Bad Romance: The first glimpse

Those of you who are connected with me on Facebook must be aware of the fact that my second book is releasing today. To all my friends, readers, fellow bloggers and well-wishers who have been away from my social handles, here's the news. My second book titled 'Bad Romance' is out.

It was one of those hectic days at office when Pulkit Gupta, my publisher called me to say that the book is printed and he expects me to be there on Saturday for signing the pre-ordered copies. Friday evening I confirmed the timings with Pulkit and he asked me to be there by 11 a.m. While there were a lot of butterflies fluttering in my stomach, a part of me was quite unsure if I could make it on time.

The whole of Friday night, in fact the past week, has been weird. Full of excitement, nervousness, cold feet, sweaty palms, anxiety pangs and what not. And since I slept late, I woke up late but somehow I did make it on time at Dariyaganj on Saturday.

As I waited for the books to arrive, my friend who had come alongwith me to keep my spirits high, kept on telling me that it's going to be big. I don't why but I had this feeling that he was more nervous than me. I can probably not describe the feeling; I wasn't getting published for the first time but the mixed feeling of excitement and nervousness was same, in fact a lot more than it was before. Maybe that was because at that time I did not have so much of readership. Now that I have a lot better reach, I have a lot more responsibility on my shoulders, to write not just for myself but for my readers as well.

So when the books finally arrived there was a big smile on my face as per Ashish, my friend. You know they say in Hindi khushi se phooli na samaana. That is what was happening with me and the feeling of getting to hold my book was simply mid blowing. I'll let the pictures do the talking for now.

 

Oh! The beauties

 

Yet another shot

I had some 90 minutes in hand and 200 copies to sign because all the pre-orders made from HS18 had to go autographed. I looked at Pulkit helplessly and he was like you gotta do it, girl. Ila Garg, Creative Head at Gargi gave me a reassuring smile and I took a deep breath only to get started with a conviction that I can do it in the stipulated time.

As promised, there are a number of copies that will find such messages. I hope the readers like it :)

I look so drained out but I was happy and the reason was pretty much obvious. Ashish who had a stopover at Delhi before going home took this picture when I took a 2 minute break.

And I started off again with a smile on my face and a happiness in my heart and soul that knew no bounds.

 

This was taken after we were done with signing all the copies. Huff! I had become too drained out by then and we headed straight to this place.

 

Since Ashish had a train to catch, we got our stuff packed. I am telling you chicken wrap and donuts had never felt so yumm as they felt on Saturday.

So this was a small account of the first glimpse of Bad Romance-Love, Lies and Betrayals. Do try to take out some time for this book.

Purchase link: http://bit.do/badromance 

With bated breaths and skipped heartbeats, I welcome you all to the journey of Kritika and Tanishq. The book releases today officially. I hope and pray that this effort turns out to be an even bigger success.

Signing off for today. Happy reading to all of you! :)

Boom of budding authors in Present times

I am already in love with this space.It's a great platform to get exposure to one's writing skills and venting out one's feelings. As a person who enjoys writing since childhood, I feel there has been a drastic change in the opinion of public towards writers. Many people plunged into this field like today but only a few got to the apex. But today with the changing scenario we have seen a boom in the count of youth Indian writers. Thanks to Chetan Bhagat and of course recession wherein after losing their jobs many people turned to writing for livelihood.
Just like the two faces of coin, writing has brought in a lot of competition   in the market as well. There is a horde of authors, good and bad. Exploitation is as always present here. Often the publishers do not give due respect to the authors, the standard royalty rate of 8-10% has come down to 5%. I have even heard about publishers not responding properly to the authors about the sales figures.The established publishing houses are not ready to give chance to the budding authors while the ones that give chance do not even posses editors, leave alone good editors. the rough manuscript is published as it as. Even the editors are unable to correct the grammatical errors. In a recent book that I read, the single change that the publishing house brought in the manuscript was changing 'hair' to 'hairs'. Amazingly we always studied it as 'hair' in lower classes but then we can't do anything as the author is already indebted to the publisher for getting his book in the print with no capital investment.
If you are a debut author and your work isn't of romantic genre, you might as well become a rolling stone because the expectation from a young Indian author is a love story or another campus life. They have a good reason for you that romance sells anyway but for a debut author  something different may create losses for the house also. They can't take a chance. While a recent interaction with another youth author, I was told that a publisher had once said to her that love,sex,fun and a fresh story line is that sells the most.

These are just a few instances. And of course we can't forget that we all have to be grateful to them as they are the ones providing us bread and butter, the fame we needed and unique identity. All we need is a little more value to our work and little effort from everybody's side to bring out the best for the nation.