How To Write, Publish & Launch Your First Non-Fiction Book - w/ Soundarya

Welcome to the Ready Said Do podcast, where we learn from journeys of not experts who are just two steps ahead of us. I am Naman Parnay and in this episode my guest is Sondaria Bala Subramani. Sondaria is the founder at Unshackled.club and the author of two books, Unshackled and Today's discussion is a masterclass for anyone that's interested in writing and publishing their own non-fiction book. Although we do briefly touch on Sondaria's next novel, which falls into the realm of some We go over all the steps that you need to take to write your first book, including note taking and consistency various choices for how you want to go about with publishing, marketing as well as optimizing for sales using what is called a book launch.

In keeping with that theme of learning from somebody that's just two steps ahead of us instead of an expert, my goal with this episode is to highlight Sondaria's journey across the writing and publishing of her two books and what we can learn from it. This is the Ready Said Do podcast and to support me, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and/or leave me up to a five star rating on Spotify. And now my dear friends, without any further ado, my conversation with Sondaria, let's talk about writing.

I want to give you some context here before I jump into my first question. And I think this hopefully you will be able to relate to because I'm talking about your And the reason I bring that up is I in February of this year, so just four months ago had a master plan to write a book, which would be, you know, a how to for international students that come into the US and that try to navigate all the various, you know, things that are So from courseware to housing to moving pretty much anything under this on social life, relationships, all of it, money, taxes.

And this podcast kind of in a very weird, true to my tech brew roots pivoting way evolved So I guess my first question to you is, what can you tell us about writing nonfiction? What goes into sitting down and taking all the ideas in your head into, you know, a manuscript, The first step honestly is why do you want to put yourself through writing because it's culture's work, it's staring at blank sheets, although with the advent of AI, maybe that's not true anymore, but still, it's still, there's a famous quote on writing where this author writes, coal mining is hard work, writing is just downright torture, it's just a funny I mean, I don't agree with it, so I think the question is, why do you want to do it? Why do you want to write a book?

A book is not like a blog post or even a long form essay, but because ideally, if people followed this, every book out there would have a pretty voluminous amount of insights, resources, details or stories in them. I think a lot of books could be blog posts. A lot of books don't even have to exist. There's nothing new in them. And so, yeah, I think the why is very important for anyone who's sitting down and writing, and one of my friends once told me, which I really love this framework, is come up with five mutually exclusive reasons why you want to write this book.

For example, let's say one reason is, I want to capture everything that I've learned in the last five years in one place, very fair reason. Another reason could be, I want to help people. I genuinely think what I'm going to share is going to help people who are reading this. Third reason would be, I want to make money from this, although most of the authors don't really make that much money. Fourth reason could be, I think publishing a book and having it next to my name will help me get speaking opportunities and other consulting opportunities.

But then again, you see how that fourth reason is similar to the third reason. It helps you make more money than being the reason. So, like this, coming up with at least five mutually exclusive reasons that don't overlap is helpful because then you know that you do have a strong way as to why you want to pursue So that's my first tip for anyone who wants to write a book. So on that same note, from some of the reading that I've done on writing, most importantly, I guess probably the most influential book when I went down that rabbit hole was on writing by Stephen, Stephen King, right, on writing, yeah, it's widely regarded as, you know, like the Bible called writers.

What if I have, I have those five reasons, like the ones you referenced, some of them were common for me, what I was not able to do though was to, you know, have throughput or to have an output every day like you're told that you're supposed to have. So would you agree that if you just have those five reasons that's normally enough for most people or is there like, is there a framework that makes you sit down and forces you to make throughput every single?

What I meant was the five reasons is the very first step, and then there's 10,000 steps beyond that that you have to be in writing. So I just meant before you start climbing a mountain, it's probably good to understand why am I doing this in the first place, but if we're talking purely, how can I get more I'm not a traditional writer and I'm going to give this caveat because see Stephen King is an excellent example of someone who wakes up, goes to his desk and then spends 10 hours Like that's what he did for a very long time and probably still does.

I'm not like that because I juggle the work of the role of writer and a few other roles in terms of being a founder, content creator, project manager and so on. So from my like version of writing, the way I like to do things is, number one, I like to work on multiple articles at once if I'm working on it. I guess in the form of a book that could be, this could be working on multiple chapters that's being pigeonholed into just one, I guess it's easier for nonfiction than fiction probably because fiction, you need to write a story for sure.

