My Debut Novel

My novella Magnificent Loss is going to see the light of day through ebook publishing startup Indirom. 

Indirom has launched their website (www.indirom.com) recently and will release the ebooks for sale from the middle of February this year. 

The e-publishing giants like Amazon provide a platform for self-publishing authors to write and publish their works from the desktop, without the traditional publishing process of drafting, editing, revising and finally turning out the manuscript for publication. All the hard work, the specialist's work, including editing, art for the cover page, excerpts from their work and blurb etc., everything that goes from the draft to the publication stage is handled by the author. There is no one to guide or prejudge the merit of the work before it is published. Also, the marketing of the ebook is entirely left to the author. This is called indie publishing and seems to have made much headway lately. 

Indirom, on the other hand, took a different approach. They preserved the traditional publishing process where in they scrutinize the sample chapters submitted and if they found merit in it, they provide the editorial support where it is required, guide the first-time author through the publishing process from the first stage to the last, do the necessary handholding during editing by experienced editors, and finally the manuscript comes up ready for the publication. The cover page is also designed by specialists and the authors input is also solicited, though the final say is left to the artist. The ebook is also marketed by the publisher through the social channels of communication like blogs, Facebook and Twitter. The cost incurred in all this process is borne by Indirom and the author reserves full copyright of the work and is compensated according to the traditional publishing terms.

For me, it was a pleasure working with the Indirom team. They were patient, critical and enthusiastic. They even discussed the story in detail, went over the manuscript several times and allowed me the space and time to get the story right and set it in a tight narrative. On their suggestion, I trimmed here and expanded there until I was fully satisfied with the outcome. 

Indirom's tagline speaks well for their objective: romance for the South Asian soul. They intend to focus on works coming out of these regions, even though the authors may belong to any part of the world. Romance is a genre that is by most counts the greatest seller in the ebook market (76%) and Indirom hopes to create a niche in this area. They have categories within this genre and color codes to identify them. The South Asian region is huge geographically speaking and its diaspora is spread in all corners of the globe. It is to the peoples of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh that Indirom hopes to reach out to through their publishing mill. 

The fiction is aimed primarily at the fastpaced commuter rushing through the hurly-burly life of our time, who prefers novellas to voluminous 400-page wordathons, who would willingly snitch a couple of pleasurable hours from their valuable time rather than invest days in plodding through an epic, who would get a glimpse into a fantasy world and collect pithy maxims, rather than worm through a mountain pile of words to sift the dross from gold. It is with this objective in mind that Indirom began its publishing journey in the digital world and it has been a pleasure for me from the word go.