Book review: How to Get Published in India by Meghna Pant

Book: How to Get Published in India – Your go-to guide to write, publish and sell your book with tips and insights from industry experts

Author: Meghna Pant

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 296

Price: Rs 499

Everyone's writing a book these days. It's easy. You've got tons of information on the internet, from where you can gather many seeds of ideas. You sow them, wet them and watch them germinate into a story or two. You water, weed and prune, till you're satisfied with their growth.You hope the havest will bring in a windfall that'll take you through a decade of writing, comfortably. That's the dream that propels many to write. And it comes true for one in a million.

If you're in the million that did not get published and still want to write, Meghna Pant's book, How to Get Published in India, is one you should be reading. Writers seldom write about other writers, much less about people who are into publishing, especially in India. If you just flip through the pages of Pant's book, you'll come across some questions that arise in every writer's mind: What is your genre? How to write a synopsis? Do you need an agent? What to expect in a publishing contract? How to self-publish? How to use social media? How bestselling authors sell? Do writers make money? How to market your book? How to make your book into a TV series? How to handle rejection? Why good books are rejected? How to publish abroad? There are answers, guidelines, trade statistics, opinions from people in the publishing industry and tips from writers who've made it big – Jeffrey Archer, Twinkle Khanna, Ashwin Sanghi, Arundhati Subramanian, Shobhaa De, Meena Kandaswamy, Anand Neelakantan, Durjoy Dutta, Ravi Subramanian, Rashmi Bansal and many others.

Pant takes you through the process of writing and publishing. If you think you know how publishing works in India, well, you may be surprised after reading this one. This is Pant's fifth book and she demonstrates her flair as researcher and writer. However, you would wish she quote the sources for some of her data, for examples, “In a country where less than 2% of books find their way to a bookstore...” and “In India, e-books comprise less than a percentage of the Rs 10,000 crore book publishing industry,” and some of the essays contributed by the authors were proof-read before printing. Ravi Subramanian's essay, for example, has five grammatical and spelling mistakes in the first three paragraphs. 

Self-help books can be read many ways. You could start from the first page and go right till the end or you open up a chapter that appeals to you first, read it and put it away, till the next time you'd want to read something from the book. If you like books, are in the media and communications industry or want to get into publishing, do read How to Get Published in India.