

On the recent decriminalization of gay sex in India (July 2009):

The full text of the ruling can be seen at:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17027448/Delhi-Hight-Court-Naz

Selected news stories:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/03/world/asia/03india.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070200509.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8129836.stm
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/india-decriminalizes-homosexual-sex/article1203903/

Creative Process

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I always find it fascinating to see how other artists create their work. Here are three things that have inspired me recently.
(If you’re reading this on Facebook or elsewhere and can’t see the videos, please go to my blog and it’ll all be clear.)

• A short video of cartoonist Alison Bechdel talking about how she created each scene in her beautiful graphic novel Fun Home (which you should read immediately, if you haven’t already done so). Her process is simply amazing:

• A thoughtful blog post by author Farai Chideya (you may have heard her on NPR) on how she wrote her rock musician novel Kiss the Sky:

I was finally willing to take my life “off track” … in order to accomplish my dream. [Click here to continue reading.]


• My friend Canyon Sam describing the many years of exploration, travel, rejection letters, and rewrites that it took for her to complete her upcoming nonfiction book, Sky Train: Tibetan Women on the Edge of History, a book you’re going to be hearing a lot more about:

So to anyone dreaming of or working on a big project… these women did it, and you can do it too!

Help for writers

The Book Writing & Publishing Blueprint

Building the Buzz: Marketing Ourselves As Artists

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This is a marketing resource list for writers/performers, particularly those of South Asian descent. It was created for the “Building Our Buzz” workshop at the Kriti Festival, organized by DesiLit in Chicago, June 10-14, 2009. I instigated this panel because, as I said in an email to the participants:

I would like to make this a really productive brainstorming session, as marketing is a huge issue that all of us work on all the time and I think we can really help each other as well as the attendees. I’m envisioning a session where people walk away jazzed about marketing their own work, with ideas on how to collaborate, knowledge to use and pass on to their own artistic communities, etc. I am assuming we all have a lot of ideas to share. Personally, I know I sometimes struggle with making the marketing part of being an artist feel fun and not “icky,” so I’m excited to share this conversation with you all.

We had a great conversation, which resulted in tons of ideas and resources. The list below reflects our collective wisdom and is divided into two parts: Resources and Strategies/Ideas.

If you want to join the brainstorming with other ideas and resources, please do so as a comment to this post! Thank you!

Building the Buzz:

Marketing Ourselves as Artists

PANEL DESCRIPTION: Writers and artists in a variety of genres brainstorm methods for marketing themselves and their work, from doing traditional events, to hiring help, to public speaking, headshots, Twittering, ‘virtual’ book touring, and more. With so many new South Asian American “creatives” emerging, how do you set yourself apart from the crowd — or collaborate to give everyone maximum exposure?

The panelists:

Minal Hajratwala (moderator), writer
Shilpa Agarwal, writer
Sonal Shah, actor
Farha Hasan, writer/librarian
Nitin Deckha, writer
Rachna Vohra, writer/spoken word artist

Resources

Publications

The Savvy Author’s Guide to Book Publicity by Lisa Warren

Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson

Poets & Writers magazine: extensive listings, calls for submission, all writing genres

Poetry Flash quarterly newspaper: extensive West Coast listings, calls for submission, mostly for poets

Websites

www.desilit.org:  US-based organization that works to build support for South Asian and diaspora writers

South Asian Journalists Association Forum: Recent S Asian authors blog about putting out their books

South Asian Artists Collective: Community where you can create a profile and share work

South Asian Women’s Creative Collective: active, NY-based community of artists of all disciplines

South Asian Sisters: SF Bay Area-based community of writers/performers, puts on annual Yoni Ki Baat show

Book sites: moorishgirl, maud newton, bookslut

Sampling of South Asian communities/sites: SepiaMutiny, LiterarySafari, South Asian Journalists Association, SiliconIndia.com, Lokvani.com, SOUTHASIA-Online.com, OutofIndia.net, Asia Pacific Arts, desiparty.com, desiclub.com, sulekha.com, trikone.org, IndiaAbroad.com

