Pricing does matter. Especially when it comes to books. It is probably a sign of the times that Harper Collins (Full disclosure: They publish my novel Married But Available) has decided to price Karan Bajaj’s upcoming second book at Rs 99/- almost $2 for a paperback version. That I think is the sweet spot for pricing as Chetan Bhagat has showed us with his novels. The yet-to-be released thriller ‘Johnny Gone Down’ by Karan Bajaj is set to make publishing history with a first print run of 50,000 books, billed as one of the biggest ever in India for a work of fiction.

The book narrates the racy tale of 40-year-old Ivy League scholar, Nikhil Arya, who is broke, homeless and minutes away from blowing his brains. An innocent vacation turns into an intercontinental journey that sees Nikhil first become a genocide survivor, then a Buddhist monk, a drug lord, a homeless accountant, a software mogul and a game fighter.

Karan is also the author of ‘Keep off the Grass’. You can read his interview done just before he launched his first book by clicking here

According to Yahoo News, ‘Books such as ‘Almost Single’, ‘The Zoya Factor’, ‘Bombay Rains’ and ‘Keep off the Grass’, ‘Married But Available’, ‘Secrets and Lies’, and very recently ‘Keep the Change Year After Year‘ have been a series of titles from Indian authors for the Indian audience that end up doing big numbers,’ Lipika Bhushan of Harper Collins said.

So what is the inspiration behind the novel?  Karan says, “‘I was influenced as much by the dark, gritty mood of films like ‘Oldboy’, ‘The Deer Hunter’ and ‘Amores Perros’ as by the incredible journey of ‘Forrest Gump’ (which is one of my favourite novels and a mighty decent film as well) and the surreal adventures of Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the Buddhist detective-protagonist of John Burdett’s Bangkok novels, ‘Bangkok 8′, ‘Bangkok Tattoo’ and ‘Bangkok Haunts’.

I asked Karan what he thought of the Rs99/- pricing for this novel. He said, “Pricing is the publisher’s decision with the author having little to no input in it. But I’m pleasantly surprised. Paradoxically, as the quality of my writing improves, the price keeps going down. At this rate, my next novel may just be available for free!”

The quizmaster’s question to you is, “Which fictional character lived at 221 B, Baker Street?” The answer is  Sherlock Holmes. You know that. Of course you do. Created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the first public appearance of Holmes was in 1887. Sherlock Holmes birthday is generally deduced to be January 6, 1854. Holmes lived with his good friend and chronicler Watson, before his (Watson’s) marriage in 1887, and again after his wife’s  death.  Traditionally, the canon of Sherlock Holmes consists of the fifty-six short stories and four novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In this context, the term “canon” is an attempt to distinguish between Doyle’s original works and subsequent works by other authors using the same characters.

Expect to see the movie version of Sherlock Holmes directed by Guy Ritchie (Director of the film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and a few other films). Expected to release by the end of this year, the movie has Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law as Dr Watson. Rachel McAdams plays Irene Adler as the solitary love interest of Holmes who was a bit of a misogynist.

Partha Basu, best known as the writer of the column Quiz Mountain for the Illustrated Weekly has written a what-if book based on Holmes (clearly someone who the author has a not-so-high opinion of) that makes Watson, the chronicler get a lot more of the limelight. This book (The Curious Case of 221 B – published by HarperCollins) takes a complicated narrative style – three view points and takes some of the well known cases of  Holmes and either carries his story forward or backwards or fills in the missing years with fresh exploits starting with Jit, the protagonist who discovers a wooden box in remote Deogarh in Bihar (why Deogarh may I ask?)  soon after his parents are gunned down by assailants in the summer of 1970. The box contains “a thin bundle of letters and two linen bound notebooks.” The diaries contain Dr Watson’s versions of the “true stories” behind eight whodunits.

Partha Basu is launching the book at Cafe Mocha in Gurgaon on 19th September 2009 at 5:00pm. I will be reading out excerpts and talking to the author. So come over if you are in town.

Like several good quizzers, Basu is clearly a trivia buff. He ran a travel business for a few years. That stint took him to see everything from opium dens of London to the slave dungeons of Zanzibar – stuff that showed up in this book. He was one of those who almost won the BBC quiz program Mastermind that was televised a couple of years back. I asked him a few questions myself  to find out what kind of a man rewrites Sherlock Holmes mysteries (in two months, according to the author) and puts a twist to it!

Abhijit: Tell us about your previous books.

Partha Basu: My first book was born out of a quiz weekly column I did for the Illustrated Weekly of India, for about two years. Which meant lots of questions! I finally bowed to pressure from my readers to compile the best ones into a book and Quiz Mountain was born.  In 1992.  A couple of years later I published a longish monograph, if you can call that a book, for the Poona Film & Television Institute on Ritwik Ghatak. Six years later, my friend and I did The Calcutta Persona, a different sort of book on the city. It sold very well.  I never seriously thought of writing fiction; nor consciously chased a writer’s dream.

