When it comes to marketing, books authors often rely on the newspaper reviews, book-signing events and other familiar methods to get exposure. However, not every writer takes the traditional route. British author Nikesh Shukla and his graphics designer friend Nick Hearne thought it would amusing if they took the name of his latest book, “Meatspace”, literally by sending a lamb chop to space.
They approached a famous East London restaurant called Tayyabs. “We said to Tayyabs, if we succeed in sending your lamb chop into space, will you put us on your wall of fame?” Shukla tells Weekend Review. “They said okay and they were sceptical.”
So on June 14 they filled up a weather balloon with helium and attached a tandoori lamb chop from Tayyabs together with a GoPro camera and launched it into space. However, after rising up in the air for some 95 minutes, the balloon burst and they lost GPS contact. “We thought it was lost but then a month later a farmer got in touch and said he had found it on his farm. And then it took us about four months to convince him to give us the camera.”
Why four months? “I don’t know. He was just a weirdo. He kept organising meetings with us and cancelling them at the last minute.”
In a bizarre way, Shukla felt like it was a plot in his book. “Because the novel is all about online identities and identities being fluid and moveable and his identity seemed very fluid and movable. It was quite strange.”
The book took Shukla four years to write. Its main character is a struggling London-based author called Kitab Balasubramanyam who is contacted on Facebook by someone with the same name as him who lives in India.
This is followed by his namesake visiting Kitab (uninvited) in London and managing to hack into his Twitter account as events take a turn for the unexpected. The book looks at the conflict between real-life and social media.
The title “Meatspace” refers to what people who live digital lives call their real lives. “I really liked the image of Meatspace. I really liked the idea of the flesh being the opposite of pixels. Something similar to that quite fascinated me,” says Shukla.
Two incidents happened in Shukla’s life that inspired him to write the book. The first was when his mother passed away and he had to delete her Facebook account. “I found that her Facebook account was a really hard thing to delete, like her digital footprint was going to live forever.” The same week that his mother passed away, Shukla’s first novel, “Coconut Unlimited”, came out.
The book was about three Asian students who study at an all white school in Harrow, London, and turn to rap music as the answer to their confused identities. The story was inspired by Shukla’s own upbringing.
“I was doing lots and lots of promotional stuff around ‘Coconut Unlimited’,” he says. “And a friend of mine had actually sent me a private message on Twitter asking how I was. I replied saying I was feeling depressed because my mum had died. And my friend was really annoyed. My friend wrote back: how was I supposed to know that? You didn’t Tweet about it. I thought that is really interesting, that is where we are now. People expect you to write everything about your life online.
The second incident was when a friend and Shukla were Googling tattoos. “My friend really wanted to get a tattoo and I suggested because he works in quite a smart job that he gets a bow-tie tattoo onto his neck so he will always look smart. And when we looked up on Google Image search bow-tie tattoos the first thing that came up in Google Image search was a guy with a bow-tie tattoo who looked exactly like my friend. It was really, really freaky.”
“Then what happened was within 20 minutes of finding this guy’s picture we’d found his Google+, his Linkedin, his Twitter, his Facebook. And when you saw all these things about him, it made me think — how much can you know about strangers on the internet if you know all these things about them but you don’t actually know what they are like?”
Did his friend go and search for this person like the character in your book? “No,” he laughs. “We thought that was too creepy. But the novelist part of me did wonder what would happen if we went looking for this guy?”
In terms of writing style, what is appealing about “Meatspace” is how realistic the dialogue sounds. Some of it takes place online over Twitter, Facebook and in blog format.
“The conversations have to sound like real conversation just like me and my friends have. Or that people I know have. They sound like conversations that happen out in the world. I think a lot of literary fiction shies away from including language about our social media plugged in digital life. There is no way of making it sound poetic or literary in any way. Whereas I think that technology has become the Esperanto of our times.”
Shukla has lofty ambitions for his work. “I really think that in the same way that people still study [Jane] Austin, I hope that people will look at “Meatspace” as a line in the sand for our times. It won’t age because it focused so well on telling a timeless story about identity.”