Second is one of my super skills, meta skills is I'm really good at capturing ideas and note-taking as they happen and I say this with so much confidence and over-confidence because I know most people are not very good at it and I've seen this in observing people We get so many ideas on a daily basis if you really think about it, like let's say you just read an article, it was very insightful you read this article and then you get a phone call that you have to take and you take the call and you completely forget about this article and you move on with your day. But what happened to all those insights that you had?

It's not captured anywhere and it's going to leave if you don't capture it. So I think, yeah, getting better at capturing the insights as they happen in that lightning stroke, you know, lightning bolt moment is very important and putting in that extra five minutes or 15 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it is, to sit down and write it then and there. You're essentially piecemealing your work. For example, instead of writing a book in five months by sitting down every single day for 10 hours, you're writing a book over three years by capturing ideas like 10, 15, 20 minutes And of course, at some point you're going to have to sit down and just do the hard work But I personally think, even for my current book that I'm working on, which is a novel, I haven't formally begin the writing process.

But in some ways, I actually already have tens of thousands of words in my room workspace that I've captured. So I'm not starting from scratch. I have a lot to work with already. So that's the second skill I would get better at if I want to be a writer. So the first you referencing the fact that you're not an expert at writing is actually perfect because that's the very theme of the show where we do not be actively avoid talking Given a chance to talk to Stephen King, I would not have him on this show, particularly.

I would still talk to him, obviously, because he was a legend, but it would not be a right fit because as you referenced, we're just trying to learn from people that are just two steps ahead of us. Typically, what I wanted to ask was, do you have a go to method of note taking? So I was recommended this little journal to carry around on my walks and such, which I use from time to time. It's like barely effective. The thing I struggle with that is indexing, like how do I find out a particular thing? So what's your go to tool stack for note taking?

Right now, I only captured two places and you'll know why two places soon. The main place is room research, room research is a bidirectional note taking app. So imagine what if you had a personal Wikipedia where every single page in that Wikipedia is all interconnected. So currently, if you go to Wikipedia and let's say you go to like Indian history Wikipedia page, you'll see like a hundred links in there, but that take you to a hundred different pages.

But if you go to those pages, they're not going to reference Indian history back. So it's unidirectional, but the way Rome works is it's bidirectional, meaning any page anywhere that I mentioned the word Indian history across my like Rome workspace will come under the Indian history page. So this way, roaming within my like second brain becomes very easy. And I know there's a lot of controversy around using the word second brain, but I just think of it as like second brain meaning a place where I captured years' worth of ideas that I've gotten over the years, years' worth of knowledge and information and decisions I've made in one place. So right now I've been using Rome for more than four years.

So I have probably over a million words that I've written in there in the last four years. So I think that's my primary place, everything that I generally take notes on goes Rome again. The second place is my notes app on iPhone only because sometimes I get ideas that are For example, I'll tell you the last one I wrote down in my, so I wrote, and this is like a page that I have in my iPhone called third book musings, okay.

So here, this is a lot in there, but when I go to the very last thing I wrote, I just literally wrote the sentence, you gave me infinity in a thousand days. Just one sentence that I was, Shumma on a call with a friend I was thinking out loud and I loved this sentence and I'm like, I need this to go into my book somewhere. So I quickly captured it. So you see how in like a very good way I've probably written one sentence of my book by And without even realizing that you're making progress towards your book, exactly.

I would recommend just to like summarize that obviously use your phone for quick note taking because it's more convenient. But make sure that everything always funnels back to one place that is properly indexed. And I personally would not use pen and paper just because it adds so much friction and moving it to a digital forum, like later on, it's impossible. Like the more voluminous it becomes the lesser odds you have ever of me seeing that in digital Some phones or some apps nowadays do handwriting transcription, but they're way like there's many years I feel like before that can be, you know, reliably something we can trust.

Something you said caught my attention, you said it's almost controversial to use the term second brain, admittedly, I'm not familiar with what that entails. So can you mind drilling down on that just a little bit? I mentioned that because second brain became hugely popular within the personal knowledge management community about four years ago when Rome was introduced, Rome became popular. Diego Forte, who is, who is this productivity coach slash writer, he published a book called How to Build a Second Brain.

