Jasmeet Chhabra continues to be passionate about his private equity investment career, and yet finds solace and sanity in his writings.
Distinct from the writings on his professional calling, real estate, in leading mainline dailies and journals, his parallel fiction, an inquiry into the nature and evolution of the human thinking and beliefs, is often an imaginative journey through characters that are in effect each one of us jumping from one time warp & one belief mould to another.
While his first novel, CrossRoad was an inquiry into the myriad paths that we choose in our social/ societal role, Norman Pinglepopp is an inquiry into the belief systems that govern the larger drivers of living fear & love.
Jasmeet presently lives in Delhi with his friend, philosopher & wife, Rachita and his 6 year old son Sahil.
Briefly explain about your book.
Norman Pinglepop is a dark satire woven around the concept of power driven by fear. I believe that our social institutions, be it religious, political, caste driven or belief oriented, have been reduced to being tools of enslavement by a powerful few who have managed to create an aura of divinity/ invincibility by exploiting resident fears that thrive in each one of us.
All the characters and all the locations in this book are essentially reflective of different motivations and mindsets of people at large. Norman Pinglepop the protagonist is one of those powerful few who through an elaborate war setting tried to explain through his monologues and soliloquy, the deeply ingrained need to belong in each one of us and how it is open to exploitation by creating the right dose of fear and conformity.
In the end however, the only rightful emotion that should guide our lives, unconditional love, wins over the evil designs of the protagonist thus fulfilling the universal law of constancy, what goes, comes back.
What do you feel is the USP of your book
I believe the characters and the settings in the book offer a unique and novel perspective to a complicated theme in a manner that is easy to relate to. It is meant for the thinking reader because it questions the very fundamental beliefs we often sacrifice our lives too and yet continue to live in a state of void, seldom understanding what or where did we go wrong. I believe this book will help each one of us identify the futility of external affectations and help us look inward to find the very reason that should define us as humans.
Who are your target audience and how do you feel this book is going make a change in their lives.
Norman Pinglepop in my mind, is beyond the limitations of age and gender. It will appeal to the thinking reader and his sense of inquiry into the nature of our societal existence and walk the path beyond the limitations of society to a path of self discovery with him.
How long have you been working on this manuscript.
It took me a couple of months to create the overall framework of Norman Pinglepop and with its iterations and re-runs around six months to finalize the book
Could you share some interesting incidents that you encountered on the course of building your manuscript?
Mid way through writing the book, I got reasonably consumed by the characters and settings in the book so much so that I started to identify people around me and situations to the characters I had created in the book. Obviously I had opinions about each of those characters and now they started to dominate the manner in which I would deal with people around basis how and where I placed them within the larger framework of the book.
I often manage to see myself as the actor and the audience at the same time and whenever I would fall in one such trap as stated above, I would laugh to myself as an audience. I used to find such times rather amusing
How did you make up your mind for self publishing?
I did make a few rounds of the traditional publishers and found them too lost in the typical commercial & thriller framework. The joy of experimenting and accepting something different, a fresh thought, and a new way of looking at things seem to lack with them. They often see out of place with the emerging social media marketplace still relying on the physical off the shelf model which disheartened me and I parked the manuscript to focus on my career.
I discovered self publishing through some articles in the newspaper and got hooked on to the idea of being able to orchestrate my own work made even better with professional help and that convinced me to look at self publishing with much satisfaction and delight on hindsight.
Your views on the publishing process that you underwent at Notion Press
Quite satisfactory and reasonably professional, Notion Press is a boon to young and budding publishers to showcase their work and yet be masters of their work and how it reaches out to people and is perceived.
What do you think has been the advantages working with Notion Press?
Effective project management and guidance at each stage. A superior social media and electronic marketing plan with an effective execution team, Notion Press with its experience of having taken so many authors to market, offers a young author the insights and collective wisdom both in publishing and marketing, essential to make a success of the book.
What is the reach of your book now?
The reach is exceptional both across E-Commerce sights and across geographies both in physical and e-book format which opens a market far larger then a physical pan national distribution could have provided in the traditional publishing world.
What are your marketing strategies?
To use the facebook, linkedin and twitter networks of myself and close friends and families with an attempt to reach out to a large number of potential readers. Use mass mailing to reach a larger professional community which I am a part of and finally break into book readers clubs across major cities and online forum to reach out to fellow authors for their reviews and comments and make them the work of mouth publicists to further promote the book
A small piece of advice to upcoming authors.
While a few years ago, one had to discover the formula that would work with the traditional publishers to connect with their markets. Notion Press has opened the vistas for us to stick to our own writing style and thus present our story to our audience. This way we now get the freedom as writers to carve our own identity and discover likeminded fellow readers. Make abundant use of this opportunity, discover your writing and present it to the world with élan.