Having worked across all tiers of publishing as an author, Rahul Saini is familiar with the unsavoury realities of the business of books. Based on his observations, his new novel “Paperback Dreams” (Penguin) reveals the dark side of “bottom level” publishing, often hidden by the sheen of “bestsellers” it churns out.
“If you want to go there, you have to go prepared that they are not going to give you royalty,” says Saini. Moreover, “those publishers help you only if they take a personal interest in you, and it’s dirty.”
The three central characters of the novel — Jeet Obiroi, Rohit Sehdev and Karun Mukharjee — are authors at different stages of their careers. While Jeet is a college-Casanova who views his books as a ticket to the good things in life, Rohit is a one-book-old writer, forced into a teaching job because he has been consistently conned out of his royalties by his publisher. Karun, an ambitious schoolboy, will go to any length, including sending hate mail to other authors, to get his first book published. All three authors have the same publisher, and are, in different ways, harassed, exploited and manipulated by him.
The novel is narrated from the points of view of all three principal characters. “When I conceived the story, I had three very distinct people in mind. They are three different people who write for three very different reasons. If I would have narrated the story from Rohit’s point of view, those people would have appeared very negative. They are not negative people, they just want things differently…It was my attempt to widen up the appeal more,” Saini says.
Like Rohit, the author is a teacher, and some aspects of the novel’s style are informed by his experiences as one. Explaining the choice to split the 250-page novel into 52 chapters, he says, “It’s very conscious. When I deal with students, I know they don’t have any patience at all. So if I give them long chapters without any breaks, they are not going to sit through it. They need a break after every 2 pages. And I am aiming at that age group.” In a similar vein, the novel incorporates emails and chats into the narrative. “That’s how things are now, this is how we live and interact,” he explains.
The starting point for the novel was the phenomenon of “bad books” which exploded after Chetan Bhagat’s “Five Point Someone”. “It triggered a huge tsunami of books and inspired every student to write a book. There’s nothing wrong in that but if you want to do something you have to achieve a level, which did not happen. Instead we saw books which did not read well, books which told the same story with the names being altered…It was a very interesting phenomenon, how a completely new industry mushroomed and then all the big players started identifying it and refining it,” Saini observes.
Despite the pedigree of three bestselling books (“Those Small Lil Things”, “Just like in the Movies” and “The Orange Crush”), Saini struggled to find a house for this novel for two years. His next novel will take the story of “Paperback Dreams” forward. “There are going to be bigger conspiracies, more things at stake, more terrible stuff about what happens to students in colleges,” he informs us.