And when I said controversial, what I meant was it's obviously not an actual second brain, meaning it's obviously a lot less complex and much more simple. And it's really just a note-taking data piece, nothing, nothing fancy. So I think some people feel like the term is, you know, used in a very clickbaity way. You get people, you check it out, that's what I meant. Do you mind talking just a little bit about admitted and what it covered?

And maybe you could end with what some of your biggest learnings were from writing admitted that you then maybe went on to use when you wrote on. So in one sentence, admitted is an all-in-one non-fiction guy for anyone who wants to study abroad and especially for those who want to study in America. I wrote admitted over nine months based on obviously my experience of moving to America for grad school at Columbia University, but also it's not my story in the book.

It's really stories of many, many, many students who come here that we interviewed. And we also just put everything that we could think of in terms of insights in one place. And you know, you said you're trying to write something similar. And I hope you do because just because I wrote admitted does not mean that anyway, you shouldn't write what you're trying to do as long as you have your five wise. And so that's admitted.

What I learned from admitted for unshackled, I learned the end-to-end process of self-publishing. I mean, it's it's it's a maze, right? In the beginning, you're like, how am I going to find a printer? How am I going to find an editor? How much do I name my editor? Who who designs the book cover? You know, how does that happen? Who designs the cover, right? Even simple things like how do I get a barcode for a book? I had to figure that out. What is the ISBN number for the book? All these little things.

I think once I was done with it, I knew like right now I can tell anyone who wants to know So that's what I learned from admitted the confidence and knowledge that I can do this. And obviously, also the confidence that I can write a book because until you write your And also the conviction that I love writing, I love publishing books. And I want to see myself do this for life. I mean, that's not something that comes unless you actually do it because once you do it, even though it can be torturous at times, you you look back and you realize that you can have this deep satisfaction from having toiled the last nine months to create this thing that's right now out there like your baby or brainchild is out there in the market.

And so I think it also made me realize I really do love writing books and writing in general. So yeah, those are all some things that I've been it gave me. That all checks out. And yeah, I mean, given that it's funny when I discovered that admitted though, you know, the subject matter for admitted was pretty much exactly verbatim, what I had in mind. It was good to know that clearly this stuff is important, which is why, you know, there is material on this already.

But just to shift gears a little bit, you reference told you that you're not just a writer, you're a content creator, a solo prunor, if you will, and you know, wear a bunch of The thing that I found myself wondering, which kind of led to this pivot from the book to this podcast, which I'll admit it to very different things. There's some overlap. But you know, for the most part, they're two very distinct things. What is your take on one form of like one of those forms of media being better or worse So I guess what I'm getting at is say pick any chapter from admitted.

Would you argue for it against that the same chapter summarized into a 15 minute YouTube video if at all that's possible would be better or worse for a consumer that's looking to learn from, you know, all the insights that you referenced that currently exist in that I think, I think we can even let's reframe the question. Instead of saying better or worse, maybe the question would be, do you think there is value in recreating each chapter from the book into a 15 minute YouTube video?

And the value is at this point, it's obvious that people watch YouTube videos more than they read books or a larger portion of people who have access to the internet watch YouTube videos than they read books. And so from that standpoint, it's definitely going to reach more people. It's easier to digest and so on. So I think the question is not better or worse. The question is, is it worth doing in the first place? Is it worth, I think they call this, oh, I can't believe I forgot this.

Uh, this process of recreating the same content in six different mediums, like maybe make Is it just verb velocity or something as you turn for this, but, um, yeah, so if that's your question, then yes, is it better or worse? I think that's not even the right question. So just for context, I guess what I meant was in terms of the creator. So you know how when we write something, we automatically ensure that whatever we're writing about it, at least in our own heads is a hundred percent crystal clear.

Like we understand it deeply enough because if we don't, then it would not translate well on people in the first place. So I guess the better or worse was position from a self development perspective, more than an audience, um, retention slash help perspective does that kind of make more sense of self development for the author. Yeah, exactly for the author. So, so I guess what you're asking is, will I grow more as a content creator or a writer if I were to write a chapter versus if I were to create a YouTube video on it, summarizing That's exactly right.

And I figured I'd ask you because you do both, you know, I only do one of them so far. Um, yeah, I, I personally gravitated towards writing more than video creation, um, because I really enjoy entering the flow state. I really enjoy being in deep thought and I don't get to do that that often. Um, sadly, I mean, I'm hoping to change that now that I'm working on a book again. But over the last year, I haven't really had the chance to just, you know, disappear into your own thoughts and to transcend then to, and to just be in that zone of deep thinking and flow and engaging with your mind.

