In a story called Words Worth Millions, Sheela Reddy writes in the Outlook India, "Something funny is going on in the famously tight-fisted circle of Indian publishers. For the past few months, they have been punting dizzily on manuscripts by untried Indian authors, coughing up millions of rupees in advance royalties."
She also says that literary agents accustomed to heading west towards UK and the US with their clients' manuscripts are now heading back.
Two books that have recently attracted attention for the advance they have received are Palash Mehrotra's The Butterfly Generation and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.
The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey Into the Passions and Follies of India's Technicolor Youth is described as non-fiction: part memoir and part travelogue, and is said to be a book about two Indias -- the socialist and the global "and the urban young today." Palash Mehrotra is a 32-year-old former schoolmaster. He has been paid an advance of Rs 800,000.00 (a little over USD20,000) for a book proposal after a bidding war between Rupa, Penguin and HarperCollins. He has now started to write the book.
The White Tiger is fiction, "A slim novel about India’s globalisation in the form of a letter from a village-born driver to China's premier" has received an advance of Rs 1400,000 (over USD35,000).
One year ago all Indian publishers could hope for was to grab Indian rights for their own Indian writers at Frankfurt or London Book Fairs like 'beggars' for 'next to nothing.' What a difference a year makes.
Others are:
- Tarun Tejpal - The Story Of My Assassins - US$56,000 (Rs 2200000)
- Dev Anand - Romancing With Life - US$38,000 (Rs 1500000)
- Nandan Nilekani - Imagining India - US$35,000 (Rs 1400000)
- Amitav Ghosh - Sea Of Poppies Trilogy - US$110,000 (Rs 4400000)
- Shrabani Basu - Victoria & Abdul - US$16,000 (Rs 630000)
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