HOW TO WEAR A SARI: Interview and Cover Reveal!

By NONIEQA RAMOS

The Soaring ‘20s are thrilled to host the cover reveal of Darshana Khiani’s debut picture book, HOW TO WEAR A SARI! 

Darshana Khiani

Darshana Khiani, a mom to two darling girls, is a computer engineer by day and writer by night. She makes every hour of the day count! Her literary career began with her children’s book review site and blog Flowering Minds, where she interviewed authors, kept a book report diary, and compiled reading roundups of South Asian picture books, middle grade books, and young adult literature. She has spent more than a decade working on the We Need Diverse Books Campaign, reviewing and promoting inclusive children’s literature that reflects our world. I am so hyped to interview my Versify sibling about her debut picture book HOW TO WEAR A SARI, which is set to release June 22, 2021!

Darshana, your debut picture book, HOW TO WEAR A SARI, sparkles with playfulness, humor, and joy. Kids will love this delightful story about a little girl who plays dress-up to prove how grown-up she is. Parents will chuckle over the hilarious results.  What inspired you to tell this story?

In the fall of 2016, I was planning out my outfits for the upcoming Diwali holiday season. I love the elegance of saris, but I was bemoaning how I never got the hang of wearing one. Then I wondered what it would be like if a young Indian girl wanted to play dress-up with her mom’s sari. *lightbulb* I knew I had a story. While many books depict playing dress-up with Western formal wear, there were none with a sari. And while there are a handful of sari books, I wanted this to be fun, light-hearted, and cheery like Fancy Nancy or the Birdie books. I wanted to show the universal themes of wanting to be older and dressing up but with South Asian flair.

Please tell us about your pre-publication journey. How did you feel when you signed with Kwame Alexander’s imprint Versify?

When I was a kid, I dreaded English class. It was my hardest subject. However, I always enjoyed creative writing assignments. They were my favorite. But seeing as I didn’t like writing essays and term papers, I pursued engineering in college. Fast forward 20 years, and I’m reading stacks and stacks of picture books to my kids and loving it. I began studying the craft of writing, joined SCBWI, took classes, attended conferences, and immersed myself into everything kidlit. After seven years, in the spring of 2018, I received the wonderful news from my agent that Versify wanted to buy HOW TO WEAR A SARI. I spoke to Kwame and my editor, Erika. I loved hearing their enthusiasm and that our visions for the story matched.         

Can you describe your revision process as you strove to bring HOW TO WEAR A SARI to the beautiful work of art it is today?

Thank you for those kind words. 😊 I started this story in the fall of 2016 and only went through 11 revisions and was in polished state by the summer of 2017. That’s quite fast for me. Most of my stories take at least two years or longer. This came well-formed from the beginning in terms of the voice and plot line. I usually do a few revisions on my own to make sure all the major pieces and vision of the story are there before sending it to my critique group. The aspect that took the longest to nail was the heart for the story. “Why did she want to wear a sari?” Once the big picture items are in place, I’ll put the story into a storyboard format so I can see all the spreads on one sheet of paper. This helps me with pacing, word repetition, and seeing the number of words on each spread.   

The illustrations are fresh, whimsical, and charming. What was it like collaborating with illustrator Joanne Lew-Vriethoff? How did you feel when you saw the final product?

As is the case in many picture book projects, I didn’t have any contact with Joanne. All communications went through my editor, Erika Turner, and book designer Natalie Fondriest. This book is bursting with energy and color thanks to Joanne and Natalie.  When I saw the first full sketch dummy. I was BLOWN away. Joanne made my spunky, fun-loving girl into a fully formed person with a personality. I loved the girl’s expressions and movement. I also really appreciated how Joanne used a variety of brown skin tones for the characters and included a mixed-race family.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book? 

I want kids to know that desire to show grownups you can do older things is a universal feeling. There will be fun moments and mistakes, but that’s all part of the experience. With the ending, I wanted kids to see that everyone young and old has flop moments, too. So keep on striving!

On what other projects are you working?

