Love him or hate him, but you just can’t ignore Durjoy Datta. He’s one of India’s bestselling authors, has a beautiful young family, vacations almost all the time, and has a loyal army of five lakh-plus followers to share this with.
Datta, an engineer and also an MBA, has built his seemingly successful life on the back of his publishing career, which he started at the age of 21. He writes young adult novels, which sell better than almost all other authors in the country.
The flipside of this is that he often gets scrutinised by literary ‘purists.’ “The criticism used to bother me a lot earlier,” he had said at one of his past launches, and added, “but now I’m older and don’t have the energy for all that anger. Unless the criticism also comes from a place of love and liking some parts of the book(s), I don’t take it seriously.”
When we got to interact with him at a recent event, we had to ask him about how this constant feedback has changed him and his writing process. “The writing process was unchanged, the publishing process was absolutely different. When I wrote I didn’t think I would get published. In fact, I was sure I wouldn’t get published,” he said as he adjudged the winners of the fourth edition of Amazon Kindle’s Pen to Publish Contest.
“Now, there are many options to get published. You don’t even have to wait for traditional publishers, you can write, edit and then make the book available online for people to read. When I started writing, I didn’t think of that as an option,” he added.
Despite the ongoing changes in the publishing industry over the last decade, Datta has managed to author almost two dozen books so far, averaging two every year since he started out in 2008. He must be a master of overcoming the writer’s block, right?
“Just write out of it,” he simplifies his method of dealing with the block. “Don’t stop writing. To get out of the rut, you need to constantly be writing.”
In the end, we asked him in a very millennial-friendly way about five tips he would give to a budding author. He said: “Read and write everyday. Have an end date for the first draft. Read a lot of books in the same genre as yours, to learn. Don’t edit before you finish the draft. Read a few books on how to write a book.”
Image credits: Instagram/Durjoy Datta