Abhijit: (I saw him refusing oatmeal and honey cookies. “I am allergic to honey”, he explains) Is your allergy to honey reflective of the fact that you hate deification?

Partha Basu: First, the allergy. I’m told it’s a ten thousand to one chance. I’ve received emergency treatment in sick rooms in Singapore and Dubai and once in the city of York in England because I ate things which had honey in them, without knowing it. Apparently it’s the enzymes; most people get it from bee stings.

The deification ? I dislike our habit of deifying people at the drop of not a hat, but a pin. But I’m not allergic to Sherlock Holmes. He shall remain immortal, in spite of all that is and will be written about him. That’s how it’s been for almost a hundred years.

Abhijit: I am not familiar with every story of Sherlock Holmes. Can you help us understand what the Canons are?

Partha Basu: According to the OED, a canon, has many meanings. Including a collection of the authentic works of a particular author or artist. In this case the Long and Short stories concerning Sherlock Holmes. When you add one more “n” to the word, it becomes a weapon. Conan Doyle created other heroes too, like Brigadier Gerard and so on. He was very prolific. It’s interesting that at one point, Conan Doyle got so bored with Holmes that he killed him at the Reichenbach Falls.  But intense public pressure forced him to resurrect Holmes. The next time, he made Holmes fade quietly away to a little farm in Sussex.

Abhijit: How do you think the readers will view Sherlock Holmes once they read your book.

Partha Basu: The response, so far has not been negative at all, from both readers and reviewers. There could be some Holmesian outrage bubbling around the short horizon, what with over 2000 Sherlock Holmes Societies, world-wide. Though I’ve passed the famed London Society’s litmus test, comfortably.  Newcomers to Holmes will probably say, ‘How can you presume that we know the canon and its twists and turns as well as maybe you and some others do?”   I had to put in synopses and Emma Hudson’s explanatory mid-words, for this reason. I was worried that it would break the flow but both have clicked.

Abhijit: You have been in the travel trade. How have those experiences showed up in your stories?

Partha Basu: I’ve been to almost every place my book talks about and I made sure that the feel and historicity was authentic. From the opium dens of London, past the wild beauty of the Cape of Good Hope to the slave dungeons and markets of Zanzibar. All of it.  Actually, I should have written a superior Travel book, like Bruce Chatwin wrote, but I was too busy traveling.

Abhijit: What is the next piece of fiction you are working on?

Partha Basu: I’m trying to complete, on a Harper Collins contract, a novel I had started much before 211B.  It’s called Silicon Valley Wives; I have a love hate relationship with the Valley.

“The age old trick of borrowing from literature for movies has found a new manifestation in contemporary literature and has gained currency in multiplexes” – Mint

Is Bollywood finally waking up to realize that it helps to have a good script to make a good movie? I don’t know if we can apply that broad brush to paint all directors in the same color. Mint in its issue dated 20 Dec 2008 has a piece that talks about the growing desire of directors to pick a bestseller since it has all the ingredients – gripping narrative, pre-soaked audience and of course name recall. So read on for more.

The brash and optimistic tales of life and love in a new India by contemporary authors such as Karan Bajaj, Anuja Chauhan and Chetan Bhagat have already won over audiences across the country. Now Bollywood wants this new generation of storytellers to fill the void left by an absence of strong scripts. UTV Motion Pictures Plc.— the production house behind Mira Nair’s The Namesake, based on the book by Jhumpa Lahiri—has What’s Your Rashee?, a film directed by Ashutosh Gowariker and based on the book Kimball Ravenswood by Madhu Rye, lined up for release next year, and is currently working on the scripts for five films, all based on books whose rights the firm has optioned.

It comes as Indian Film Co., a publicly listed production house which is promoted by Studio 18, is in the process of converting the stories for up to eight books into screenplays.

While the notion of borrowing from literature for movies is not new in Indian cinema (Satyajit Ray adapted a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay for cinematic release in the 1950s), the age-old trick has found a new manifestation in contemporary literature and has gained currency in multiplexes.

Hot on the heels of the release of Hello, an adaptation of Chetan Bhagat’s One Night @ the Call Centre, and Slumdog Millionaire, the critically acclaimed adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s Q&A, Chauhan’s chick-lit debut The Zoya Factor, is being turned into a film by Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment, while Bajaj’s Keep Off The Grass is being adapted by Mosaic Media Group—the production company behind The Dark Knight—in conjunction with Bollywood partners.

Siddharth Roy Kapur, chief executive of UTV Motion Pictures, explains that the appeal of turning new-generation fiction into films comes in part from having a ready source of stories to choose from.