Truthfully, the writing has been a bit slow with everything that’s going on in the world. I’ve been leaning into family time, learning more about anti-Blackness in the South Asian community and engaging in the ongoing conversations with family and friends.

I am polishing up a picture book on compassion, which I’m excited about as it is near and dear to my heart. I have another picture book under contract, but it hasn’t been announced yet. Stay tuned. 😉

And now… the Grand Reveal! 

As we get closer to Darshana’s publication date, please stay tuned for details on her launch. Check out her website for details on forthcoming interviews, panels, and workshops. Be sure and add HOW TO WEAR A SARI on Goodreads! 

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Darshana Khiani is a computer engineer by day and a children’s writer by night. She is a second-generation Indian American and enjoys writing funny, light-hearted stories with a South Asian backdrop. When she isn’t working or writing she can be found hiking, skiing, or volunteering. Darshana lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two daughters. You can find her online at:

Website: www.darshanakhiani.com
Twitter: @darshanakhiani
Instagram: @darshanakhiani

NoNieqa Ramos is an educator who wrote THE DISTURBED GIRL’S DICTIONARY, a 2018 New York Public Library Best Book for Teens, a 2019 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selection, and a 2019 In the Margins Award Top Ten pick. Hip Latina named THE TRUTH IS in its “10 of the Best Latinx Young Adult Books of 2019.”  Remezcla included TTI in the “15 Best Books by Latino and Latin American Authors of 2019.” Versify will release her debut picture books BEAUTY WOKE on January 1, 2021, and YOUR MAMA on April 6, 2021. NoNieqa is a proud member of The Soaring 20s and Las Musas. You can find her online at:

Website: https://nonieqaramos.com/
Twitter: @NoNieqaRamos
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50986523-your-mama
Instagram: @nonieqa.ramos/
Las Musas: https://www.lasmusasbooks.com/nonieqa-ramos.html

Statement of Solidarity

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Art by Larissa Marantz

We, the Soaring ’20s Picture Book Collective, are united with the Black Lives Matter Movement. 

We grieve with you. We are outraged with you. We understand that words and actions are required to fight with you.

Because we are a diverse group of creators, we directly state that our nonBlack and white members have the responsibility to eradicate police brutality and systemic racism first and foremost. Those of us with privilege will use their voices and resources to support, defend, and protect the human rights of the Black community.  

We demand the prosecution of the police officers who murdered George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and countless others. We demand the prosecution of ex-police officer Travis McMichael and his son Gregory McMichael for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.

We demand that the lives of freedom fighters, the protestors who are risking their lives and livelihoods to rise up against police brutality and systemic racism and oppression, are respected and protected.

We pledge to: 

• Listen to Black voices.

• Speak up and fight against anti-blackness in our own families and our own communities of color.

• Amplify Black creators by promoting their works.

• Examine and be accountable for our own beliefs and actions, including how we benefit from systemic racism.

• Educate ourselves about the brutal systemic racism Black communities have experienced for generations so that we can work for justice and become strong allies with the Black community.

• Educate ourselves about the historic accomplishments and achievements of the Black community that have been ignored and erased.

• Be present for Black joy. Celebrate Black accomplishments. 

As parents, we will:

• Talk with our children about racism, white privilege, and the role of informed, engaged citizens to make their voices heard and hold our government accountable. We will educate our children with #ownvoices literature and resources.

• Examine and be accountable for our own beliefs around racism, white privilege, and white fragility.

• Ensure our children have access to and are enriched and empowered by books by and about people of color and specifically, Black people, to study the history of racism in the United States and the history of Black resistance and perseverance. We will provide our children with a full-range of works by BIPOC that represents a wide range of experiences by BIPOC—not just tragedies—and a full range of genres.

• Encourage our children’s schools to be actively antiracist.

• Work with our families to create change. These actions may include 

  • protesting, 

  • signing petitions, 

  • contacting legislators, 

  • writing letters to the editor of newspapers, 

  • donating money to causes supporting Black Lives Matter, and

  • voting in federal, state, and local elections, and making informed choices.

