Authors Electric

When I started writing  Shambala Junction  in Amsterdam in 2009, I had no idea that there was a traumatised young man named Saroo Brierley. Oceans away from me in Australia, he was desperately searching satellite images on Google Earth, trying to find a way from Howrah railway station to the home he lost as a child in India.  I had angrily started to write my novel, tentatively titled  Finding Piya , after reading a short news article in an Indian community newspaper about babies for sale in India. The article described a flourishing trade in unscrupulous international adoptions operating out of India. Shambala Junctio n was published in 2016, after winning the Virginia Prize for Fiction in the UK. Also in 2016, the much-feted movie  Lion  opened in movie theaters worldwide   starring scene-stealer Sunny Pawar, as well as Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman.  Lion  is based on Brierley’s memoir ( A Long Way Home , 2013).  ...

On January 21 st  this year, I decided to take a peep at my Amazon Sales Dashboard, to see how many “page reads” I was getting on my borrowed/subscription ebooks. I saw that 65 pages of my short story collection, Storm Damage, had been read that day, in the UK. I found I couldn’t resist going back the next day to see if more pages had been read. None had. So I went back the next day. No more of Storm Damage had been read, but I saw that one page of my novel, Agency Woman, had been read, by someone in India. One page. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. The next day, January 24 th , I went back again. 7 more pages of Agency Woman had been read now, in India. Went back the next day, but nothing more. All went quiet for a while on borrows. Then, I noticed on February 8, in the sales dashboard, that 547 pages of my borrowed/subscription books had been read that day. I did a specific search for each title, and saw that none of The Survival of Thomas Ford or St...

E-publishing is going to change publishing and change always evokes excitement in some and worry in others. There are challenges to it being successful in India, but its adoption will happen, primarily due to the growing popularity of smartphone and other electronic platforms. To illustrate it I would first like to share some anecdotes. One: A well-known TV journalist and blogger has been writing miniature stories within the 420 character spaces allowed by Facebook wall posts. His stories are serialised. Every time he posts a new episode in the story on his wall, it is lifted as is and published in Hindi dailies around the country. He is then sent a cheque by the newspaper for having printed his story. Although the payment is minuscule, it is a continuous and steady relationship, illustrating how a social media space can be monetised effectively. Two: A school principal from a small town on the outskirts of the capital, Delhi, told me recently how excited she w...