Interview: Zelda Rhiando

I went on a blind date with Zelda Rhiando once. Sort of. At least, that's what I'll tell everyone when she is a big literary sensation. We first met in our teens/early 20s and are now a lot older. She is a very talented individual with a cracking novel under her belt and several bestselling apps and popular websites to her name.

Now that her novel, Caposcripti, is available from all good bookshops I have persuaded her to come on here and answer a few questions.

SP: Tell us about Caposcripti in a couple of sentences (mainly to save me from typing up an explanation myself!)

ZR: A photographer stalks the streets of London looking to capture subjects for his terrifying experiments. An explorer, lost in the Amazon 150 years earlier, is on a quest to discover a language lost since the dawn of civilisation.

Separated by time, they are ruthlessly united in their obsession - to discover the code of life.

SP: The book has had a rather long gestation I believe?

ZR: Yes - it's been a while coming! I first had the idea in the late nineties, and then went and researched it in 1999 in South America. Then followed a period of intense writing when a lot of the jungle scenes were created, and an outline of the whole plot. I was working on various digital projects at the same time, so writing was sometimes compartmentalised, and I put it away for a little while. Then in 2007 I decided to take a fresh look and got in into complete draft shape. It then went through a couple of rounds with a really good editor [Scott: modesty prevents me from revealing the identity of said editor] who made structural suggestions that really helped the book take shape, and resulted in a finished manuscript. Sadly due to economic woes, the publishing offer fell through, and nothing happened with the book for a year and a half.

Meanwhile, I'd begun working with Penguin Digital - developing enhanced digital books and apps as part of their move into digital publishing. This brought me into a wide range of formats, and gave me a rather eye-opening glimpse into the world of publishing - as well as a good understanding of the end-to-end process of getting a book from manuscript form into the hands of a consumer.

A good friend had recently left the Sales department of Hodder and offered to help me get the book into shops, so I decided to go the boutique publishing route. I set up my own imprint (Badzelda Productions) and created several editions of the book. Kindle, ePub and iBooks editions started the ball rolling, followed by a print on demand service for the US, and finally a print run.

SP: Wasn't it a free download for a while? How did that go?

ZR: There hasn't been a free download of the whole of the book - just a few sample chapters. I did get a lot of interest in the chapters, including an interview on BBC London followed by a flurry of downloads. However, the final book is a very different beast to those early concepts. Free downloads could conceivably drive print sales of the book, but in reality paid downloads offset the print costs, and for me that's a better model at this stage.

SP: I have to ask you about the headshrinking. You actually went to South America to research that aspect didn't you?

ZR: I did - I spent time travelling down the Amazon and Janamono rivers in the Loreto district of Peru, looking for the Jivaro and other tribes. Actually most of the tribes I came into contact with in the Amazon were somewhat westernised - satellite telly, football, etc - but I did find some people in the cloud forests of Southern Columbia that were living a much more traditional lifestyle.

SP: Do you have a shrunken head yourself? If so, where do you keep it? If not, do you secretly want one?

ZR: I've got several replicas, but not the real thing. Actually, I think I can live without the captured spirit of a fallen warrior in my house :)

SP: In your other life you do lots of exciting digital things, what sort of projects have you worked on?

ZR: Well I've been making digital stuff since 1996 - so that would be a long list... I've always loved a cross-disciplinary approach: imagining, structuring, coding, designing, and generally making projects happen. I've been lucky enough to do that as a 'company of one' for the last decade or so, which gives me a lot of flexibility with writing. Websites, apps, enhanced tv, digital books - I've worked on all these things at some point.

Recently I've been making apps and enhanced books - mostly for kids, from babies up to young readers, with Penguin, Ladybird and Warne. Other projects are afoot, in the adult space, but I can't talk about them just yet.

SP: What next on the writing front?

ZR: I've got another novel in progress - which will be set in Japan. It's in a fairly early stage at the moment - treatment, emerging outline and a couple of chapters. I'm excited to see where it goes!

SP: And finally, every visitor to my blog is invited to recommend a favourite book. What do you think we should be reading?

ZR: Well, my favourite book to read again and again is Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. In terms of new writers, I really enjoyed Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beaumont. I just read through your top ten books for 2011 and some of them look very intriguing - so off to read a couple of them now.

Thanks for having me Scott!

---

Zelda, it has been a pleasure.

You can discover more about Zelda and her work at www.badzelda.com. Caposcripti is available in print and ebook editions and should be pretty easy to get hold of from your retailer or e-tailer of choice or direct from the author here.