I Sold My Book From a Backpack for a Year
Train stations, tea stalls, staff rooms, my distribution was my two feet.
The first stranger who ever bought my book thought I was selling pens. It was 7:40 on a March morning at Hazrat Nizamuddin station, and I had rehearsed a whole speech about poetry, about small presses, about taking a chance on an unknown name, and he pressed a hundred rupee note into my hand before I finished my second sentence, took a copy, and boarded the Jan Shatabdi without looking back.
I stood on platform four holding the money like it might evaporate... Then I laughed loudly enough that a porter turned to check on me.
One down. Two hundred and ninety nine to go.
Twelve publishers had said no. Two of them said it kindly. One suggested I should build an audience first, which felt like being told to grow taller. So in January I took eighteen thousand rupees of our wedding gift money, my own wedding, my wife signed off on the plan with one raised eyebrow and one condition, that I never call the books stock in her presence, and I went to a printer in Daryaganj who worked out of a room the size of a parking space and quoted prices from memory like scripture.
The books came back in February. Three hundred copies of Paper Boats on a Dry Street, ninety six pages each, still warm from the binding press, smelling of solvent and glue and something sweeter underneath, the way new things smell before the world gets to them. I slept badly that night.
Three hundred books is not a dream. It is inventory.
I had no distributor, no bookstore contacts, no budget for ads, and a landing page my cousin built in an afternoon. What I did have was a blue backpack from my college days with one broken zip, and a city full of people who stand around all day waiting for trains, for tea, and for the ends of meetings. So the backpack became my distribution channel. Forty two copies fit if I packed them spine down. Seven kilograms of poetry. My shoulders learned the weight the way you learn a phone number, without meaning to.
I made rules. Never apologize for the price, ninety nine rupees, less than two plates of momos. Never say it is just poetry. If someone hesitated, offer to read one poem aloud, their choice of page number, no skipping. If they said no, smile, say thank you, move on. Rejection at a tea stall is faster and cleaner than rejection by email. It stings for four seconds and then the chai arrives.
Ramu bhai, who runs the tea stall outside Kashmere Gate metro, became my first retail partner. He kept three copies next to the glass jar of rusks and took ten rupees a copy as commission. Poetry and chai, he said, wiping the counter with a cloth older than me, same customer. He sold eleven copies in a year, which made him more effective than the country's biggest online marketplace, where my listing sold four.
Staff rooms were the gold mines. My aunt teaches Hindi at a school in Ghaziabad, and she smuggled me in one lunch break, past corridors smelling of whiteboard marker and canteen sambar, into a room of teachers grading in silence. Teachers buy books the way other people buy lottery tickets, half in hope, half in solidarity with anyone foolish enough to try. I sold nine copies in twenty minutes and received two unsolicited lectures on meter, both correct.
Not every day was a staff room.
There was the man at Anand Vihar who bargained me down to sixty rupees while wearing a watch worth more than my entire print run. I took the sixty. I hated myself for a full week... and then I discovered he had photographed three poems and posted them online, fully credited, and strangers began writing to ask where the book could be bought. Sixty rupees for a marketing department. Fine.
There was the monsoon afternoon the broken zip finally betrayed me outside Rajiv Chowk, and six copies drank the rain before I could reach shelter. I dried them at home under the fan, pages rippled like old maps. My wife picked one up, read a page, and said the water damage suited the poems. She was not wrong. I gave those six away free all week, and two of those readers came back and bought clean copies for their friends.
And there was the woman on platform six at New Delhi station who opened the book at random to a poem about hope, read it standing completely still while her train was announced twice, then paid me and said nothing at all.
Her eyes were wet... I have won nothing in my life that felt like that silence.
In August I entered the title poem into a monthly poetry contest, mostly because the schoolteacher who lectured me on meter kept asking whether I had. It did not win. The runner up mention brought forty three visitors to my payment link, and seven of them bought the book. I stopped being embarrassed about small numbers around then. Small numbers are still people.
A book does not need a shelf. It needs one hand willing to hold it for the length of a single poem.
Then, in November, the year turned on me.
I found my own book at a second hand pavement stall in Daryaganj, two streets from where it had been printed. Forty rupees, the price written in pencil on the first page. My stomach dropped.
Somebody had bought my book, carried it home... and then let it go.
Then I picked it up.
Underlines everywhere. Corners folded into small tired triangles. In the margin of page sixty one, beside a poem about my grandmother's steel trunk, someone had written, in blue ink, read this at Papa's chautha. I bought my own book back for forty rupees and stood on that pavement for a long time while the traffic went around me like water around a stone.
I used to think distribution meant reach. Warehouses, algorithms, a display at an airport bookshop between the mints and the millionaires. That year taught me distribution is a chain of hands, and the chain does not need to be long. It needs to be warm. A reader who underlines you is worth a thousand who scroll past you. Months later I read an essay on why safe poems lose and recognized the backpack's whole curriculum in one line: nobody underlines a poem that risked nothing.
By the following March the print run was gone. Two hundred and some sold by hand, a few dozen given away, eleven sold beside a jar of rusks, six baptized by the monsoon. I did not make the eighteen thousand back. I made something else back. There is a page online for writers nobody has heard yet, and I spent a year being one at full volume, on platforms and in staff rooms, and I can report that being unheard is loudest... right before it ends.
The blue backpack carries my laptop now. The zip is still broken. But some mornings at Nizamuddin, when the Jan Shatabdi is announced, my shoulders remember the seven kilograms and straighten on their own, the way they did when the weight meant that somebody, somewhere in this city, might hold my book for the length of one poem.
The pavement copy sits on my desk. Forty rupees, price in pencil.
I never erased it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.