As educators, we will:

• Decolonize our classroom bookshelves and curricular book lists,

• Commit ourselves to promoting the ideals of racial equality with action,

• Encourage engaging in activism and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. (Resource: https://www.tolerance.org)

As writers, we will:

• Read, review, and promote books by Black creators,

• Actively support the inclusion of marginalized voices on panels at children’s book conferences,

• Only attend conferences that create safe spaces for the Black community,

• Have sensitivity readers to ensure our work is antiracist,

• Work for full inclusion in the publishing community using whatever resources we have at our disposal.

Words without action are performative and unacceptable.

Please join us in our fight against systemic racism and oppression with action. These actions must permeate our daily lives and guide our paths forward now and for the rest of our lives to save Black lives and to preserve the Black community’s human right to life with liberty and happiness. We have created a living document with full awareness of its insufficiency and vow to revisit and update it. 

Resources

• Kidlit Rally 4 Black Lives hosted on The Brown Bookshelf, archived recording. 

• Template for Holding Your Employer Accountable for Racial Justice by Rachel Cargle

• SLJ Day of Dialog video: Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds discuss Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

• List of Black-owned independent bookstores compiled by LitHub

• Equity Audit: Self-Assessing Your Classroom Library, from Seed the Way, LLC

• Teaching for Black Lives book from Rethinking Schools

• Education resources related to Teaching for Black Lives

Organizations

• Showing Up For Racial Justice

• Clemmons Family Farm

• Campaign Zero

• Minnesota Freedom Fund​

• The Sweet Water Foundation

• Sipp Culture

• The Loop Lab

• Designing Justice

• People's Paper Co-op

• The Bronx Book Festival

Reading lists for kids

• “Because Several Folks Keep Asking for a Reading List for Children (0-12)” by Sujei Lugo Vázquez and Alia Jones

• We Are KidLit Collective Summer 2020 Reading List 

• The Brown Bookshelf 

• Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness by Anastasia Higginbotham (picture book)

• List by the Conscious Kid on Noteworthy - the Journal Blog

• Here Wee Read

• Here Wee Read - Black Lives Matter book stack

• Diverse Reads/The Tutu Teacher

• Black Children’s Books and Authors (BCBA), books by categories

• Books to explaining racism and protest to your kids from The New York Times

• Children’s Books by Brilliant Black Women 

Reading list for adults

• Anti-Racist Reading List from Dr. Ibram X. Kendi 

• Resources for Talking about Race, Racism and Racialized Violence with Kids from Center for Racial Justice in Education

• Talking Race with Young Children from NPR

• Resources for Having Difficult Conversations with Youth from Partnership for Afterschool Education

Articles

• For Our White Friends Desiring to be Allies 

• 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

• Anti-Racism Resources

• Resources for White People to Learn and Talk About Race and Racism 

• History of Police Brutality 

• South Asians and Black Lives

• The 1619 Project, The New York Times Magazine

• Performative Allyship Is Deadly (Here’s What to Do Instead)

• A Unit To Teach Kids About Microaggressions, Pragmatic Mom

• How Can Parents Make Their Kids Understand How to Be Anti-Racist? NPR interview with authors Renee Watson and Ibram X. Kendi

Documentaries

• 13th by Ava DuVernay 

• The Central Park Five by Ken Burns, David McMahon, and Sarah Burns 

• 10 Black History Documentaries 

Websites

• Talking about Race, a resource from the National Museum of African American History & Culture

• Teaching Tolerance

• Teaching for Change

• Reading While White

• Anti-Racism Resources for All Ages (Dr. Nicole A. Cooke, University of South Carolina) 

• The Guide to Allyship by Amelie Lamont 

• Dr. Robin DiAngelo Critical Racial & Social Justice Education

• Institutionalized Racism: A Syllabus (JSTOR Daily)

Mental Health Resources

• African American Focus Mental Health Organizations

• Black Virtual Therapist Directory

• Ethel’s Club

• Therapy for Black Girls

• Kìire Wellness 

Launch Countdown: Reflections and Results

By Vicky Fang

A Scholastic early chapter book, out now.

