Writing

This post was originally published in February 2015. The links in the original post have been updated. The pricing break-up in INR or Indian Rupee terms remains in the ballpark even today. This was confirmed during a discussion in a Facebook group for Indian authors in December 2021. Exchange rate in Feb 2022 is 1 US Dollar = approximate 75 Indian Rupees. You may adjust the US Dollar figures accordingly.

– Thanks, Amar Vyas.  February 2022

What is the Cost of self publishing a book in India?

Call it epiphany, or a combination of circumstances, or a  mere coincidence. Earlier this week, I decided that I should write a post on how much self-publishing NRI:Now Returned to India cost me. That was on Monday. By Thursday morning, I had the draft ready, but then two events prompted me to re-write this post and publish it a day later.  On Thursday evening, the moderator of the Nanowrimo India group on Facebook posted an article from The Write Life, which discusses the costs incurred by four authors on self publishing their books. That article prompted a discussion within the group, and some members shared their costs- which ranged from Rupees 15,000 (around 250 U.S dollars at the current exchange rate) to Rupees 150,000 (or about 2,500 dollars). The latter cost has been incurred by yours truly. And that’s what prompted me to re-write this post.

When I had sent the draft of Now, Returned to India to my beta readers, the word count stood at nearly 98,000. As I had mentioned in an earlier post, almost every reviewer had mentioned that my writing seemed verbose. So when I sat down to reduce the word count, I also began to maintain a chapter-wise ‘before and after’ word count.

Earlier this week,  a writer and fellow blogger asked me how did I approach my reviewers. At the same time, I heard on the most recent show of Simon’s Rocking Self Publishing Podcast that probably 20 is a good number of beta readers to have. This got me thinking: How did I actually do it? Over the past several months, I had been so enamored by the novel that it is quite likely that I must have told anybody and everybody who cared to listen. And that probably got a lot of people interested to read Now, Returned to India during the interview.