Last month I attended my first Lit Fest. The
Bangalore Literature Festival was also the first time Bangalore was hosting
such a festival. Usually these festivals are held in Delhi, Mumbai and Jaipur.
I was thrilled to see a decent crowd (I had expected a smaller crowd as we keep
hearing about the dwindling number of book readers). It felt great to be in the
company of like- minded people and surrounded by lots of books.
I especially enjoyed the discussion ‘Business of
Books’ moderated by my publisher Annie Chandy Mathew (Unisun Publication). V.K Karthika's ( the editor
of Harper Collins India), discussion was informative as well as enlightening.
She said that writers should stop seeing editors as monsters who prevent their
books from being published. Infact, it was the opposite. Editors are eager to
see manuscripts. She urged writers to simultaneously submit to several
publishers to better their chances of getting published.
One of the things I liked in her discussion was the
reason publishers turn down collection of stories. She said that she has seen
that in collection of stories submitted, one or two of the stories are great,
the rest don’t match up. So the publishers pick the good ones and ask the
writers if they can use it for their anthologies.
The editors participating in the discussion
mentioned that many times they turned down manuscripts on the basis of the cover
letter. If the letter was full of grammatical errors and not well written, it
showed that the manuscript too would suffer from the same flaw.
How about you all? Have you attended a lit fest? If
yes, what did you think of it? If no, would you like to attend one? I would
love to hear your views on it.