Social Networks

These are websites where you sign up, create a profile, get followers/friends, list events, etc:

goodreads.com: readers say what books they love; authors get special level of access to create profiles, offer book giveaways, etc

librarything.com: goes to librarians and library patrons

pw.org: Poets & Writers site, need certain # of publications to be listed

Amazon Author Central: for authors with books being sold thru Amazon to create profile, upload blog entry, etc

booktour.com: event listings that are then linked into local newspaper web listings and to your book’s Amazon.com page

kahanimovement.com: Indo-American video storytelling, good for posting book trailers, promo videos, personal videos

facebook: Read The Facebook Marketing Toolbox

twitter.com:  examples of how we’re using it: @desilit, @sonalbshah, @minalh

Strategies/Ideas

Establishing a web presence

• Have your own website and update it OFTEN. If you’re a performer, always have your upcoming shows; if you’re a writer, your latest published work; if you’re an artist, your latest pieces or gallery showings, etc.  Make sure the links track, i.e. links to other publications etc.
• Set up author’s pages in other sites – bookstores, writers’ organizations (see social networking resources above).
• Podcast or get yourself interviewed on someone else’s podcast.
• Publish in ezines or online literary journals: One of the benefit to this type of forum is that your name is more likely to come up in a google search than with a traditional hardcopy journal.
• Online Forms: I put a collection of short stories on the apple app store for iphone/ipod and within a couple months I got 30,000 downloads worldwide without any kind of marketing or promotion. Another online forum to showcase your work is Scribd. (Farha)
• Put up a short story or e-book on Kindle.
• Track stats such as “bounce rate” – how long does a person stay on your site before moving on?
• Change your outgoing email so that your website shows up in your signature line for everyone you communicate with.

Blogging tips

• Blogging can be useful either as an addition to a website or an alternative to one. But if you use a blog to replace a website, then you should have your information on a panel to the side, not just postings about your thought of the day. Use it to advertise your work, not just to chat to whoever’s reading!
• Go on a “virtual” book tour by guest-blogging for 30 days; see amazing example from Shaila Abdullah
• Pull people to your site by interviewing other authors on your blog; see examples at http://www.shailaabdullah.com/blog.html
• I was an electronic writer-in-residence at www.openbooktoronto.com for the month of October 2008 – I kept a blog on this, literary and interesting, before my book came out (Nitin).
• Keeping up a blog of events/reviews/interviews: http://shilpaagarwal.com/blog/
• Set up RSS and Share links to your blog so that others can follow you easily: http://www.minalhajratwala.com/blog (see the Share buttons to the right)
• Feed your blog directly into Facebook, Amazon, etc.  Once you set it up, it updates automatically each time you post a new blog entry.
• Post portions of work in progress etc. (beware of copyright issues, some publishers may not want to publish if it’s been already published, even on your own blog.)
• Use keywords to draw folks in w/current events, organizations, etc if you are blogging on timely information.
• Link from your website to blog and vice versa.
• Reach out to the big South Asian blogs such as Sepia Mutiny, etc.; read their submission/suggestion guidelines.

Media

• college/university radio: not so much in the summer, but in the fall/winter – there’s usually someone who likes to interview writers in his/her spoken word program.
• ethnic media – they are often hungry for stories to cover; there is growing interest in authors/writers. It’s easy to place an article especially if you will write for free.
• don’t forget the aunties and uncles: an uncle who edits a religious newsletter included an extensive blurb about my book in a recent issue – it’s distributed free (in my case) at mandirs around Toronto. (Nitin)
• Get on a morning talk show, especially on a controversial topic.
• Press releases: Become your own publicist, set up gmail account as your own publicist to email press release to various press address. Blogs, newspapers, morning shows, call/pretend you’re a publicist, finding out contact name and who to email, be persistent.
• PERSISTENCE: Sending a hard copy, then calling, then emailing, then repeating that process again and again.  One every week until they call.  Pick 10 newspapers and submit to them every week to get an article.
• BE SEEN: Continue to perform at open mics, do as many red carpets (with press) as possible, do staged readings, go see plays/improv/sketch all of the time.  Snail Mail: People are using internet more and more and while that is convenient, snail mailing is still a great (yes more expensive) method (less people are doing).
• Write op-eds and/or let people know you are available as an expert source on timely news stories related to your book— or not. Any article you get published should have your book title and website link in the credit line.