The Asian characters in “Meatspace” have names such as Kitab, Aziz and Teddy Baker. I ask Shukla about the significance of names in the book. “What I wanted to do was basically play with the idea of what an Indian name, or what a South Asian name represents in a novel. Because I once wrote a short story.
“A reviewer once said about that short story that he was confused by all the Indian names. And this was a short story that had Bengali people, Pakistani people, Indian people, British Asian people — but for him they were all just Indian. That really frustrated me to have this sort of real ignorance to the way we live our lives.”
Above all, the point Shukla wants to make is that in literary fiction everyone is white — unless they act otherwise. “For readers to expect all of your characters to be white unless they do something Asian or black — that is frustrating.”
One of the themes in the novel is the awkward ways in which older generation uses social media. As a case study we have Kitab’s father who leaves witty and embarrassing comments on his son’s page. We also learn how his father uses the site to keep tabs on women he likes. At one point in the novel a character comments that Facebook needs to offer a “family setting”.
Shukla sees Facebook as being representative of the first generation of social media. He feels the long-term effects of social media are still unknown. “Young people aren’t using Facebook anymore,” he says. “They are junking Facebook and moving on to networks that we don’t even know about. And soon as we adults know about them they will leave them and move on to somewhere else. But the fact is Facebook to me represents people of my age connecting with cousins my age, aunties my age, and uncles my age. And also friends and acquaintances. And they are all in this big pot.”
For Shukla Facebook feels like a village hall where everyone’s invited — which doesn’t necessarily bode well. “I ended up thinking well, my wedding photos — who do I want to have access to my wedding photos? And that is who I am now Facebook friends with. I just think well I have got an active Twitter profile, follow me on Twitter if it is that important to you. I have sort of realised through writing the book that it is important to curate your online spaces to reflect how you interact with people.
Does he see himself as someone who is very sceptical about technology and social media? “I absolutely love social media. I wrote a book satirising the worst parts of my social media. And I found out having a book to promote made it even worse. Which was quite an interesting situation to be in.”
How did it get worse? “Because I just found myself constantly keynote searching my own name, the name of my book, getting upset when people un-followed me because I was shamelessly self-promoting, checking my Google search rankings, and my Amazon sales ranking. Constantly like on a mere hourly basis. And it gave me this really severe form of anxiety for a couple of weeks so I had to quit the internet.”
Shukla wrote the first draft of the book on his iPad during his daily commute between Bristol and London on coach. Usually however Shukla is not very particular about where he writes. “I don’t think you need a space. What you need is a regular time block, like I write at the same time everyday and where that is doesn’t really matter to me.” What time does he write? “I usually write 6am to 7.30am and then I go to my job.”
Does he think more authors need to put in the kinds of marketing efforts he did by sending a lamb chop into space? “I don’t want to tell authors what they should and shouldn’t do. I don’t think authors should be on Twitter just for the sake of being on Twitter. They shouldn’t do a stupid social media stunt just for attention. You know me and my friends, we come from the DIY scene. We are used to making things for ourself, doing stupid stunts and having fun. And doing comedic little projects. This just felt like a very natural thing that we would have done anyway for anyone of our projects.”
In terms of marketing, Shukla’s viral video was a big success. “We were trending for a good week. Because the video was closely associated with the book. The book was the most talked about book in the world for a week. It was exciting.”
Why did he choose a lamb chop? Why not chicken tikka masala or something else ? “Because a lamb chop is inherently funny if you think about cartoons. Lamb chops are just funny things. And we just thought these lamb chops are legendary.”
He talks about how his publishers, Harper Collins, have around 10,000 other authors besides him. “What makes me think just because I am on Harper Collins I am going to be just as important as any of those 10,000 authors? If you create a momentum as an author publishers will get behind you. Because you are not just lost then. You know I think it is really important for authors to find new ways of creating their own momentum and getting things going for their books and then publishers will catch up. You should never expect anyone to do everything for you, or anything. You should always be in control of what is happening in your name.”
Syed Hamad Ali is a writer based in London
