“It’s All About Them Cheese Sandwiches & Other Stories” is a collection of novellas written by Saksham Sinha, a fourth-year Chemical Engineering student. The novellas deal with themes of love, discovering yourself, coming of age, and inspiration. The English Press Club recently caught up with him to talk about the experience of writing and publishing his very own book.

When Saksham was 13 years old, he saw novels at bookstores and figured that it would be easy enough to write his own book. However, when he tried to put pen to paper, he found himself stumped and was hit with the gruelling difficulty of writing a book. However, he did not allow himself to feel discouraged. Since then, he consistently worked on it over multiple attempts. In the summer of his first year, he made his first serious attempt at writing a manuscript that could be published.

Saksham stated that the greatest difficulty he faced when writing his book was burnout, which he described as the frustration associated with the grind of writing. He explained that the process of writing a book requires consistent effort, and he had to spend several hours writing 3000-4000 words each day. This grind wore him out, and he found it difficult to stay motivated when he felt like he had not made sufficient progress for the time he had put in. To avoid feeling burnt out, Saksham decided to break his book into multiple novellas so that he could reinterest himself in his work when he started a new story.

When asked about his writing process, Saksham said that he created skeletal structures for each of his stories where he described the characteristics of his characters, the setting of the scenes, and how the story would progress. Once he defined these, he would write his manuscript based on this structure. He made frequent changes to this skeletal structure as he wrote the manuscripts based on how he felt the characters would act in those situations or if he wanted to change his characters’ traits to make the story more interesting.

Saksham’s favourite novella was the third one of his book. It is a story about superheroes and how he envisioned them to be like in the real world. Saksham was a big fan of comic books when he was younger, and he was interested in what the genre represented to the wider world. No take on superheroes he has seen has felt realistic to him; either they were too good or too evil. Saksham felt that writing the novella was cathartic and fulfilled a fantasy that his eight-year-old self had started.

Although Saksham wrote the manuscript completely on his own, he frequently bounced ideas off his family and friends and used their feedback as necessary. Once he finished his manuscript for his book, Saksham mailed his manuscript to many top agents in India. An agent is required to have your book published by a publisher because few publishers accept unsolicited manuscripts. An agent is often required to vet it first. Most agents have their own websites on which one can submit their ideas for a book in 200-300 words. The agent then reviews your ideas and contacts you on whether they would like to work with you or not. Saksham did not know this before he wrote his manuscript, and deeply rues the effort he could have saved himself had he contacted the agent before writing his manuscript.

It took over a year for Saksham’s manuscript to be read by his agent and another year for the publisher to review and edit it. At the beginning of the editing process, Saksham felt like control over his book was being wrested from him, but he later realised that the suggestions were valid and made his book more readable. The publisher also offered to create a design for the cover of his book, but he instead had it done by Eashan Chopde, a wingie of his. Saksham was able to talk him through the vision he had for his cover and was very satisfied by the design that ended up being used.

Saksham’s favourite part of this procedure was the response he received from his social circles. He personally had not felt that anyone would really care about his book, but he was pleasantly surprised by the interest his friends displayed. He described it as gratifying and said that it vindicated the achievement as worth being proud of.

The novel has not sold very well so far, but Saksham attributes it to the fact that debutant authors are supposed to handle much of the marketing themselves. Saksham stated that he has a lot of work as a fourth-year student, so he has not had much time for publicity. Once he gets more time, he intends to put in more effort for the publicity of his novel. However, the feedback he has received from those who have read his book has been positive and supportive. The endearing response to his stories has been very affirmative to the effort he has put in.

Saksham’s advice to anyone who wants to write their own book is to keep making a constant effort. He says that the author needs to keep writing and reviewing their work and decide whether it is good enough to be published. Saksham pointed out that there were instances where he realised that the last 50 pages of writing had driven him into a narrative corner that he did not intend to write in, and he needed to review whether he needed to backspace all of it or whether he could make it acceptable with a few modifications. When asked about dealing with burnout, Saksham stated that the process of writing is personal and it is up to them to decide how to deal with it – whether it be to develop more resistance to burnout, or to develop the ideas more so that they feel more passionate about their writing. He further went on to say that there is no easy way of writing a book, and there are no easy answers on how to write a book. All that the author can do is to just keep writing.

Saksham Sinha’s book “It’s All About Them Cheese Sandwiches & Other Stories” is currently available on Amazon at the link given below.