Sherine: Can you tell us more about the audiobook making process?

Roxanne: It’s a lot of work! As a filmmaker/sound artist anthropologist, I also work in sound so I did all of the recording myself. For Last Scene Underground, Audible paid me as a narrator to narrate my own book. I insisted, because I didn’t want a narrator slaughtering the Persian words. 

This time, as I was producing it myself, I went into the studio and did the whole thing and then hired a sound engineer to finish the final engineering which is to make sure everything is at the right volume and no poppings, and so on. They engineer the correct format for places like Audible and Spotify which have very particular requirements.  

I wanted to record the audio version before the printed book went to press, so that everything could be exactly lined up. It was also important to me to use the whisper sync on Kindle, which helps people read along with audio. 

The funniest part is that I tell my readers in the beginning that spelling (dyslexia’s kryptonite) is not important and that I purposely left some spelling errors. Then one of my students asked if that was why I mispronounced “pterodactyl” (I said it like “petra-dactyl” but the “p” should be silent) – so it turns out pterodactyl is just one of those dinosaur names that isn’t spelled the way that it’s pronounced. 

I wish I could take credit for that, but it was an actual mistake. My student thought it was a brilliant way of showing how letters don’t make sense if you can’t spell – which is a huge problem with dyslexia.

Sherine: So your students are reading your book! Can you say more about how you are using it in your teaching? 

Roxanne: I’ve assigned the book for my course on Visual Anthropology and for my Multimodal Anthropology course. It’s a great way to introduce anthropology, and what anthropologists do when they go into the field.  Surprisingly, I thought that this would be an easy way to introduce theory, as you said Marx, Benjamin, Sontag are so vividly in the book but it turns out that the more interpersonal things are what interest the students. 

They love that Alex, my protagonist, deals with imposter syndrome. They often relate to the ways in which she finds it difficult to organize thoughts or data. I have had a couple of students come up to me and mention that they think they may have dyslexia or ADHD after reading about Alex.

Many students fall through the cracks and don’t find out that they are have a learning disability until whatever crutch they used to get by is no longer there for them in college, so that’s also been incredibly gratifying to introduce students to different ways of thinking and different ways of learning and different ways of outputting research, all of which the book covers.

It’s also been helpful in my PhD seminars where I teach very broadly across disciplines from the School of the Arts to Humanities, Social Ecology to the Social Sciences, and I often have PhD students who had never before taken an anthropology class, and now I have this handy way of giving them a quick primer. 

A student recently told me he wished he had this book in high school, so that he would have come to anthropology earlier. I’d love to see anthropology taught in high school, which is one of my goals with this. I’d like to see more students come to the major earlier. 

Sherine: Your students are so lucky! I wish I learned anthropological theory this way – I really struggled in graduate school, too.

My final questions are about the publishing process. You are really blazing a new trail here by going the self publishing route, which is a whole new world with Amazon facilitating buying and distribution: what was this process like? 

Roxanne: That’s a great question because starting my own imprint was in and of itself a lot of work. And it’s not just Amazon. I use a number of distributors. As a writer friend pointed out, it is especially important advocacy work in that it moves us past gatekeepers. We have erected too many walls, too many boundaries, too many rules and regulations and gates, and we’ve kept a lot of important voices out by doing that. If folks have issues with thinkers taking the means of production into their own hands and doing something creative then my guess is those folks have benefited greatly from being a gatekeeper. It’s much easier to hide behind these walls and gates and gain your authority from that rather than to be vulnerable and put something valuable out into the world that is different. It’s time to take down these walls. We need to embrace difference and allow the spaces for other voices and ways of thinking and ways of outputting research to make their way into the world.

I had a publisher based in New York, someone I really admire, who was very excited about publishing this both as fiction and as a work of curriculum.  But the contract was abysmal. They wanted me to sign away the serial rights, and all of the subsidiary rights. As someone who does film and sound, I especially did not want to give away those rights. For my earlier books, both Duke and Stanford University Presses allowed me to keep those rights, but a trade press was less willing. (As much as I needed and enjoyed publishing with academic presses, they are expensive books to buy for students and the public.) Publishers will often hold onto those rights or sell them cheaply to a film company who may never make the film, but having bought them, will stop anyone else from making it. 

