Rupi Kaur, how she became a best selling author at 24

In the digital era, new opportunities have opened up for artists to achieve success through unconventional ways. Rupi Kaur hit an astonishing success through her Instagram page with her short poetry. Now only at 25, she has sold more than one million copies of her first book, Milk and honey,  which is outstanding for a first time writer especially to reach the New York Times bestsellers list every week for over a year. Fun fact, she self published her first book, and now it has been published in 30 languages.

Her goal is to make her poems easy to understand, straightforward, yet powerful, exploring emotional subjects in depth. She started writing about things that no Instagram poets were exploring. Even though she writes about love and female empowerment, her poems began to stand out because she explored topics from trauma, abuse, rape, violence, alcoholism and healing. She not only wrote these poems but also illustrated them, with this eye for words as well as lines she conquered the world one photo at a time.

Rupi created an Instagram account for her poetry while studying rhetoric and professional writing at the University of Waterloo. Slowly she achieved organic growth of 30,000 followers, but her real boom was when she posted a photo that made her an internet sensation. In 2015 she uploaded a photo of her lying on her bed with a menstrual stain. The first day her followers had quite a positive response to her statement, thanking her for exposing such a taboo subject. Although, the photo reached more than just her following, and negative reactions filled her photo comments. Later on, Instagram removed her photo. After she posted it again, they repeated their action. That day she decided to write on facebook all that was inside her, the story went viral and media such as Mashable and BBC Newsbet were posting about her — leading to dramatic growth on her social media and sales. She says that people went to her Instagram for the photo but stayed for the poems.

thank you @instagram for providing me with the exact response my work was created to critique. you deleted a photo of a woman who is fully covered and menstruating stating that it goes against community guidelines when your guidelines outline that it is nothing but acceptable. the girl is fully clothed. the photo is mine. it is not attacking a certain group. nor is it spam. and because it does not break those guidelines i will repost it again. i will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in an underwear but not be okay with a small leak. when your pages are filled with countless photos/accounts where women (so many who are underage) are objectified. pornified. and treated less than human. thank you. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ this image is a part of my photoseries project for my visual rhetoric course. you can view the full series at rupikaur.com the photos were shot by myself and @prabhkaur1 (and no. the blood. is not real.) ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ i bleed each month to help make humankind a possibility. my womb is home to the divine. a source of life for our species. whether i choose to create or not. but very few times it is seen that way. in older civilizations this blood was considered holy. in some it still is. but a majority of people. societies. and communities shun this natural process. some are more comfortable with the pornification of women. the sexualization of women. the violence and degradation of women than this. they cannot be bothered to express their disgust about all that. but will be angered and bothered by this. we menstruate and they see it as dirty. attention seeking. sick. a burden. as if this process is less natural than breathing. as if it is not a bridge between this universe and the last. as if this process is not love. labour. life. selfless and strikingly beautiful.

A post shared by rupi kaur (@rupikaur_) on Mar 24, 2015 at 9:02pm PDT

The bold courage of her words led made artists blade her of plagiarizing, yet she continued writing. She was able to become who she is now because she feels her mission is to talk for the silenced woman. Touching all taboo subjects making all of us genuinely see every reality. Although quite a successful writer she is more than that, she is a voice that finally is being heard.

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