Write and publish your heart out

Sometime during the end of March, the founder of Veracity Leading Edge, Ritesh Vig, saw himself in a Zoom grid along with 80-90 people. The lockdown in India due to the Covid-19 pandemic had overturned countless major and minor life events. Vig noticed extreme anxiety in the people attending the webinar, which is why he was there. “I spoke on the positive impact of COVID 19,” he said, “which was well appreciated.” So much so, the notes he had made for the webinar became the basis for his upcoming book, Leadership in Unprecedented Times.Self-published through White Falcon, Vig joins a growing legion of people who took to writing in the lockdown period.
And that’s a surprising trend when mainstream publishers and authors have mostly deferred book launches adopting a wait and watch policy. Just a handful like Preeti Shenoy (When Love came Calling) opted for online launches. Radha Thomas, singer and author, was pitching her book (Dog Tails) based on ‘a few entitled street dogs in Bangalore’ during pre-pandemic but the lockdown occurred and no one really wanted to do anything. “I understood but the doggies didn’t,” she remarked. Thomas went to Amazon self-publishing which was pretty easy according to her, although, typical of COVID times, her interactions were online or through customer care service.
Explaining the trend, Vig feels that for the first time, a lot of professionals who were caught in the grind of worktravel-work, have got time on hand. Subject experts, life coaches, and those who have always wanted to write have finally got an opportunity to satiate their lurking desire to ‘write a book’.
A good time for poetry
Notion Press, a publishing company focused on offering self-publishing tools for writers, published 3812 books during the lockdown period. Pre-lockdown, books published in a 3-month period were about 3000. This, in spite of their decision at the start of the lockdown not to take up academic, cookery, and coffee table books under their guided publishing (it constitutes 10-12 per cent of the books published). The increase in numbers during the pandemic is in spite of catering only to fiction and nonfiction books. A trend noticed by the founder, Naveen Valsakumar, was the emergence of poetry. “In a crisis like this, I believe poetry is cathartic,” he said. Navsangeet Kaur of White Falcon affirms an increase in poetry submissions along with business books on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. Overall, she believes the increase in book submissions, before and during the lockdown, is 25 per cent. The demography has seen change as well. Youngsters and adults in the age group of 25 – 40 are writing more. “Previously authors in the age group 45 – 75 were more,” Kaur said.
Fitting both the criteria (younger demography and poetry) is 25-year-old PhD student Anjutha Ranganathan. An avid poetry lover, Ranganathan had written many poems related to the quarantine. She decided to publish her book on poetry, An Unquenchable Excess of Love (Notion Press), after initial reservations on the timing. “Who would buy books in the lockdown?” she thought. But now she feels validated about her decision. Her book has gained traction on social media - statistics show that people spent more time on social media in the first phase of lockdown. “People are buying my book. It feels like people are really into poetry, reveling and drowning themselves in solace and love,” she noted.
Self-publishing has also seen an increase in children books as well as children authors. Nine-year-old Kavya Kompella wrote and illustrated The Three Adventurers at Fungalore which her father Kashyap Kompella selfpublished on Kindle. “We suggested that she try writing to keep her busy,” Kompella said. “Since being published, the book has been a bestseller on Amazon India, and ranked among top 50 hotsellers in Amazon UK and US in the Children’s Adventure and Children’s Fantasy categories.
The only Indian author featured in this category, dominated by JK Rowling and Rick Riordan, is Sudha Murty,” he said.
India has about 15 major publishers actively releasing roughly 20 titles in a month prepandemic. The current slowdown may have levelled the field for selfpublished authors vis-avis those who are getting published by the organised channels. Notion Press took advantage of this by announcing a writing contest #writeyourheartout that resulted in thousands of entries and published anthologies. Promotion too has gone digital for published authors. Ranganathan’s plan of promoting her book through Instagram and Facebook live is similar to what bestseller-author Preeti Shenoy or Radha Thomas are doing.
Industry insiders believe that now is the time to look if the books are going to the hands of readers or Cloudtail. “There should be a serious debate on this,” said Subodh Shankar of the city’s popular bookstore Atta Galatta. That will touch the tip of the iceberg of the underlying problem the publishing industry has been facing.
“The lockdown has turned out to be a blessing in disguise,” Ranganathan commented on her decision to self-publish and the book’s success. The same with Vig who felt that the lockdown gave him the time and opportunity to write with the selfpublishing platform offering a quicker way to get the book out. It reiterated the message of his book. “Through it, I wish to spread the positive impact of COVID 19. Focus on the good things that emerge.” Books have always been good.