EVENTS

• Driving up the west coast (on my own dime) and doing readings (Shilpa)
• Have my publisher give away marketing copies to orgs I’m involved with for silent auctions, banquet raffles, etc (Minal)
• Co-promoting with another (artistic) event: for example, I am doing a reading and book signing as part of a launch of contemporary Indian art in a gallery space later in the summer (Nitin)
• Mixers: I partnered with a South Asian web-based entity in Toronto and did a reading, Q and A at a local restaurant. I ‘donated’ books which were sold to attendees, almost all of whom would not necessarily have attended a traditional launch …  There are a lot of people who don’t necessarily read but who could read; readers & future readers. (Nitin)
• “melas” – these abound all over the place, especially in the summer. Some have artistic performances that even pay its performers!
• setting up readings in places where you’re already planning to visit for fun/family
• Joint readings with other authors
• Cross-collaborate – readings with singers/dancers

Book clubs

• book clubs: offer to come do an author’s visit – this is a potentially good audience because they actually buy books
• putting together a reading guide for book clubs and making myself available to phone in for discussions (Shilpa): http://hauntingbombay.com/reading-guide.htm

SCHMOOZING/COLLABORATION

• Business card: It may sound funny for an artist or writer to have a business card, but you’d be surprised – that’s how people will remember you. Especially when you’re meeting non-South Asians who may have a hard time remembering your name (Rachna… could you repeat that? Rachna… oh.)
• Proactivity: If you’re at an event, take people’s contact information and follow up with them instead of waiting for them to follow up with you.
• Attending launches and book readings of other writers, especially ones that you do not know – usually in the milling around people after a reading, you  can mingle with other readers who may be interested, meet someone in the media who hasn’t heard about your work…
• Talking to other authors and exchanging ideas
• Networking outside the literary community: Mainstream networking groups especially women or South Asian women have been a tremendous source of leads
• Networks: Use what you are. If you are a woman, go to women-centered events; if you are South Asian, tap into South Asian networking events; if you have a poem about rape, bring it to rape-prevention organizations/meetings; etc. Everything you are and everything you write/paint/dance about can be used.
• Have a signup list at your events, get email addresses so people can join your mailing list.

THINGS YOU CAN PAY FOR

(or try to learn yourself or get someone to do for free)

• Web design
• Postcards/bookmarks for your book.
• Video book trailer: samples: Haunting Bombay (fiction), Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (nonfiction), Sky Train: Tibetan Women on the Edge of History (nonfiction)
• Publicist
• Speaking agent/agency
• http://www.cyberprbooks.com/ : An online marketing service that connects bloggers with books (has a South Asian staff member)
• Constant Contact e-newsletter : stores addresses and gives you templates for creating your own mailings. Free option and monthly paid service option.

FOR ACTORS/PERFORMERS  (from Sonal Shah)

• An actor is/should always be marketing.
• Headshots-What makes a good headshot
• Marketing to theatres: In my situation, at first it was checking all chicago publications (performink, The Reader, An Actor’s Guide to Chicago) to find theatres to send my headshot to- marketing to theatres.
• Marketing to agents: marketing to agents to get an agent.
• LA Connection: marketing to an agent that has connections in LA.
• SAG: Get a sag card before moving to LA.
• LA Casting Directors/managers: arriving in Los Angeles and marketing to Casting Directors (mailings, emails, workshops, dropping off materials in person).
• Websites: Registering/creating accounts for all actor-related websites (Casting Networks, Casting Frontier, Actors Access/Breakdown Services, Now Casting, iactor, etc).
• Current Marketing: Now (post “Scrubs”) my marketing has changed to be geared towards Casting Directors as well as PRESS.
• Comedians should go through program at UCB, IO, Second City, or Groundlings

MARKETING GENERAL

• BRANDING:  Finding your niche (i.e. Sonal Shah, female Indian comedian) and market yourself from that perspective.
• Hard Materials to always have- Business Cards, Headshots, Cover Letters, Postcards/Fliers
• Key to a good headshot: Find a good photographer, get a photo where your eyes are the most important detail, you’re connecting with whoever is looking at your photo, natural, organic, honest. Convey you and your truth and honesty through your portrait.
• Be a photography model for students, look on craigslist for listings to get  cheap/free headshots.
*
Late addition: Instructions for a Do-It-Yourself Book Tour

The Book Writing & Publishing Blueprint Workshop

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A two-day book writing workshop

Are you ready to transform your ideas, chapter drafts, and research notes into a powerful blueprint for a published book? Published author Minal Hajratwala will lead a two-day intensive book-writing workshop Saturday October 10th and Sunday October 11th, 2009. The workshop will give participants a writing toolkit to develop and finish a book AND a business strategy to publish a book. Minal’s recent publication and success of Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents positions her as a writing mentor with valuable insight and a fresh perspective on the book business and the creative writing process.

