Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

You don't see too many 900-page books anymore--they are a tough sell to a world swamped with web pages, magazines and 24-hour news. 

After carrying around Vikram Chandra's new novel Sacred Games for three weeks, I remembered the lovely feeling of getting lost in a long book. It reminded me of my younger days when I'd buy gigantic books by Stephen King and James Ellroy at garage sales and devour them over long, lazy weekends.

Today, Chandra explains how his epic detective story evolved into one of the riskiest, most rewarding novels of the year.

Welcome my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions.  In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing. 

Jason Boog:
It's a brave thing to publish such a long book today. How did that happen? Any advice for writers lost in their own long manuscripts?

Vikram Chandra:
Most of the time while writing I didn’t think about the length, I had the sense it wasn’t the 300-page book I started. Continue reading...

I kept each chapter in a separate word file, I didn’t put them together until the end. I called my wife over and we stared at it in stunned disbelief.

While writing I was only interested in getting it done. I had published two books before, I was quite happy with the readers I had found. Sending out, I had no idea there would be all this excitement.

People started talking about the length when it came out, that’s when I started thinking about it.

Here’s my post-game wisdom: Write the book you need to write, as romantic as that sounds.

The thing, [the book] when it is alive and complete in itself, will attract the readers it needs to. It will work by itself.

Don’t hew to one idea of what a book is in this market, you might end up damaging the book in the end. Keep your head down and do the work.