My Journey from Escapist to HarperCollins Author
A tall woman in a long black coat and a black hat rested the ferrule of her umbrella on what looked like a grey London street. She stood in front of a house with a window revealing a bookshelf within, presumably hers. She was regarded as a writer. It seemed that this stranger was me – or who I hoped to become. That vision appeared one afternoon when I was a child. At the time, I was adrift in an oasis of trauma, tragedy and culture shock upon relocating from Europe to India.
And that’s how it began.
My first short story was published when I was eight, and I attempted my first sort-of novel – a fantasy story. I carried on writing through a near-death experience preceding my diagnosis of Type-1 diabetes. Not long after, a middle school crush inspired a series of school-based novels that continued through most of high-school - mostly a combination of scenes, ramblings and reflections. The notebooks where I wrote all of that are tucked away somewhere in a loft in my childhood home today. But all of those years of voracious writing – and reading – gave me practice.
Fiction, for me, is a way of channeling my escapism into an alternate reality whose outcomes I can control. My childhood tryst with fiction informed my journalistic career, which began at the age of twelve, when I started freelancing for newspaper dailies and appearing on air as a youth anchor for private television channels. When I was seventeen, I wrote a book, The Voyage to Excellence, published in 2005. The book, which features the personal stories of twenty-one successful women business leaders, did well in academic and business circles. But the publisher had an outdated distribution channel, which was not in line with the changing ethos of bookstores and multi-product retailers.
As I prepared to attend my Master’s program at the London School of Economics, I toyed with the idea of writing a fiction novel inspired from my experiences digging into a story for a newspaper as a journalist. That marked the genesis of my bestselling psychological and crime thriller, Victims For Sale, in 2006. I completed it by Christmas of 2014. It went out on submissions in January 2015. I signed with HarperCollins in September 2016. My debut novel, Victims For Sale was released in January 2018. The book, which took me all the way to the United Nations in New York, has been likened to a David Fincher movie and reviewed as reminiscent of the prose of Megan Abbott.
Victims For Sale was written in the midst of two post-graduate degrees, multiple relocations between continents, and full-time heavy-duty editorial or consulting jobs. During a brief sabbatical in San Diego, through early 2011, my husband encouraged me to return to my former city, London. Subsequent research for the novel. Victims For Sale, originally intended as a literary novel, evolved into a commercial crime thriller upon elaborate face-to-face interviews and discussions in London with multiple subjects, including Scotland Yard officials, barristers and BBC producers. Further, my experience of sitting in on a murder trial at London’s Old Bailey as part of the fieldwork for this book helped me flesh out the character of my antagonist.
I would be lying if I said I didn’t struggle to find a literary agent. In late 2012, I attended two writers’ conferences in New York. These were incredibly helpful since I was a novice when it came to the art of pitching, agenting and publishing fiction. I signed with a prominent literary agency in August 2014 upon being referred to its founder by a publishing executive whom I had connected with on LinkedIn, thanks to a shared alma mater.
The journey I have embarked on has been both frustrating and rewarding. Hardly had I left a well-paying consulting gig and begun my training as a reporting fellow at Columbia Journalism School in 2011, when I lost my mobility almost overnight. I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, which, like Type-1 diabetes, is autoimmune. It was around that time, in early 2012, that I wrote the opening scenes of my next novel, Twin Flame. Before long, I recovered and was juggling multiple jobs, holding the fort in New York while my husband ran a social enterprise venture overseas.
It was fiction that kept me going.
Through it all, I learned two things: The notion that one is self-made is an illusion. The most successful creative inventions are those involving the coordinated contributions of many focused and talented people. For everything that I did not have, my husband has been beyond supportive. He was my catalyst for the writers’ conferences I attended in 2012 before landing an agent. My editor at the literary agency reposed his faith in the book, and went so far as poring over Google Maps with me on satellite mode one night to scout for a location that would find its way into the epilogue! My mother has been with me every step of the way.
Secondly, I learned that being delusional facilitates an effective outlet for one’s escapism because it’s a way of being true to oneself. As a New York Writers Workshop faculty member who has addressed fiction authors at various forums, including the Algonkian Writer Conferences in New York, I hope to play a role in nurturing fresh voices and guiding writers to be more connected with themselves so that they can draw readers into the epicenter of a new addictive reality!
Meanwhile, I completed writing Twin Flame in the midst of my Victims For Sale book tours. Since my editor at the literary agency shifted careers to digital advertising, I began pitching Twin Flame to other agents. I was over the moon when Writers House founder and NYC-based literary figurehead Albert Zuckerman invited me to lunch after reading my pages! It was a humbling experience, to say the least. Albert, who has groomed and launched various bestselling authors including Ken Follett, Nora Roberts and Olivia Goldsmith, offered me representation, noting that he “feels the music in my prose” and that the writing “reflects a great degree of talent and brilliance.” I was working under his guidance until he was unable to continue in view of other extraneous factors. So, I’m back in the trenches seeking an agent who is as passionate about Twin Flame as I am. This novel, which follows the journey of a mathematical physicist and a professor-cum-novelist, has received great feedback from the likes of Alice Martell who said she hopes to see a glowing review of it in the New York Times!
Long story short: My publishing journey has reiterated my lifeblood as a storyteller, reminded me of the art of patience and perseverance. It taught me that the very themes, experiences, and incidents we are sometimes reluctant to pen down are exactly what we must write about. It taught me to identify my voice and be true to it. I believe in creating good stories, both as a novelist and a journalist. In fiction, I let the story pick the genre and choose to focus mainly on the voices of my characters, rather than getting fixated on one genre or sub-genre. I have three more novels brewing in the alcoves, including a work of adult fantasy fiction, a satire on the public relations biosphere and a quasi-political financial newsroom thriller.
Today, I feel like I have worn the black coat I saw on the woman writer, a.k.a. the stranger a.k.a. my future self, in my childhood vision. And I am now getting closer to being able to wear that black hat. The journey continues.
Nish Amarnath is a New York-based journalist and novelist, who grew up in parts of India, Africa and Europe. She has published two non-fiction books. Her first novel, Victims For Sale (HarperCollins, 2018) is a suspense thriller nominated for the Bombay Film Festival Word-to-Screen Awards in 2018. She was one of five journalists across North America to be honored as an Outstanding Reporter as part of the Alerian MLP Awards in 2017. She has written for The Wall Street Journal and was previously Managing Editor at one of Europe’s most prolific magazine publishing groups. Nish is presently a reporter at news provider Reorg in Manhattan. She majored in Economics with Distinction and holds post-graduate degrees in media and communications and journalism from the London School of Economics and Political Science and Columbia University, where she was a James W. Robins Reporting Fellow. You can learn more about her at www.nishamarnath.com.
To learn more about Victims For Sale, click on www.nishamarnath.com/victimsforsale.