This is a unique opportunity to access a published author’s firsthand knowledge and experience of her journey from creative book idea to a critically acclaimed publication. The workshop is set up for a limited set of participants, so each participant will receive individualized attention and focus on works in progress through topic discussions, writing exercises, and question and answer sessions.

About the teacher

Minal Hajratwala is the author of Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), which has been called “incomparable” by Alice Walker and “searingly honest” by the Washington Post. She spent seven years researching and writing the book, traveling the world to interview more than seventy-five members of her extended family. She is also a performer, poet, and queer activist based in San Francisco. Her creative work has appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and theater spaces, and has received recognition and support from the Sundance Institute, the Jon Sims Center for the Arts, the SerpentSource Foundation, and the Hedgebrook writing retreat for women, where she currently serves on the Alumnae Leadership Council. Her one-woman show, “Avatars: Gods for a New Millennium,” was commissioned by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco for World AIDS Day in 1999. As a journalist, she worked at the San Jose Mercury News for eight years, was a board member of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, and was a National Arts Journalism Program fellow at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2000-01. She is a graduate of Stanford University.

The Book Writing & Publishing Blueprint Workshop:  Agenda

DAY 1 — The WRITING PROCESS

• The writing process: how to structure one’s time, process, support and what it personally takes to finish a project.

• Breakthrough to write: how to deal with inner criticism, obstacles, and blocks to write the book only you can write.

• Narrative structure: themes and narrative drive that unify a longer piece of work.

• Storytelling: discovering narrative threads.

• Finding the depth and layers of your story: research and inspiration.

• Editing and revision during the creative process.

DAY 2 — The BUSINESS STRATEGY

• Navigating the book business.

• Creating your platform as a writer.

• Finding an agent: pros, cons, and how to go about doing it.

• Writing a query letter.

• Having a hook: pitching your work.

• Writing and submitting a non-fiction book proposal that makes you stand out from the crowd.

• Editing process in the publishing house.

• Resource list: books, publications, and websites that are helpful.

NOTE: Minal will send out an email detailing some advance reading to prepare for the workshop in order to maximize our time together.

Yes, tell me the details!

WHEN

The Book Writing & Publishing Blueprint Workshop

The Writing Process: Saturday, October 10, 2009, 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
The Business Strategy: Sunday, October 11, 2009, 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

WHERE

San Francisco Bay Area (details upon registration).

FEE

$150 per day, or a special rate of $200 for the whole weekend.

ELIGIBILITY

Writers of all backgrounds and all genres (fiction or nonfiction) are welcome. Participants should have a book in progress or a book idea that they are willing to work with for the purposes of the weekend.

REGISTER

Please email Meeta Kaur at meeta@thechananas.com to reserve a seat and send a check payable to Meeta Kaur at 4561 Fernandez Street Union City, CA 94587 by September 1st, 2009. To maintain individualized and focused attention for each participant, workshop size is limited, so please confirm your participation soon.

Life/Limbo/Death: A Michael Jackson story

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A short story to mark the day…

 

1. Life

Sometimes I feel them now, the millions, licking at my heart. I am the god-king of their pagan sacristy, the one they worship to soothe their own pain, boredom, loneliness. Their prayers are vague and ill-defined, and if you asked them, they might deny wanting anything at all; yet they come, wanting to taste me. Singing my own songs to me, dancing my dance, they come; gazing into my mirrored lenses, they come. With flashbulbs and tears, with professions of love, with ancient gestures of praise and great wails, they come. I shelter myself with acres and magical beasts, with the innocence of children and of mothers; yet they come.

And how can I resist them? Every god needs devotees, craves their touch as a boy his father’s love. I never learned how to be just a man. I am the sacrifice they bite at with their small, human teeth. With their love, they are eating me alive, hollowing me out, and I say yes. Come; oh dance, oh come, yes.

Devoured, I will live forever on their lips.