So I just ran a launch countdown for my debut book, LAYLA AND THE BOTS: Happy Paws. If you’re curious about how I set it up, how much anxiety was involved, and what the results were, this is for you!

THE IDEA

One countdown post per day, posted to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, for eight days leading to the launch of my book.

DAY BY DAY

Let’s look at each day and how it went.

8 Days to Launch: Book Giveaway

I wanted to kick off with something fun and splashy, so I ran my first book giveaway. Learning from the experiences in my Soaring ‘20’s debut launch group, I kept it simple. Just a Follow/RT with an extra entry for tagging a friend. This last part is key! It promotes your tweet to your desired audience and keeps the visibility of your tweet high all day. I did retweet once in the afternoon, and posted a thank you reply in the evening. As you can see, I got 142 retweets on this post. It’s hard to say how many followers, because they continued to come in over the next few days, but I’d estimate 50 followers on the first day. Facebook likes were low—I would guess because it didn’t have any new information for my friends and family and because the call to action pushed them to Twitter, which most of them don’t use.

Worth noting, too: I spent way too much time debating whether I should make the countdown a thread, or a nested retweet, or independent posts. I ended up going with independent posts for simplicity (even though it means a given day could be retweeted three days later with no context and therefore showing the wrong number of days until launch - I figured nobody would get too upset about the number of days and decided to just let it be.)

7 Days to Launch: Podcast Interview

I was scheduled to appear on Jedlie’s Reading With Your Kids podcast so I chose to promote this. One awkward thing I realized was that my graphic countdown approach made it difficult to retweet with comment or highlight the content link itself. I ended up using my graphic for visibility and including the link, but also retweeting (without comment) Jedlie’s post. I’m not sure what the best answer is, but if I had to guess, I would say the graphic helps promote awareness, while possibly dampening link action. It’s a tradeoff to consider on posts in general. Engagement on this was also much higher on Facebook, which makes sense as those are my friends and family who would be most interested in listening to me, as an unknown debut author.

6 Days to Launch: Free Stickers w/ Pre-order

On this day, I chose to promote free stickers on orders from my local indie, Linden Tree Books. I didn’t expect a lot of action on this, but I wanted to give my local indie some love and encourage others to as well. It probably only resulted in a handful of new orders to be honest, but it raised awareness for the book, for the shop, and felt like a nice thing to do.

5 Days to Launch: Online Activities

I wanted to post my online activities, especially since I had grown some new teacher and librarian followers from my first day giveaway! I expected this post to get more traffic than it did, but I didn’t want to retweet because at this point I was starting to feel some anxiety from shouting about myself publicly all day.

4 Days to Launch: KidLit411 interview

On this day, I was scheduled to appear on KitLit411. I was pretty relieved to not have to talk about myself and to let somebody else talk about me. I didn’t feel too bad about the lower engagement on my end because it was being promoted in a separate tweet (thanks to the KidLit411 folks!) You can see I chose to retweet with comment and add my graphic, because the KidLit411 content looked okay and clickable when I set it up that way.

3 Days to Launch: Bookshop.org List

If you haven’t guessed, at this point I was feeling quite, quite anxious about posting about myself all the time. I had another post planned to point to some past interviews, but I couldn’t bear it and spent the night setting up a Bookshop.org site featuring my favorite #STEAM books for kids so that I could talk about other people for a day! I also tagged all the authors I included. I enjoyed this one because it did allow me to interact with some of my favorite authors, some of whom I’m already connected with and others who maybe had never heard of me until I posted. I also feel good about having this Bookshop running list for books that align with my goals as a writer, in empowering kids in STEAM.