I think that doesn't happen in a YouTube video as much as it happens when you're writing because you also see that in a YouTube video, there's a lot of external factors to think about, especially if you're interviewing someone, I mean, keeping that aside. Even if you're doing a long form video, now you have to sit in front of a camera. You have to make sure the camera is recording and there's no problem there. You have to look at your script and read off of it, um, then you have to make sure you And if you do, you have to.

So there's so many things that go wrong versus when I'm sitting by myself staring at my computer screen on my whiteboard and just thinking. So, um, so I mean, I, I think writing, I personally think writing is more useful for people to grow than creating videos. Um, and I think I don't know if you've read deep work, uh, Cal Newport, he talks about, you know, yeah, okay, so there, I feel like essentially what you were referencing is there is very little chances of somebody entering or basically doing deep work in front of a camera while they're trying to, you know, look presentable, appear friendly versus, you know, just locking themselves in a cabin in the woods and just writing for five hours.

Like those are two very different states of output of the interesting thing is, um, once Sam Harris mentioned in a podcast or actually it was a debate, I think where he said the kind of insights you generate from meditating under the caves in Tibet for 10 years is very different from the kind of insights you generate inside a physics laboratory where you're conducting experiments trying to figure out how did the universe come into existence and you're using all these, you know, amazing devices for that.

So you possibly cannot expect a physicist who's doing this to understand the kind of insights, you know, a meditation coach comes up with and vice versa. So I think the same applies here that someone who's been doing podcasts for 10 years now, for example, Jordan say the kind of self-development he's done in his brain is very different from the kind of self-development Stephen King was done by sitting down and writing for 10 years.

I, that, that tracks totally love that, you know, call out there about those two being just different and not necessarily better or worse than the other. Um, I'm curious about how you went about, you know, the entire. So I know there's a plethora of resources available online on publishing. So I don't really want to go into that too much. What's more of kind of, you know, an enigma that's less understood is kind of the launch of a certain book.

So like, how do you go about preparing, you know, like hyping it up, having a pre launch, there's so many different things that at least I saw you did with unshackle, which I thought was really cool. I'm fundraising. I feel like also belongs in there. So I guess, what can you tell us about how somebody that's, you know, looking to self-publish, having checked all the boxes in the checklist for stuff we talked about earlier. So like you figure out all your basics.

But what are some tools that you think would be helpful for somebody to really get their names out there and get as many eyeballs on their book as. I'm going to assume they're not going through a publisher in this case, but they're doing it themselves. So okay, person A has a book that's written. So now let's even assume they found an editor and the book is edited and it's ready to go. It's ready to be printed. Now it's all about sales and marketing.

So number one, number one lesson with this is marketing is not the same as sales. Marketing literally is 100,000 people knowing that your book exists. Sales is 100,000 people actually giving their wallet to you, giving their credit card and making that purchase. So you can have 100,000 people know your book exists and have 1000 sales or you can have 10,000 sales. So without going into the nuances there, marketing and sales, two different things. Number one. And secondly, if you're going to self-publish, I mean, okay, you have two options. Okay, you have three options.

Number one, go pay a marketing agency. Find a great marketing agency, pay them money and tell them, Hey, I want my book to sell 10,000 copies. I'm giving you $50,000. Get it out. Like, help me get this. Help me make this happen. Does that not depend on the actual quality of the book at all? Oh, of course, it does. And funnily enough, I just got off the call with a book agent who is like explaining certain things to me. And they were telling me that with fiction, quality matters a lot. Like, you're not going to get who wrote the fiction unless it's, you know, JK Rowling, they're not going to care with the quality of the book really matters.

But if it's nonfiction, then they'll care more about who wrote this. What are they credentials? Like, you know, what skills do they have and so on. So, but yeah, to answer your question, of course, quality matters, but I'm saying for people to even know your book exists, they have to know your book exists, right? Like, they have to first be aware of this. And there is an information overload happening every day to all of us.

So marketing agency is one way. Second way is you grow an organic following on your social media. A lot of people have done this. A lot of creators have grown following to millions of subscribers, people. I think the most famous example is James Clear, who when he sold his rights to Penguin had several hundred thousand people on his email. And so they were all potential buyers for him. So it is also a long term thing. You slowly grow your following. And even if you have a million followers, doesn't mean even 10% of them are going to buy your book.

