“Chetan Bhagat didn’t inspire me to write" Grapevine Founder,Sachin Garg
Being an avid blogger since his college days, Sachin Garg jump started his writing career with “I’m not twenty four” in 2010. Sachin has been in the limelight for his books and has been constantly lingering on the Indian bestsellers list with his subsequent works. Actress Gul Panag launched his last book “Never Let Me Go” which has struck many chords.
So, what led him to startup Grapevine India Publishers? “There is a gap in the publishing industry in India as I see it” says Sachin. “There are two ways to publish. First is to publish books by quantity which will keep you afloat and the other is to come up with quality books, all of which will do good” says Sachin. He wanted more publishers to fall in the latter category and hence took birth, Grapevine India Publishers.
Along with Durjoy Dutta (‘Of Course I love you… Till I find someone else’ fame), Sachin formed a group of authors who’d publish books. Established in July 2011, Grapevine came up with its first launch in September 2011. They started out with republishing five titles and since then have published seven original titles.
All of these books have been authored or co-authored by the writers who run Grapevine. Currently the team consists of five but will soon grow. The core team has Sachin Garg, Durjoy Dutta, Nikita Singh and Sundhanshu Gupta.
Being a very young publishing house, Grapevine hasn’t experimented much in terms of genre. “Going on, we intend to diversify. We want to reach out to a much wider audience. In fact, my next novel is going to be non-fiction.” informs Sachin about Grapevines’ plans to explore other genres.
One always wonders whether Chetan Bhagat was the spark that turned many engineering students towards writing. “I wouldn’t say that my writings have been inspired by Chetan Bhagat as I’ve always been an enthusiastic blogger. I have been writing and my blog was pretty popular as well so writing is something that came naturally to me,” informs Sachin.
How does Grapevine Operate?
Operating with a guiding principle of not publishing sub-standard work, Grapevine takes considerable amount of pains before selecting a manuscript. They are willing to wait for a good manuscript rather than publishing anything that comes their way. Grapevine receives an average of 10 manuscripts a day! “The quantity is huge but we’re not satisfied with the quality” says Sachin.
What’s in store?
“We’re coming up with a series of novels titled ‘The BackBenchers’ which is about 16-17 years olds and the problems they face… their journey” informs Sachin. The first book in this series will launch in May (this year). This series is written by the authors under a penname, “Siddharth Oberoi”.
Post ‘The BackBenchers’, one could expect more diversification from Grapevine and we’d have our eyes on this Grapevine Publishers.
If you want to submit a manuscript to them, write to Grapevine with:
- Author’s Bio
- A Brief Summary of the novel
- 3 sample chapters or the full manuscript
More about Grapevine here.
