Pitch it right

Do remember your first novel will most likely be your breakthrough work. So, how do you wow an editor?

Writing is only one part of the game, albeit the most important one. After finishing your novel, you want to see it in print and, hopefully, make a few bucks from it. In the West that would mean a literary agent. In India, though, those are few and far between. Everything is vested in the fiction editor. This month let's look at the world from the point of view of an editor.

A former fiction editor at a noted international publishing firm recently told me she quit her job to start her own independent imprint because she was unable to publish the kinds of books she was passionate about. The reason — the brief from her bosses to acquire only certain sellers. When she joined the business in the 1990s, publishers still had a midlist which was made up of authors in which they were investing for the long run. In other words they were supporting talent in the hope that the author would deliver a big hit eventually. Hence authors like John Irving and Don DeLillo were able to survive a few flops before writing their breakthrough novels — The World According to Garp for Irving and Underworld for DeLillo. This penchant for certain sellers has now become the publishing norm, certainly for the big boys, as a result of which the midlist has shrunk considerably. So bear in mind that nowadays your first novel to be published will most likely be your breakthrough novel. And that actually might be the second or third novel you write. Very few writers get it right the first time round. Midnight's Children, for instance, was the fourth novel Salman Rushdie ever wrote. After that he was able to publish everything he had lying about in his drawers.

How do you wow an editor? Well, irrespective of the kind of novel you are writing, you have to write one hell of an opening. These are not the days of the Victorian novel a la Charles Dickens where the author could spend the first 70 pages establishing the world of the novel before making anything happen. We live in an age of short attention spans, and a fiction editor's attention span is very short indeed. So if you don't hook him or her in the first ten-to-15 pages then you are in trouble.

Full report here Hindu

Are you in the Reading race?

A mad scramble to read every writer we hear about can launch us into an entirely new mind-space

Some people must have a new gadget the minute their brother-in-law has it. I have never envied other people's electronics, but I have my own egotistical weaknesses. When someone quotes a writer I have never read, I feel a little smaller and must go out and find his or her book to make that feeling go away.

Other competitors are more glib. For instance, you're discussing Dickens and you talk of the double-narrator device in Bleak House. The other person (who hasn't read Bleak House) then shoots back, “But have you read The Mystery of Edwin Drood?” No, you admit. “Well, you should read Drood, because that's where Dickens really gets clever with the narrative perspective.” As the more diffident competitor, you then rush out to find Drood, whereas the other chap's purposes have already been served. And he hasn't read Drood either. No one has.

But ideally the spirit of competition launches you into an entirely new mind-space. That's how I discovered Garrison Keillor. My brother quoted a line from Keillor when announcing the name of his baby boy. I instantly wrote back to ask about that author, and he told me that some of my emails about village life reminded him of Keillor's style. I have since become a Keillor devotee, howling over his essays in Lake Wobegon Days and Leaving Home, and his radio monologue The News from Lake Wobegon, which I listen to on CD.

Full report here Hindu

Competition to complete landmine victim's novel

Perhaps for the first time in the world, a Sri Lankan publisher is offering a reward to provide the ending to an unfinished novel. Author Nihal de Silva was working on his new novel Arathi when he was killed in a terrorist landmine explosion in Sri Lanka three years ago.

Publisher Vijitha Yapa has now published the unfinished novel and is offering a reward of £500 in a competition being held where anyone who provides a satisfactory ending will be rewarded. The unfinished book has been published and will be launched at the London Book Fair at the Sri Lanka Books Stall on Monday, April 19.

The novel is woven around a gamut of tenders, the underworld, arms dealing, betrayals and murder. It was left unfinished just as another unfinished murder mystery of the past, The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. Supplying a conclusion to the famous predecessor has occupied writers from the time of Dickens's death to the present day.

Full report here DNA