Like, there's a lot more that goes into sales. I'm just talking about marketing. Absolutely. Yep. And I guess the third way would be not to grow through your following, but maybe approaching influencers out there. Like, almost being a marketing agency by yourself, where you hire a few people interns, and you ask the interns to go spread the word about your book in different forums where it makes sense. So for admitted, for example, I could hire interns whose entire job it is to go to Reddit threads, core threads, and respond to any question on higher education by mentioned admitted. And be like, Hey, have you checked this book, by the way, it's very helpful. So in this way, you're kind of like doing some hacky things yourself. So yeah, these are some three different passes you

can take to get your books word out there. But unless you have a lot of money, like the first pathway, it's going to take a lot of effort and time. And I want people to be aware of this because, you know, the famous, like, will, if we build it, they will come. Like, that is absolutely not true when it comes to publishing an authorship. And sadly, the fact that's super, super helpful. Quick, a few different, I guess, callouts that I've been noting here. The first thing, have you tried personally going down the Reddit slash core route where you kind of organically try to farm? Well, maybe farm isn't the best word, but direct traffic to your sorry, you have or sorry, I've gone the second route. I've not gone the first route. Actually, first route, I've tried working with the marketing

agency once for a smaller project. Didn't really work out for me. I felt like the money was wasted. So I've really just focused on growing organically on social media and using that. Yeah, so the reason I asked that was because I had a similar and hopefully this isn't too much of a tangent. But when I was trying to, I guess, I'm still trying to kind of put my name out there. I'm only 15 episodes deep at the time of recording this. And I was like, yeah, sure, let's go to Reddit. Let's go to Cora. All of my latest video topics that are related. I'm just going to spam it over there and hope for the best. Well, Reddit straight up bans your links. They, they don't like it. If you do that at all, like it's just automatically banned. Cora apparently nobody on earth uses it anymore. So both of those were admittedly

dead ends for me, at least. Maybe I didn't give to it well enough or give up too early. But agreeing to your point, I guess what I'm getting at is it largely appears to me that having an organic social following might actually probably be for the average Joe out there. Probably the best disc, you know, course of action. I'm not sure if you would agree. Maybe I am hesitant to agree to that because maybe the average Joe out there doesn't care for social media, doesn't care in promoting themselves. I mean, if you're saying, because even to grow on social media, I mean, you have to treat it like a job. It's not going to work if you think of it as, oh, you know, I'll just make one post a week on LinkedIn.

I'll make one post a week on Instagram, one video on YouTube a week. No, I mean, the algorithm is hungry for consistent content. Like only after you do that over a certain period of time, it'll start picking up. Instagram will notice that, okay, this person has been posted has posted every day for the last six months or has posted every other day for the last three months. So they're serious about it. Maybe we'll make one of their reels go viral so that they get that dopamine head and they keep coming back and posting. So I think and a lot of people honestly don't enjoy that. I mean, yeah, even in my case, it's a city no room say necessary evil as much as would I rather be reading a new book and learning something and growing as a person versus making a video, sharing something that I already know

probably the former. But I also understand that on the longer scale, would I rather write books that no one reads or would I go to get at? Yeah, because the book you referenced that you would be rather reading. What if you had never found out about that book in the first place, you know, then you wouldn't be reading that book. So it's yeah, it's like a chicken and egg a little bit, you know, so I guess that's why I'm hesitant to say the average Joe should take that route. Because, but yeah, if you're saying, okay, let's assume the person has no money. I mean, if that's the constraint, no money, they have no following on social media. Now they have to figure out how do I get the word out there. I think honestly, in that case, while it should be do both, meaning slowly grow your following, but also

in the meantime, reach out to other influencers out there, reach out to other communities where your readers are and try to, I guess in the beginning, you're going to have to ask for a favor, because there's nothing you can offer in return. But hopefully you will find a few generous people who are willing to take that chance on you. You can, you can try to make it slightly valuable for them by telling them, like, by offering what you can, it's a tricky, I mean, now we've come to another topic entirely, which is, how do you ask for help from people when you have outreach? Yeah, we can talk about that if you want, but that's a different topic, so I don't want to get into that. Oh, yeah, I mean, I guess if you could touch on it, so I'm sure you would have had to do a fair amount of food outreach to, you know, like to do all of this,

