What makes a bestseller? ‘Write when drunk, edit when sober, marketing is your hangover’

So this was only a book cover reveal, not a launch really. Bestselling authors Ashwin Sanghi, Ravinder Singh, Anand Neelakantan and Ravi Subramanian together unveiled the cover of Sanghi’s new novel, ‘The Vault of Vishnu’ at the Times Litfest on Sunday. The book will release in January, so this was like a movie trailer. Appropriate, however, for an age when platforms for bestselling stories are multifarious: TV screens, YouTube, social media and, of course, print.
The unveiling also answered one aspect of session chair Subramanian’s query to his fellow authors in the segment titled ‘Crafting a Bestseller’: Is writing a book that sells a craft or an art? By consensus, the answer was that it was a craft.And among the practice of the craft was to market it, taking opportunities of events like a literary festival to promote a forthcoming novel.
As Sanghi put it, modifying that old bon mot, “Write when drunk, edit when sober, marketing is your hangover.” Among the authors who sell the highest numbers in India, the quartet was clear that a bestseller was not simply a good story told well, but marketed well. By itself, the writing could attract the disdain of reviewers or of trolls, as Sanghi pointed out. But marketing can turn even something like that into a selling proposition.
Success has to be crafted meticulously, the four agreed. Neelakantan disclosed how his first novel, ‘Asura’, turned into a bestseller only after rework, the initial 500 copies considered too aggressive for the general readers. Singh also talked about how he had to reluctantly add two chapters of romance in‘Like It Happened Yesterday’, the crafting lying in the work done to meet readers’ expectations. In that regard, you can become genre-bound, he said.
Compromises of this sort are necessary, Singh said, because successful authorship is no longer about ‘I will write, you do the rest’. The writer himself has to work at the marketing. With books perhaps the most conspicuously missing subject on television — where people from chefs to gadget experts become celebrities —the authors have to create a buzz around themselves and their works, an ecosystem, so to say, on social platforms.
But what about stories that appeal to people so much that they sell so well? Sanghi said that wherever he goes, his mind is constantly searching for ideas. He mails these to a personal email account for archival use, and there are over 10,000 ideas conserved in this format. He recalled the idea for ‘The Krishna Key’ came at a party where he ran into an inebriated man who was declaiming that he was the 10th incarnation of Vishnu. Neelakantan conceded he had just 300 workable ideas, pleading that he cannot always exist in the milieu of his multi-genre work, which is the mythical world of the Ramayan, Mahabharat, Baahubali, among others. But he is able to flesh out these ideas into TV scripts because not everything is amenable to treatment as novels.
Two other necessities for crafting bestsellers: Singh said, “You have to ensure proper editing. The reader makes an impression in the first five minutes of reading. Remember, you are competing with 500 other authors, so make sure not to disappoint the reader.” And this from Neelakantan: “Don’t follow trends just because they are successful. Do what moves you, what your passion is about.”