 

 

2. Limbo

How pale the moon looked, from below. But here, up close, it is dark and pocked, shadowed, purplish brown like a bruised cheekbone. I am walking all its surfaces while I wait. Down there they are teasing my body and stories apart, dissecting me under glass, under scalpel, under spotlights. It is all familiar; nothing’s changed except that now, I am the space between the out-breath and the in-breath. I have chosen not to inhale again.

I am waiting to be buried, so that I can fly.

 

3. Death

God is opening the gate with one pearl-gloved hand, and angels sing like happy rainbow children, I’ll Be There. I see Mahalia and Eartha and my grandfathers, two old men leaning into each other like melody and harmony. If I had known death was only music, I would not have dreaded it so much. Do we each create the heaven we need? Still, despite the sequins and sweetmeats, the cloud-dolphins, the wings, I know already I will be restless here. I want to sink to my knees and beg, I want to say I didn’t mean it, that last great mistake. I don’t want to live forever as this porcelain boy. Let me go back, o god, let me touch the brown soil, let me try one more time to be a man.

 

~~~

Thanks to Tananarive Due, Steven Barnes, and VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts) for the “assignment.”
Creative Commons License
Life/Limbo/Death: A Michael Jackson Story by Minal Hajratwala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.  You may quote from or re-post this work with attribution and a link back to this web page; please click on the icon above for full copyright and url information.

Why I am not mourning Michael Jackson

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It’s pretty simple, really:  I never loved him, never hated him. How could I?  I didn’t know him.

And neither did you.

So what’s up?

I always feel confused during these big cultural moments, out of sync, cuz there’s something I’m just not getting. It might sound really cold-hearted, but honestly, I’m not trying to be a jerk. I really would like to understand how people — people I know and respect— can care so much about an event that, to me, feels so distant.  (To me it even feels rather tawdry to be involved, to have this level of public engagement, in another family’s private grieving process. Particularly disgusting are his so-called friends who, in the guise of writing tributes, are revealing intimate details he swore them to secrecy about during his life… but that’s another topic.)

Maybe I don’t really know what it means to be a fan, in some profound sense.  It’s almost un-American to say, but I seriously can’t think of a single celebrity whose death would make me, on a non-PMS day, weep.  At most I think a public event has made me mourn a facet of myself or reflect with sadness on a time in my life passing; but in these cases I’ve been aware my emotion is all about me, not really that man in the mirror .

Love, grief: to me these are intimate emotions, waves of feeling that come to me in relation to people I know — and I don’t mean people I “feel like” I know. I mean people who know my name, too.  Y’know, real people.

And mega-celebrities are not real people in our lives, however much we want to imagine they are. The great illusion of celebrity is that we’re supposed to feel intimate with these people who are actually as remote to us as the moon.

What any of us thought we knew of Michael Jackson was a public surface, a skin. Even the self that an artist expresses is just a version, not the real person. It’s hard enough to truly know the people in our lives, let alone those we encounter only through the filters of media, marketing, and stage-lights. Heck, any of us who put ourselves out in public — whether it’s a Facebook update or a book or a film — know how easily we are misunderstood, mis-read.  I suspect that fame only amplifies that tendency.

So we experienced Michael Jackson’s art, yes; so we honor and remember it as a part of an important time in our lives, as culturally significant, etc. Like everyone else, I’ve been tuning back into his music, and I’m filled with admiration for his particular genius.  His art is still with us, as the massive numbers of video and audio downloads over the last two days makes clear.

But the man?   You and I never could go along on Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, any more than we could on Neil Armstrong’s.

Still, it seems like something more than a deep appreciation for the music is creating this moment of communal grief; the last time I remember seeing something like this was with Princess Diana. (Wasn’t feelin it then, either.)

So I’m curious: Do you feel sad about his passing in the same way you would about someone you actually knew, or is ‘fan grief’ a different order of feeling altogether?  Are you maybe mourning a time in your life, a part of yourself that was reflected by him or his work, a generational change?  Are you swept up in the drama as if you were watching a movie and someone died?

Or something else?

What I’m not really asking is how or why Michael Jackson touched you; there’s been plenty of that.  I’m more curious as to how, if you’ve been sad about his death, you make sense of having strong feelings about the death of someone you don’t know.

And of course, no one has to justify how they feel.

Including, I suppose, me.