Person of interest | Andaleeb Wajid: the story weaver

After two life-changing tragedies in 2021, the author chooses to self publish because she has no time to lose

Author Andaleeb Wajid wrote her way through two life-changing tragedies in 2021 when she lost her mother-in-law and her husband Mansoor to COVID-19, leaving her and her two sons Saboor and Azhaan grief-stricken and “untethered”. Like most deaths during that time, her family members were gone suddenly and without any proper goodbyes. Last year would have been the couple’s 25th anniversary. Wajid found herself unable to talk to anyone without breaking down, bereft without the two people with whom she shared everything first. Writing, you could say, saved her.

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“Writing was a lot like therapy,” she says, adding that at a time when everything was slipping away, it was the only place she could cling on to for a semblance of normalcy. “When you’re writing you’re creating your own world, you’re in control. The one thing I didn’t have in those months was control.”

She worried constantly about money and about life without Mansoor. Just months before he passed away, her husband had converted a large balcony in their house into a plush man cave, with wardrobes and an office space. Angry at him for going so soon, Wajid began writing there. Even as the writing schedules that she diligently made at the start of every year crumbled, her self-publishing journey, which she had embarked on in 2019, became even more urgent.

When she started self-publishing her books, fellow authors had expressed concern: “What’s wrong? Why are you self-publishing?” They wanted to know why Wajid, who has been an author with almost every big publishing house, had picked an option that many see only as a fallback for writers rejected by mainstream publishing.

Wajid’s logic was simple. She couldn’t wait the year or two it usually takes to go from manuscript to published novel. “When I’ve written something I want it to go out into the world immediately,” she told them. Plus, she wanted to see if she could actually make a living from the writerly life. Wajid, 45, has always been prolific: the last time I interviewed her in 2018, she had written 17 books in nine years. She was just embarking on her self-publishing journey. When she’s working on a book, her day starts with writing, one or two chapters daily. In self-publishing, she is her own boss, and a very “strict” one, she says.

Now she’s the author of 40 books, including many self-published multi-part series. Her top selling Kindle e-book,  Accidentally Married, the first of a six-part series, has an 11 lakh-plus Kindle Edition Normalised Page Count (KENPC). The KENPC measures the number of pages customers read and calculates royalty accordingly.