Books by Amrita Tripathi
Blog posts May 2016
Finding your Zen...
Sometimes it's just enough to sit back and feel the flow... Especially hard to learn how, but once you do... Slow...It...Down
Here's looking back at a beautiful moment, a memory pebble for the ages.
Reading from The Sibius Knot
Photo Credit: Mary Therese Kurkalang
Thanks to the Prose at Toddy series, Mridula Koshy, Anushree Majumdar, friends at The Toddy Shop, and the wonderful writers in the line-up: Amitabha Bagchi, Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan and Parvati Sharma, this was actually not entirely terrifying.
The fun's just begun... if you're writing a book
Writing this was a hoot! (Well, that's the version I'm sticking with, not the sobbing in a corner while contemplating sales and print runs...wait, what?!)
You can find this on The News Minute right here and do send in your comments @amritat / @thenewsminute or share your stories. (Thanks for those who've already commented saying they share the pain!)
Step 1: Write
You think of a story and decide to write it. Or a story grips you so hard that you don’t know how you’re sleep-walking through the rest of your life, but sleep-walk you must, because this is the story that has to be told. You write it or it writes you. It can be a mystical experience at the best of times, a frustrating one at the worst, but it’s fulfilling, all told.
Which is probably why so many of do it. Folks with the glimmer of an idea, those who want to tell you about the universe, reporters who feel that 2,000 words in print or 20 minutes on television never really did justice to the people they met. Some of us are honouring the flame that’s burning us up inside out. The prestige that comes with it is a nice little bonus.
And then thud, you crash into the real world.
Step 2: Wait out the rejection
Someone will tell you the story is fascinating, but perhaps too intense, so not for them. Someone else says there may be a sliver of a market, but only if you re-write the ending. Or the beginning. And re-name your characters while you’re at it.
Word to the wise? Hold on to all the positive comments you get, even from your boyfriend or grandmother, because they will be the only buffer protecting you and your naked self-esteem in the storm to come.
(Pro tip: Clutch to your heart famous authors’ rejection stories. JK Rowling is a current favourite on social media.)
If you’re lucky enough to have an editor or agent or prospective publisher, or all three, you’ll be ready and privileged to have a book come out, after this series of back and forths.
You will inevitably get sucked into a maelstrom of publicity and marketing. You might downward spiral into self-pity once this round is done, but that’s still about six months away, when you optimistically decide to check on sales.
(Pro tip: For your sanity, try not to check on sales. Or where your book is available, or why it’s not.)
Step 3: Get people to your book launch
You’re lucky if you merit a book launch party, so call everyone you know, at least once. If you’re savvier, email them, message them on FB, put it up on Twitter and invite the world, to ensure that at least half your social circle and professional circle makes it. If you’re a Somebody, they will.
The book launch party is no longer quite as de rigeur these days. Publishers are weighing the costs and benefits, and maybe they’re sick of seeing that one set of free-loading journalists who never write about books anyway… or they’re done with the elderly gentleman no one seems to know, who makes it to each book launch (and may even ask you to sign someone else’s book).
A quick note about why most everyone outside of Delhi hates would-be writers in Delhi. Access. A lot of this schmoozing and networking and bonding is yielding a disproportionate number of publishing contracts. If you meet the same handful of publishers and catch their attention, you’re likely to land yourself a few emails of interest and possibly that elusive contract. But if that’s your big game plan, the joke really is on you, because the amount you make has far less 000’s than you’d imagine. Whether it’s Amish Tripathi or Ramachandra Guha you’ve read about in the news, let’s set the record straight. Your first cheque isn’t likely to cover whatever fancy vacation you had planned.
Step 4: Spread the Word
Once the book goes to print, your real job begins. You’d better get the word out. Gone are the days when a handful of Indian writers did their thing, confident in the gravitational pull their names exerted. We all knew and read Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie…We were reading Amitav Ghosh and feeling worthy. We knew and loved Ruskin Bond, got to know Arundhati Roy, and so it went.
Then we started to hear about a writer who created the IIT book genre, Chetan Bhagat.
Practically overnight, the dam burst. Bhagat was quickly followed by an improbable series of management types-turned writers, flooding the market, combining their swash-buckling style with slick video trailers and talk of Bollywood interest.
Then came the rom-com titles. Writers who were getting no interest from traditional publishers found Srishti Press and created legions of followers.
Ravinder Singh, who wrote ‘I Too Had a Love Story’, is regularly tweeted by readers who tell him (and those of us who follow him on Twitter) how much they love him or hard they’ve cried. Young writer Nikita Singh meanwhile has eight books to her credit, already. Eight!
Who wouldn’t envy the lakhs of readers they’re said to have? Many of us masochists who are writing because we “have to” are struggling even to sell out 4,000 copies at a go! Oh yeah, that’s the other heart-breaker. With literary fiction, your print run can be even as low as 2,500 copies in this day and age, in this country with a population of 1.2 billion. Print runs by and large remain fairly modest, 2,500 or 5,000 books, with publishers hedging their bets. You know you're big time when 10,000 books and up is the first print run.
Step 5: Keep up the social (media) bombardment
What the commercial, ‘pulp fiction’ or mass market writers know is that selling any product takes investment and some major marketing, and they’re willing to go the whole hog. They start out with power point presentations and target audiences and slick marketing pitches, from what I understand.
It’s this attitude of treating a book as any other commodity that drives purists up the wall. But there’s no question as to who is powering sales at publishing houses. Lit fiction titles are the prestige list. (Almost like a consolation prize!)