2 Days to Launch: Critique Giveaway

On Day 2, I stuck to my plan and posted a critique giveaway. This time, I decided to try out a Rafflecopter, with entries tied to Twitter follows and newsletter sign-ups. To be honest, I knew that at this point I had saturated my feed with my countdown and that I couldn’t expect huge engagement, so with Rafflecopter entries being invisible (vs Twitter RTs/Follows) I figured that as long as I got one entry, it would be all good! (I got more than one entry, forty-five to be exact.) I retweeted once in the evening with a thank you. From this retweet, I got a lot of likes in the morning, which made me realize that tweeting at 7am PST missed a lot of the EST morning Twitter traffic.

1 Day to Launch: Thank You Blog Post

My last day was saved to thank my editors, illustrator, book designer, agent, launch groups, and critique partners. I considered posting this on a blog with larger influence, but it felt most relevant to writers and I didn’t have a good outlet in mind on such short notice, so I kept it on my personal blog.

That night, I picked the winners and optimized the images on my website. Why I didn’t do that BEFORE the launch countdown, I don’t know.

Launch Day!

I posted a launch graphic and announced the winners. This was fun! 

THE POSITIVE TAKEAWAYS

Overall, I was happy with the results of the countdown. Here are the upsides:

I grew my audience:

By the end of the week, I had gained about 110 new Twitter followers. To be transparent, there were also many factors and activities outside of the countdown happening. I snuck in book reviews and retweets of other authors to ease the anxiety of self-promotion. I also posted cute pics of my kids to my smaller networks. My publicists and launch groups continued to post articles and interviews that I continued to retweet.

I partnered with my publisher:

I do think the countdown was appreciated by my publisher, including my editors, my publicist, and my marketing partner. It gave me a way to share with them my own enthusiasm and willingness to pitch in. The countdown was one piece of the puzzle. I also generated original content for them (STEAM activity blog post, activity sheets, and video).

I generated awareness for my book:

Even when engagement felt low, I do think awareness grew just through the visibility of the countdown, which really was the point. There were many instances when something surprising would come out of the woodwork—a friend that I didn’t know was an influencer in another sphere tweeting about my stuff, a friend choosing to order from my local indie, close friends suddenly asking where to buy my book or telling me they finally ordered it, friends ordering from bookshop.org who hadn’t heard of it before. Even though I felt like I was shouting about myself, each post had tangible results and brought my book back to the forefront of people’s crowded minds.

LESSONS LEARNED

This was a decent amount of work. Every night, I found myself finalizing content and every morning, I was manually blasting my social networks. I had fun doing it, but it was also anxiety-inducing. In the end, I think it was worth it and I would do it again. But here are my notes-to-self for my next countdown:

• Keep the simple giveaway kickoff.

• For mental sanity, consider running it for 3-5 days instead of 8.

• Find ways to ease the self-promotion anxiety, for example:

  • Have scheduled content from a blogger/influencer.

  • Find ways to promote other people’s books.

  • Continue to tweet about other books/things/people.

• Be flexible and adjust to what feels comfortable on the go.

• Tweet early and retweet later in the day if you want more visibility.

And one more note—I’m not sure if the graphics helped or became tedious for my audience. I think because not many people are running countdown graphics, it was okay, but if everybody starts doing it, then it might lose its appeal. So I plan to keep this fluid in future countdowns, depending how I feel.

Okay, that’s what I learned from running this countdown! I hope this is helpful for you as you think about promotion for your own books and that you figure out a strategy that works for you. Onward! 

(And keep an eye out for my next launch countdown for INVENT-A-PET, starting very soon!)

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Vicky Fang is a product designer who spent five years designing kids’ technology experiences for both Google and Intel, often to inspire and empower kids in coding and technology. Through that work, she came to recognize the gap in education and inspiration, particularly for girls and minorities. She began writing books to provide kids with accessible STEAM-inspired stories that they can read again and again, learning from characters they love. Her goal for her books is to inspire computer literacy for a wide range of kids—while letting their imaginations run wild with the possibilities of technology! Her debut books, LAYLA & THE BOTS (Scholastic early chapter book series) and INVENT-A-PET (Sterling picture book), are launching in Spring/Summer 2020 and feature courageous and innovative girls in STEAM. You can find Vicky on Twitter @fangmous or at her website  www.vickyfang.com.