Bangalore Literature Festival

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.