This would be the title of my first book I'm thinking, a collection of essays about the first ten years of my life spent in America. They'd be mostly humorous essays, stumbling from ordering food at restaurants to talking to people to miscommunication and friend breakups and crashing in people's couches for years to an end. And my total inability to make white girl friends, or to retain them.
Who would read it, maybe I could push it on to my friends and family, if I got two hundred copies sold that would be hopefully enough to pay for the editor and the initial print run. It would be shitty obviously, self-publishing with Amazon, but my content would be out in the open finally for the world to consume! Why anybody would ever want to consume the so called book would be a questions for the great minds.
Perhaps somebody like me, a brown person who doesn't consider himself too out there and interesting will have a glance at it and underestimate it, rolling his eyes and groaning at the ambitious title. He'll flip through the pages -- how it will have made to the shelves of the bookstores we will never know -- and see if there's anything worth looking at or if I'm yet another tryhard loser. Ah a slightly funny incident here, an anecdote there, worth the twenty bucks most certainly, he'd think and buy it. As a joke of sorts. Not the kind of book to recommend to anybody.
He'd read through the fifty thousand words in a matter of days, and be really loving it. He'd tell his friends and family that he really misjudged this book and some new author, it's actually quite good, might want to take a look, a couple friends of his would check it out, and like it as well. And they'd have finished it over a matter of a weekend. One of them will write a goodreads review of it, in addition to posting it on social media and sharing it with friends and family at large.
Eventually it'll gather some steam but I won't know it because I"m not keeping track of the sales. I've made my original investment, I'm happy about the moolah coming in. Six months later amazon tells me I've got some royalty checks, I look at it and freak out, maybe the number's wrong because by that logic I'll have had to sell at least five thousand copies, which is quite an unbelievable number in this day and age for an unknown writer. But it's the truth, and the number only keeps on rising.
Eventually the book will have gathered a couple of hundred mostly positive and some glowing reviews on goodreads, the most negative reviews will call it boring, but nothing worse. It'll get reviewed by small Indian newspapers, and papers from Nepal who'll have heard of it through the grapevine.
Very soon I'll have family and friends who I did not force to buy copies of the book tell me they read the book and it was good. By the end of it I'd have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and been on several recommended bookslists.
I won't be a celebrity, but I'll be known and respected, and taken seriously as a writer. This will open up avenues for me to try become a real writer.
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