May 2022: Update

Hello everyone!

Just a quick update about what is going on. My debut novel, “Web of Ties” is in the final stages of production now, and I am gunning for an August release. It is being brought out by Book Street Publication and will be available on all major eCommerce websites and select bookstores across the country.

“Web of Ties” has been a long time in the making. I had started writing the book sometime in 2015. I had made significant progress too, but an accidental manhandling of the laptop and a damaged hard drive led to a loss of about 30,000 words of the manuscript. Dejected, I stopped working on the project for almost a year and started focusing on other projects. That experience also taught me to keep all my writings on the cloud!

Then sometime in April 2017, I rediscovered an initial version of the novel on my email and realized that it had not aged badly. So I started working on it again. I wrote off and on over the next two years, juggling the writing with the rigours of an MBA. Sometime in mid 2019, I finally completed the first draft of the novel and started the pitching process.

Something that I know now, and did not back then, was how incredibly slow publishing can be as an industry. I started querying, without even being aware of the template of a book proposal. The results were exactly what you would expect. However, in January 2020, I signed on with The Book Bakers, a literary agency. Things were looking up, until March 2020 arrived and we all knew how that whole thing went.

Many publishers severely cut back their operations and publishing schedules got pushed back by months. It would take almost a year before things would get back to normal. Once things started opening back up, we restarted the pitching process and finally, late 2021, I signed the agreement with Book Street Publishers.

You would think that my job was done, so did I. How wrong was I! Turns out writing the book is the easy part, now comes the challenge of marketing it. Getting the word out, and that is my next goal. As with everything else, I am figuring it out on the go. Here’s to hoping I figure it out without taking too much damage.

So that was a brief history of my debut novel. I will soon be starting out on the marketing journey for the book and would love to hear from people who have gone on this journey before. As the modern adage goes, Apes together strong.

But thank you for being here. The most painful thing an artist of any kind can experience is indifference. So merely staying with me till the end of the article is a bigger deal than you realize. I will be using my website as a sort of diary to document all that steps I take promote my book. I hope that it will help some other clueless kid someday, or if not, atleast would be entertaining to read. Thank you and I will see you around soon!