all of these various things you've accomplished. So I guess, yeah, I am trying to understand if you have any tips or tricks that you've learned around, maybe a template that you found from somewhere that was particularly handy, but yeah, really any, just any outline tips around cold outreach itself that anybody can use. Definitely, cold outreach. Okay, so I've done a ton of cold outreach, by the way, I've done cold outreach is for raising, raising money, for getting, you know, people to help with something. I want to think of a scenario. Let's, okay, maybe I'm, let's assume we're talking to someone who has a book written out, you, for example, you have an admitted like book that you've written in the next six months. You don't have the money to work with agency,

you don't have a following assuming. Now, how do you get to go out there? So let's, your job, I would say would be obviously make a list of the 10 influencers in this area, study abroad, actually make a list of 25, like white and like make a long list. And it may not be easy for you to get in touch with the number one influencer who has same millions of subscribers. And for the sake of example, let's actually take her nursing, her nursing is, you know, probably the most popular study abroad, slash someone who was an immigrant who came to this country. It may not be easy to get in touch with him because he has a team of people and he is, you know, his time is like very sparse and he's doing many things. So you may want to start off with someone who is

the 25th on the list, who has 20,000 people on their LinkedIn, equally interested in growing as you are. And at that point, you're saying, okay, let's reach out to them with a compelling pitch. But even then if you literally just say, Hey, I just published this book, admit it as an admitted like book. Can you please promote this on your channel? There's no way they don't respond. And if they did, they are probably doing it, you know, out of there, very, very good heart. But most people are not going to do that. Absolutely. So now you have to think what would they care about?

So I would go to their profile on LinkedIn. I would go through a few of their posts. I would start to engage with them in the comments section by like supporting them. I might, for example, let's say they, let's say they talk a lot about latest news and developments in the field of immigration, I would send them news that I come across so that they're aware of it. And at some value, so that they recognize me from the noise first. Yeah. And anyone can do the things I just said. You don't have to have any sort of skills to do what I just said. So then I would at some point reach out and say, Hey, I've been working on this for a year, put a lot of effort into this.

And I genuinely think it could help some of the people in your community. Is there any way in which I can promote this? I am cast trapped. I'm a student. I don't have the money right now. But I can help you in these following ways. And so just amazing. That's how you should approach not like, first, let's go like, Hey, can you help me? And then do not do a hundred people and bombard people with health requests. I love how actionable that was. I guess to just kind of tie the loop on really this, this, you know, little fun conversation. I kind of wanted to touch a little bit on your, you getting the oven visa. So I'm trying to understand if so. So like, did you already know about the oven visa and that kind of maybe was a catalyst for writing the book

or that? Or if you found that way later, and it was just like a happy, you know, bonus that you were able to use. I'm actually assuming that the book helped you or can help somebody get an oven visa. So a lot of assumptions baked in there, but really just trying to understand kind of your own visa journey and how a book cannot help with that. Right. Okay. There are some assumptions there, but I'll come to that. Number one, I knew of the 01 early 2021 itself. I filed the 01 after admitted early 2022 is when I filed my first own application. I got an RFE request for evidence responded to that. And then they sent me a denial notice in May 2022. So I had been wanting to write a short book on immigration for a while. I was literally just waiting for the 01 to come

through. So I could do that. So that number one, I was able to do it. Number two, I had the authority to talk about immigration. But of course it didn't come through. I also realized maybe I shouldn't let that stop me. What if I could work with a lawyer on this, like someone who has far more experience than me, someone who can add the legal authority to this book? So fortunately, I approached Samir and he agreed to work with me on Unshackle. And so yeah, I knew about the 01 before I began Unshackle to answer your question is, did I write Unshackle to get the 01? Absolutely not. I mean, I didn't even know that writing Unshackle would help me. I thought that I thought it would hurt me since I'm literally writing a book that criticizes the immigration system. And then I'm

reaching out to a US officer and being like, Hey, can you give me the 01 by the way? In fact, in my own application, obviously, Unshackle is mentioned, but it only takes up 10 less than 10% of the evidence in terms of even I would say less than 5%. So does writing a book help you get the 01? Oh gosh, mostly no, I would actually say, I'm not going to say yes to that because the 01 is a talent visa. They have very rigid requirements. You have to meet three out of eight criteria or nine criteria if you account, comparable evidence as one. One of the criteria is scholarly articles, which is new publishing a scholarly article in a journal out there or a publication that is reasonably reputed in your field. So you can see how self publishing a book does not qualify because your self publishing anyone can do that. But let's say you have a book

that you self published, which has been read 10,000 times where people you have awesome reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and you have experts in the field who've made posts about your book there. I think you can start to say, okay, you know what, even though I self published, look at all of these evidences that show you why my book is important. The press, right? Because I think one of the eight categories is associated press on your work. Would that call it? So if you get press on the book, it could help for sure. And just saying, self publishing a book on its own, not going to help.

