After receiving huge appreciation for her blog, YashodharaLal moved on to try her skilful hands in writing book and she truly won hearts with her light commercial fiction. Her booksJust Married , Please Excuse and Sorting Out Sid are funny relationship-oriented fiction books set in India.
Her first book ‘Just Married, Please Excuse’ was published by HarperCollins in 2012 and is a largely autobiographical story of the ups and downs in the journey of marriage.
In a recent interview YashodharaLal shared her views on books, blogs and addressed some of the most significant questions related to the two.
- What are some of the qualities that you think every good blogger should inculcate in their blogs?
To have a successful blogs, there are few dos and done. The important do is to have your own voice and opinion. The way in which you tell a particular story has to be your own. The second part of it is being as regular and consistent even if that means establishing a rhythm may be once a week or twice a month. As long as readers know when to expect content from you they will come and check with you and they will devote those five minutes to read your blog. The third rule of engagement is that of engagement of being able to respond to reader’s comments, of being able to read others who write and engaging with them is important means to get more readers to your blog.
- What do you think a blogger should write about- something that interests the blogger or something that interests the readers?
It is interesting that you asked this because, I had been thinking about that. In many cases you start with something that you want to share and you can see whether people are reading your content or not. Beyond a point if people are not engaging with your content then you know you are pretty much writing a private diary in a public space and there is no point in that according to me. Start out by saying what you have to say but listen to know if it is relevant for other people.
- How important is it to market the blog and how to market the blog?
That depends entirely on what role that blog plays in your life. For me my blog helps in engaging me with my readers so I do feel a need to publish it on other social media and make sure that it reaches people so to that extent promotion becomes important. But if you are writing more out of passion or because you want to write for the people who are looking for it then you really don’t need to actively market.
- From blogs you have now moved on to books, how different or similar are the two?
They ae very different from each other and I know there is this misconception that if you write blogs then over a point of time you can jump to publishing a book but actually it is very different and I made that mistake by picking a lot of content from what I had written but a book won’t really work without a basic structure, a story line, characters, a climax and those are things which are very different and require mastery of writing to be able to accomplish.
- Do you think that blogging helped you in writing a good book?
Yes, blogging helped me a lot in giving me the confidence that I could write because I got a lot of appreciation, it also gave me my first set of people and the third area where it helped me was in finding a topic for my book because I knew people were finding the stories on my husband to be funny. So, my first book Just Married is an auto biographical account of our marriage. That was the role it played in my life and subsequently it helped me connect with my reader and get their viewpoint on what I should write next. But beyond that it didn’t play any strong role in publishing the book.
- How important do you think it is for bloggers to have their own domain right from the very beginning?
I actually don’t think that it matter so much I started out with Blog Spot and I still use Blogger as a domain because I find it works very well, a lot of people told me that WordPress is better but there is inertia involved in moving from Blogger to WordPress. My domain name became important to me when I realized that I was going to have multiple books under my name so I had to publicize myself as an author and that is when I decided to invest in my domain. Impotence of domain name again depends on what objective you want to achieve.
- There is this difference between book and blog that in case of blogs the response is instant as people can leave a comment but that is not there with books.
In the category of books that I write that is light commercial fiction, humorous romance novels, they are the kind of books that somebody will pick up in a train or a flight and finish it during their journey. I have found that while the lead time in terms of getting the book published is a long time, once the book is out the feedback starts coming in very fast. So, I don’t think it is very different in terms of interactivity or the speed of response that you get.
- What is the best way to handle criticism or negative comments because most of the times the blogger is confused as to how to address it. A lot of times they end up deleting the comment and many a times they fail to handle it well.
People have different ways of dealing with it, I know some people who respond to that particular comment and it becomes a long argument and they tear down the comment but that takes a lot of time so if a blogger wants to address it that way then they should know that it’s going to take a lot of time, other people choose to ignore it and I fall in that category. Let it be there, I don’t see a point in deleting it.
- You just shared with us some of the good qualities of a blog, what about blogs?
A book according to me has to have a certain formula and that formula is to have a character whom you can relate to. That Is the most imp because if u don’t have a character to establish an emotional equation then the reader is not going to read on. Then there is an element of having problem in the story. It is taught in very early ages, my eight year old daughter comes to me to ask what the problem in the story is in order to comprehend it. There is always a certain situation facing the main character that you have to make main point of story. Ideally there should be some growth and change in your character as the story progresses.
- Lastly, how important is it to do good research before writing a blog?
It entirely depends. In my case when I am writing it is based on my own experience and I don’t have to do a lot of research, someone who has to write about a movie has to have a view point. The research for them is to go and watch the movie. It depends from topic to topic.
Picture Credits : Kuldeep Pundhir, One World News