Also one has to be careful with having AI now trained on our work. I had a lot of help navigating all of this, especially things that we think of as trivial, like sharing a pdf of a book, makes our works vulnerable to AI training, use, and manipulation.

This publisher also had a bad track record of getting audiobooks out and one of my demands was that the audiobook come out at the exact same time as the print book because the whole impetus of this was to advocate for the dyslexia community. They wouldn’t budge on subsidiary rights and told me that they would do the audiobook, but I didn’t see any evidence of this. 

Creating my own imprint allowed me to make everything accessible and maintain full control of releasing the audio and text at the same time, which is much harder in traditional publishing.

It was very scary to walk away from a legitimate book contract, but what really encouraged me was when one of my fellow Dyslexia Disruptors in the United Kingdom said to me: “Roxanne, we folks with dyslexia are entrepreneurs, we are disruptors, and this is one of your strengths. In this day and age there is no reason for you to give it away for free.” 

If you are someone who has something to say and you have already established authority in your field and you have an audience those people are going to want to read your book, regardless of who published it. 

I’ve never suggested that students only read from certain presses, I tell my students know your author. Don’t ever accept that just because they are peer reviewed or that your professor has told you that you should read them that you should trust that blindly, always look things up for yourself.

Another very important inspiration for my work has been Virginia Woolf. I keep her journals by my bedside. I don’t read them as much anymore, but she would never have been published had she not started her own printing press. It was her husband Leonard Wolff, who was so tired of seeing her rejected that he went and bought an old printing press and encouraged her to put her hand to it. 

She also ended up publishing really important authors like James Joyce, who also would never have published Ulysses if it hadn’t been for her Hogwarth press. In this age when we don’t have to go and buy an old printing press and type-set all the tiles ourselves on multiple printing plates. There is so much less now holding us back from pushing the boundaries and creating new genres.

Sherine: Those are such good points about self-publishing. There are so many examples – Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, and Margaret Atwood also started out as a self-published author. 

Also the publishing process can be really flawed: editors don’t always know how to make a book better – and I think it would be hard for a trade press editor to shape this new genre that you are creating. You are really breaking new ground in anthropology! 

Like Virginia Woolf, you also have major support from your partner, Kasra Paydavousi, who is a visual artist, and I noticed that he did the beautiful artwork for the cover. What was that collaboration like?

Roxanne: Yes, it is like having an in-house art department. When I first met Kasra at Persian Poetry Night at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, he was photographing with a Holga camera. This was a popular toy in the 70s that became a hip mode of doing photography among artists in the late 90s with the reverse technology which I was really into as well. 

So, we bonded over our Holgas and he’s been an important collaborator since then. He also drew all the individual chapter headings for the book. 

Photo by Roxanne Varzi taken with a Holga camera, similar to the pinhole camera that Alex makes in the book that happens to catch a clue.

Sherine: Was it hard to write without an editor? How did you know when you were done? Also, how are you able to promote the book and get the word out? 

Roxanne: In terms of editing, neither of my academic books were given major edits or changes after peer review. If anything, the process of peer review delayed publication in the case of my first book by a whole year, while a reviewer sat on it.

Our technology has finally gotten to the point where the individual can control the means of production, which is a very powerful place to be. I felt this early on when making my first film: I was able to afford to be the editor and the camera person and the subtitle writer and translator. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work and you have to learn all sorts of new skills but I also like that because I get very bored doing the same thing over and over.

And you know this as a multimodal practitioner every time we develop into a new genre there’s a huge learning curve.

That said… I’m terrible at marketing, and I hate self-promotion. I just put something up on Facebook about the book and I have old friends who are congratulating me, which tells you that they didn’t even know that the book came out a year ago.