Makes sense. You have to do a bunch of other things to make sure why your book is extraordinary. And so interesting. And then to, I guess, final question, what can you tell us about your next venture? I don't know, it feels weird to call it a venture, but your next writing, right? And I think you see your reference, you're moving into fiction. Was that? Yeah. I mean, it's fiction inspired by true events, still fiction. That's the best type of fiction.

An interesting one leg here, one leg there, that I'm doing. The next book that I'm working on is called Thousand Days of Love. It's a novel inspired by true experiences that happened in my life in the last three years, especially after I met someone called Rajesh Sati. Rajesh is a third parent, a best friend, a teacher to me. He's the person that I call when I get good news or bad news. He's the person that I talk to every single day for like five times. So he changed my life.

And this in many ways is a book telling him, thank you for what he's done for me. But it's also a way for me to push myself as a writer. It's a way for me to help put this into the world so that there can be more Rajesh's, so that there can be more people out there who help each other and who show what true compassion feels like. And so there's many ways behind why I'm doing this. But I don't expect the book to be published for the next 18 months, by the way, because I'm still very much in the early process of writing it properly. And after I write, I want to find a publisher and the publisher has their own timeline. So it might not be out into the market for until 2026. But yeah, I'm very excited to work on it. Yeah, it'll be funny once it drops for us to come

back and listen to this, because then you can, you know, that's what I was thinking of at the time, because I know there can be so many pivots slash obviously many pivots, but it's just something that you know, I really like to do, which is to go back and look at something I wrote about something two years later. And it's just so cool to me, like, I just really love that. And I guess, what can you tell us about your vacation? I guess it's not a vacation, but more like a right vacation that's upcoming in London. I only know that because of your, you know, LinkedIn post, I thought that was really cool that you had to be shortlisted. It seemed like, you know, really huge. So what can you tell us about that? It's definitely not vacation number one. I don't really care for

vacation. I actually love enjoying, like, writing and creating things. So it's a six month long novel writing course that's launched by Faber and Faber, which is a big publishing house in the UK. I, they pick, they pick 15, they call serious writers from across the world and help them go through this program. I'm very happy that I got one of them. And so I'm moving there in September. I got the UK global talent visa, which I'm actually launching tomorrow online across social media.

So I'm saying it now itself, because I'm sure it'll come after tomorrow, this podcast. So I got approved for something called the UK global talent visa, which is a very coveted UK visa, actually. Thank you. It's kind of like the E.B. one in the US in some days. So O one slash E.B. one in the US. So yeah, I'm moving there in September. And that'll be my main focus to work on this book, to finish the book and find the problem. And do they kind of like make sure you're in the right setting, like mentorship, all of that is a kind of a complete package that they help writers. Okay.

So six months, you have 15 people who are all giving each other feedback. And you have three to four professors and these teachers are novelists themselves. They're multi novelists. They've published four or five fiction books so far. And they also bring in a lot of renowned guest authors into the world like to do workshops every month. And they put you in front of top agents in the UK at the end of the program for your book. I see that. That's just that's so exciting.

It almost sounds like a writing version of why combination if you value it is, you know, I should just say that from now, like it's like YC for writers. That's it. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what it sounds like. But Sandaria, thank you so much for taking the time today. It's been so amazing to interact with you. And I'm really excited for your next book, even though I know you said there's a decent amount of time, but it sounds really amazing.

And I'm so excited to read not just that, but all the other books that I'm sure you will continue to come up with for us. Thanks so much for having me. I love talking about this with you. That brings us to the end of episode 22 of the Reddy said do partners. Thank you all for sharing these episodes with those that continue to benefit from them. If you would like to support me, the easiest way to do that is by subscribing to my YouTube channel and or leaving me up to a five star rating on Spotify for any feedbacks or suggestions or guest recommendations. My YouTube comments are the go to area. I always read every comment.

So thank you all so much for leaving those new episodes every Wednesday catch you all in the next