Why HarperCollins India is pushing hard to sign up the biggest names in Indian commercial fiction

Don't let the wine-soaked book launches, literary awards and glitzy literature festivals fool you. While Indian literary fiction continues to throw up some interesting writers and books, the backbone of the publishing industry in India very much remains non-fiction and commercial fiction. Selling in the tens of thousands (and for big names, lakhs), commercial fiction writers bring in the kind of money that successful literary novelists can only dream of. Mythological stories (Amish Tripathi and Devdutt Pattanaik) and romance (Ravinder Singh, Durjoy Datta, and Preeti Shenoy, among others) still rule the roost. For publishing houses, holding on to these bestselling authors is key for their financial health. And for publishers that manage to convince authors to switch over to them, it's a cause for celebration.