“When fiction is recognized and successful, and when it translates well, then we have a ready-made screenplay which we can work with,” says Kapur. “Books have been made into films for years, but it is not often that English language books have been turned into mainstream films. That is a first.”

The attraction of optioning the rights to books for Sandeep Bhargava, chief executive of the investment adviser to Indian Film Co., derives mainly from the fact that the story has been tested and proven: “(Optioning books) saves us a fair amount of time in the film-making process, but the main attraction is that we are getting the right concept.”

The trend also tells us something of the currency of new writing in English in India, according to Udayan Mitra, senior managing editor at Penguin Books India, who reveals that “several” authors published by Penguin are in ongoing talks with film companies.

“Chetan Bhagat, Vikas Swarup, Aravind Adiga, Advaita Kala and many others of the new generation of writers have written books that are hugely accessible to the reader, a far remove from the brilliant but convoluted writings of Rushdie or Naipaul, which would scare off the average Bollywood film-maker,” says Mitra, explaining the appeal of the new storytellers. “They don’t always result in good films—Hello was a veritable disaster—but they are in the popular domain.”

However, Vikas Swarup, whose second book Six Suspects has been optioned by Starfield Productions in conjunction with the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), points out that remuneration for writers still varies hugely, depending on the the desire of the film-maker to keep the rights, the fame of the author and the nature of the story being optioned.

Swarup says that although he was paid “considerably more” by Starfield Productions for Six Suspects than the Rs5-6 lakh cited by publishing houses as the median payment to authors who option rights, he adds that he will not receive more than a “nominal” share in the profits of the film. The figure compares with a minimum payout of about $10,000 (Rs4.5 lakh) for signing off film rights in Hollywood.

“India is consistent with international practice in that the writer will get a one-off sum when the book is optioned, and is also then perhaps promised a minuscule share of the profits,” says Swarup, whose agent sold the rights to Q&A in 2004, a full year before the book had even been published.

Also currently being adapted for cinema is 3 Idiots, based on Bhagat’s Five Point Someone, which is being directed by Rajkumar Hirani and stars Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor, while Harper Collins is in negotiations with production houses over the film rights for Almost Single, by Advaita Kala, as well as Lashkar, by Mukul Deva and Married But Available, by Abhijit Bhaduri.

Bajaj, who turned down approaches from UTV and Kunal Kohli Productions before signing the deal with Mosaic, credits the surge in interest in novels by Indian writers to the growth in publishing—and a corresponding deficit of good stories and coherent scripts in the Indian film market. However, Chauhan suggests that the appeal of books such as The Zoya Factor might be in part a reaction against the “angst and trauma” found elsewhere in Indian literature.

“I was slightly sick of books about angst and trauma and I just feel that people are not really writing about our India,” says Chauhan, who used to be a jingle writer before turning to fiction. “It is either nostalgic or weird and involves themes like incest.”

The Asian Age runs a list of best sellers for the week. For two weeks now the Booker award winning novel The White Tiger has been topping the list. The others that follow have been pretty consistent too. Brisinger has been at the silver medal winning spot and Meenakshi Madhavan Reddy who writes the immensely popular blog called The Compulsive Confessor is holding forth at spot number three while I am holding fourth (could never resist a cheap pun!) … I missed even the bronze. But I don’t crib. I am made of a different “metal”

I was just beginning to wonder if it was the same list that they ran on the week of 7th Dec 08 that got reprinted. A bit like spot the difference between the two pictures. But no, there is the Non Fiction section to look at to see that another blogger is leading at No 1 with Stay Hungry Stay Foolish ahead of Thomas Friedman, Barack Obama and Randy Pausch.

Best seller lists are lists. If you have not heard Randy Pausch, the Prof from Carnegie Mellon Univ, US talk about the list he made as a kid, then you have to listen to this one. Carnegie Mellon Univ posted the full 76 minute version of The Last Lecture it on youtube.com. The man made a list of things to do in his childhood and talks about how many of them he has met. Do you have a list like that? I had written about the film Dasvidaniya recently which has a list making protagonist. Randy Pausch inspires you to make a list of your own.

If you had one last lecture to give, what would you say? The video that brings tears to my eyes and inspires every time I watch it. Don’t miss it.

It is official. I am going with HarperCollins. The publishing giant HarperCollins, one of the largest English-language publishers in the world, is a subsidiary of News Corporation. Headquartered in New York, HarperCollins has publishing groups around the world. In India they have been in business since 2002 as a joint venture with the India Today group.

I had to make a choice. After weeks of nail biting suspense, I voted in favour of HarperCollins to publish my novel MARRIED BUT AVAILABLE. After all they paid me the half a million dollar advance. Ok… now it is time for truth. Heck no it was nothing like that. In this cruel world it is the publishers who decide whther to take on your manuscript or not. So I am really excited that I am going with the biggest name one could have.