Far From The Madding Crowd

With many authors expected to market their books by writing their own blogs or contributing to one, the guys at Penguin have an interesting take on the subject.

Book Title: “India’s Unending Journey”

Author: Sir Mark Tully

Publisher: Random House

Place : British Council, 17, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi-110001

Date and Time: 18th June 2007 at 7.30 p.m.

For further information, please contact Neeru Aneja at 011-41497261 or neeru.aneja@in.britishcouncil.org

If there are book launches, signings or meet-the-author sessions you wish to have covered, do email us at contact@dogearsetc.com

I came across this interesting article in the Times of India this morning:

Peter, a burly South African, is hunting for books on India. And no, it’s not the usual coffee table book on the Taj, tigers or Rajasthan. What Peter’s after are comics, and to be more specific, Indian comics. “Last year, I stayed over at a friend’s home in Delhi where I started reading Indian mythological comics. The stories fascinated me so, now, whenever I come here I make it a point to pick them up.”

Peter is part of a growing tribe of foreigners who feel that comics are the best and easiest way to understand Indian culture. From stories of the Mughal period to the Ramayana, from tales of various gods to the Panchatantra, booksellers in various parts of the country say demand is going up, slowly but surely.

For more on this article, click here

Self-Publishing authors have this dilemma staring in their faces: How do I promote my book? In this information-age how do you cut to the chase and get your book noticed by your customer. Perhaps, just perhaps, one way would be to develop your own promotional video. With cellphones, that should not be too big a deal. Simply develop one and upload it on youtube and, voila!…you have your own commercial right there. Perhaps, you could have someone interview you and have that clip uploaded.

Out there, it’s only your imagination that limits you.

For one such video, follow this link.

Here’s an interesting blog that should help authors, especially those self-publishing, with their book designs.

From Pia Chandavarkar’s article in the Indian Express:

For over 13 years, his book brought hope to thousands of readers struggling to break through the shackles of the Indian social structure. Now, Narendra Jadhav’s stirring memoir Amcha Baap aan Amhi is set to inspire the minds of school children. Come June 2008, students in state board schools will have a chapter in their standard VII Marathi textbooks, which will comprise excerpts from Jadhav’s interview on the book.

Amcha Baap aan Amhi, published in 1993, depicts the story of Jadhav’s father Damodar, a Mahar, who battles the caste system to strive for a better life for his family. The book, originally written in Marathi, has been ranked among the top bestsellers in the state.

Apart from being translated into several other languages including English, French, German, Korean, and Spanish, the book has also inspired a 52-part television series.

Moreover, the book has had a record ten editions published in one single year, and was once ranked ahead of classics like Shyamchi Aai and Mahatma Gandhi’s Story of My Experiments with Truth.

The Hindu reports on the fund crunch that hinders the efforts of The Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute to preserve its collection.

A funds crunch has come in the way of The Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute’s project to preserve thousands of old manuscripts and books.

Such preservation initiatives are important for the over-six-decade-old Institute at Madras Sanskrit College, Mylapore, as it serves as a reference library for researchers and scholars. The collection at the Institute includes around 50,000 books in Sanskrit and books on oriental research and learning and Indological studies. It is also home to journals in several Indian and foreign languages, besides 1,000 manuscripts in Grantham, Tamil and Sanskrit dating back to 500 to 600 years.

Run on public donations, the Institute is finding it difficult to mobilise enough funds to sustain its activities. According to institute director V. Kameswari, with the limited resources, only half of the salary could be paid to the seven staffers.

Describing the institute as the only library of its kind in south India, she pointed out that renowned persons, including former President S. Radhakrishnan, have donated rare books to it.

Maintenance of the collection, however, has become difficult in the absence of adequate funds. The books are getting brittle day by day, she said, pointing out that photocopying and microfilming them were costly.

Are book reviews a literary exercise in their own right and treated as such? Or are they mere marketing tools with nothing but ad copy passing off as reviews? Do newspapers actually take the trouble of finding a good book and arguing its merits? Or are book reviews also sponsored nowadays by publishing houses who see the exercise as a cheap marketing gimmick?

Do book reviews actually influence sales?

A blog I read in this connection makes a good case for argumentative book reviews.

…book reviews don’t seem to be moving copies as much anymore, in part because the general readership’s knowledge-base has shrunk. So, [the logic went], people reading book reviews don’t have the context in which to place a value on a critic’s conclusion about a book. Therefore, it’s simply just another opinion.

Dogears Print Media Pvt. Ltd., the parent organization of Dogears Etc., has launched CinnamonTeal Print & Publishing Services, an arm that will function in the pre-publishing space. The services offered by the new venture include:

• Substantive (or developmental) editing
• Copyediting
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For more details do email editorialservices@dogearsetc.com

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been named winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

She beat five other contenders for the £30,000 women-only award, including Kiran Desai, shortlisted for her Booker Prize winner The Inheritance of Loss.

Adichie’s novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, is her second work and set during the Biafran War of the 1960s.

The new writer’s award worth £10,000 was presented to Karen Connelly for her novel The Lizard Cage.

Source: BBC