How Zara Khanna Self-Published a Book at Age 11

Using Kotobee, Zara was able to create an interactive travel book.

Zara Khanna is an entrepreneur and a world traveler - and now a first time book author.

When Zara turned 8 years old, she thought the company name Octa could be a cute play on the root word for 8. Thus, she coded up a chatbot platform to help parents and children discover fun things to do when they traveled.

At the same time, she began working on a travel book based on her family's adventures. Now, 3 years later, she has published it using the platform Kotobee and titled it Zara’s Travels: From Scotland to Singapore.

Writing a travel book during Covid-19 when world-wide travel has been restricted couldn’t have been easy, but Zara found a way. The book is also now available directly on Amazon Kindle.

Smart Kid Mag: Can you tell us about the process of writing your book? 

Zara Khanna: So far, we’ve been working on the book for three years. We started traveling in Europe in the summer of 2018 and continued through Turkey and Central Asia in the summer of 2019. Then - 😭 - COVID-19 came and ruined our lives.

So travel was put on hold, but I constructed the last section (Xinjiang to Singapore), from my research and imagination. However, as soon as this wretched pandemic hits the road, so will we -- off to complete the great train adventure!

Smart Kid Mag: How did you work on it with your dad? 

Zara Khanna: Well, my dad taught me all the geography I know, helped me come up with the itinerary for Scotland to Singapore, and then came on the trip with me -- and so much more.

So he was there every step of the way. I did lots of writing while we were traveling just like he does. My mom and brother, and even grandparents were along for the ride and also helped make the S-S dream a reality. 

Smart Kid Mag: What’s the biggest lesson you learned from self publishing a book?

Zara Khanna: We were uber-lucky to find Kotobee, which is probably the most amazing digital publishing company in the history of ever. My book is not just like any other.

Thanks to Kotobee, it has interactive quizzes, embedded videos from my YouTube channel, links to my travel chatbot Octa, and cool splashes of color in the margins. They really made it better than a physical “book.”

Smart Kid Mag: How did you pick the technology stack for Octa?

Zara Khanna: Tech-talk! This question deserves a much longer answer but I’ll do my best to put it in a nutshell. I coded Octa in Python 3 as that is the language I learned programming in, but also, Python 3 is simple and fun!

Also, I chose to make Octa as her own site. Why? Well, originally we wanted it to be hosted on Facebook Messenger, but Octa was sitting in the acceptance queue for months. So eventually we came up with the bright idea of having Octa have her own site! We weighed the pros (everything) and cons and decided to go for it! We used Heroku for the cloud and Bitbucket for saving and sharing our code.

Smart Kid Mag: What’s the first thing you will do when you can travel again? 

Zara Khanna: Hop on a train and finish Scotland to Singapore! We’ll start by flying up to Xinjiang and taking the high-speed trains through China until we reach Yunnan, and end by taking one of the most historical and legendary trains of them all - the Eastern & Oriental (E&O) Express that will take us cruising into Singapore. From there, I’ll rush to Sentosa, the southernmost point in continental Asia, and make a grand declaration: “We made it!”

Smart Kid Mag: Any advice for kids and parents who want to do a similar project?

Zara Khanna: Research, research, research! Read books, study maps, and familiarize yourself with the place that you’re visiting, and then look at the sights through the eyes of a local.