No Writers' Block

Authors who have become literary brands are now attempting to stretch their wings and create new revenue streams

- Monica Bathija

WHEN WRITER ASHWIN Sanghi was writing his first novel, The Rozabal Line, it was just a matter of getting it done and published. The first print run was 2,500 copies and it was anybody’s guess whether there would be a second book. It was only when sales touched 70,000-80,000 copies that Sanghi knew a second book would happen. “Once you have a successful book out there then to a very great extent your inertia is also affected because your publisher then starts following up,” he says. And only when the second one—Chanakya’s Chant, in 2010, a year after The Rozabal Line—did well was he convinced that there should be no looking back.

He went on to complete his third mythology-based fiction The Krishna Key (2012), after which he co-wrote two books in the Private series with American crime writer James Patterson, and a non-fiction 13 Steps series, co-written with domain experts.

Unlike Sanghi, whose writing career was more or less unplanned, author Amish Tripathi says he had a very clear plan in his head right from his first book: To create an interconnected universe of characters, much like the Marvel Universe, over the years.

His Immortals of Meluha was the first in a trilogy on Shiva and, two books down in the second trilogy about Ram, he points at the clues he has left in each book that bind not just the current series but also the earlier one. “If I had spoken about the clues at that time people would have said, ‘yeah, yeah, you’ve got a 25-year plan’. They wouldn’t have believed it. But now that the