If you’re not doing any of this and you’re not buying ad space, how do you get the word out about your book? You have to rely on reviews in a dying piece of real estate — magazines and newspapers. So you hustle. You make the rounds of those parties, looking for that dying breed known as a Book Editor. You ask whoever you can, neighbour, auntie or cousin at a newspaper or magazine. You do all the social media you can manage, ever more shamelessly, till you pretty much end with a Buy me! plea. Meanwhile, the over-worked publicist at your publishing house is trying to think of ways to pitch your book and align with a news peg.
(Pro tip: If she’s not, you’d better be doing the same!)
Then there’s the matter of the small incestuous social circle. Often the reviewer will either know a writer they’re reviewing, or have grown up with their little brother or be related to their mother’s cat or …there might be an intense rivalry we know nothing about. I don’t know why we don’t do disclaimers. (There was this brouhaha recently about a glowing review Amit Chaudhuri did in The Guardian for his former student and colleague Anjali Joseph.)
But social media has up-ended the traditional game. Reader reviews on Amazon or Twitter feedback with the right hash tag can go a long way. The flip side is that it can also lead to attacks like the troll army on journalist Barkha Dutt’s This Unquiet Land, and their campaign to get her a 1 star average review.
At the end of the day, readers really are the best judge. But as writers, we increasingly have to do what it takes to get your attention. We will ask our friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and random strangers waiting at street lights to review us on Amazon.
A few stars and a comment, is that too much to ask for?
Amrita Tripathi is a freelance journalist who writes contemporary fiction. She is the author of ‘Broken News’ and ‘The Sibius Knot’, two novels she’s not done entreating you to buy.
Writing...
My first column on television news, for The Reel on Scroll.in is here on their site, and below...Comments are welcome!
Amrita Tripathi | 31.9K Total view
CHANNEL SURFING
On the small screen, the big picture isn’t always visibleWith so many different versions of breaking news, it’s hard to get perspective, says our new fortnightly TV columnist.

Television news is stressful business. I didn’t know until recently just how traumatic it can be as a spectator sport. It’s not even a question of weeding out your favourite news channel from the wealth of choice available (about 400 channels at last count).
English news channels are constantly amping up their game, trying to find new ways to convey excitement. If multiple screens, blues and reds, and tickers and capitalised headings weren’t enough, graphics are constantly swishing across channels so that you know that Things Are Happening. Presumably, a seizure is a small price to pay to know what the breaking news of the day is.
It’s been a while since the last bastion of calm and reason – the news anchor – has crumbled. It’s not just 9pm anymore. The daytime is also being prevailed upon to be forceful and shout-y. Perhaps the re-branding of post-lunch shows – long presumed to be the time when people are watching on mute – as Afternoon Prime Time is a sign of the times. With so many different versions of breaking news multiple times a day, it’s sometimes hard to get some perspective. If you’re not a news junkie, you’re probably not flicking channels obsessively to see what the big news is.
For instance, in the space of one afternoon, there was a heated commentary on the fate of Indian prisoner Kripal Singh, dubbed “Another Sarabjit”, on Times Now, CNN-IBN focused on the Bombay High Court as it deliberated on the IPL issue, while India Today was breaking news of a secret K4 ballistic missile launch, which, we learned, had been carried out the previous month. It was breaking on this day because the channel had accessed unpublished images of the launch. (I found the golden mike distracting, but perhaps I’m not yet used to it).
Perspective is a tricky business, but if you do channel surf, you’re likely to get a fuller picture. The news is mainly bad news. While channels do their part to convey the scale of the problem, say in Marathwada, where Rajdeep Sardesai went for India Today to chronicle the drought, television cameras sometimes very powerfully bring home what is happening across our country.
But television news doesn’t always give you the full picture. The decision of where to point your camera or where to release resources for your reporters and star editors to travel is a very calculated one, and takes into account audiences and potential ratings as much as the given news peg.
Boxers or briefs?
What television does well is present a developing story. We tend to turn to the news when there is genuine breaking news (a fact that has kept CNN a portentous force in the United States of America even when it normally lags behind its competitors). When an earthquake recently struck Myanmar, causing massive tremors in Kolkata, Guwahati and Patna, the instinctive tendency was to tune in to television to hear what the experts were saying. Increasingly, we supplement this with our dependence on print or digital, or social media, though the latter is notorious for not always being reliable.
But television also gives us access to people we want to know more about even if we didn’t know we wanted to. On April 1, I watched a fabulous interview by Shekhar Gupta for his Walk the Talk show on NDTV with the Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal at their school campus at DPS RK Puram in Delhi. It was unexpectedly free-wheeling and full of laughter. These guys have been friends since Class XI and clearly understand each other. This was an interview in which everyone was at ease and appeared to enjoy the conversation without trying to score brownie points or come off as cleverer than the other.
More recently, the other riveting interview was by Prannoy Roy on NDTV24x7’s India Questions with the very watchable Shah Rukh Khan. Not just because SRK took questions from the audience, including “Boxers or briefs?” Khan’s reply: “Depends who’s wearing them.” (Briefs, if we must know. “Death before boxers,” apparently.)
The light-hearted banter was a bonus, including Khan telling Roy that he wasn’t doing much work that evening. The production wasn’t as spiffy as one would have expected, with some lighting issues, but even so, it pales in comparison to the fact that Khan had apparently decided not to go to any other English news channel. Khan did riff about wanting to get NDTV good ratings. His appearance itself would have done the trick, if not his attempts to get the venerable Dr Roy to shake a leg, or even remove his shirt, which Khan promised to get him to do next time round.
Amrita Tripathi is a recovering news junkie. She has worked at CNN-IBN for nine years and The Indian Express for two years. At times, she may have a glancing familiarity or more with the news players mentioned.
We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.
**(NB fyi: The question from the "audience" was from SRK himself, seated in the audience, to himself, on stage. As a "fan", that is.)