Booktok is bringing romance authors to the forefront, and the same thing happened for South Asian author Nisha Sharma, when her book ‘Dating Dr. Dil’ went viral on Tiktok. We spoke with her about her journey to getting her work published, and the need for increased diversity in the publishing industry.

Sharma’s first attempt at publication with traditional publishing was with a book that is now called “Illusions of Fire”. She was unable to sell the title, but finally made her debut with a YA rom-com “So Called Bollywood Life”. At the time, there weren’t many other South Asian authors writing books, especially in the romance genre, and the publishing industry wasn’t incredibly inviting.

“Diaspora stories weren’t receiving a lot of support back then … When I first wrote ‘Illusions of Fire’, publishers said we have no idea how to place this, and we got all of these rejections that started with ‘we love this, but…. Finally my agent said you have to start something else. I was in an MFA program at the time, and that’s when I started writing ‘My So Called Bollywood Life’.”

She encountered a lot of bias in the beginning of her publishing journey: editors and houses were looking at her stories with a stereotypical lens. For example, a publisher once told Sharma to make her male lead white, or readers wouldn’t connect to his character.

Sharma didn’t start her professional career after college as an author: in fact, she initially decided to go to law school. She credits her background in law to helping shape her advocacy work in the publishing industry today.

‘Dating Dr. Dil’ was Sharma’s first book to go viral on social media, and she hadn’t realized exactly how many South Asian readers were hungry for more South Asian romances than were already on the market.

“There were people who came before me who helped give me the strength to push back on publishing in a lot of ways and to advocate for all the new readers I met … For every one of the South Asian reviewers who don’t understand the books that I write, there’s like ten who come to be at a book signing and start bawling.”

Sharma explains that she doesn’t write stories based on a lot of her personal experiences or true events, and instead wants to have a conversation through her characters about South Asian experiences. She also knows that readers might not always understand the message. Her upcoming book ‘The Letters We Keep’, which was released on May 1st is based on letters her grandmother saved that were written by her greatmother after the former passed away.

“She was a brilliant woman, but she ended the last eight months of her life in an assisted living facility because she had a fractured hip bone … I was wrestling with this idea of what is our ancestry, what do we have left to remember our ancestry after she died. As the oldest daughter, my mom and her two brothers handed me a cardboard box of all of her papers, and asked me to figure out her estate … and I started going through her things and I found letters that my grandmother had kept wrapped in an old dupatta from her mother, and these letters were the last messages from her mom.”

The letters gave Sharma the idea to write about a love story that happened years ago that two college students discover through letters they found in their university library.

In addition to writing, Nisha consults in diversity, equity and inclusion work, and provides educational workshops and seminars to young, aspiring writers. She says that her greatest piece of advice is for writers to do their research on the stories that are currently on the shelves. There’s still a huge need for increased representation within the publishing industry and Sharma’s novels are some of the narratives that are able to make South Asian audiences feel seen.