Sangram Surve is an author-strategist and founding director of Think WhyNot Pte. Ltd. Based in Mumbai, his corporation also has offices in Singapore and comprises four companies fielding more than eighty employees: Think WhyNot Integrated Communications (strategy); Twist Studio (film production); Caffeine (implementation, events); and Think WhyNot Digital (social media marketing).
- Surve is best known for his work with runaway bestselling Indian author Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy. As he mentioned at a Singapore writing and publishing conference, “I realized that Amish’s Shiva Trilogy is like Lord of the Rings—huge and complicated, a world of its own.”
- Surve produced CGI video trailers for the three books (at the time, not a common approach in India) and went into cinemas with the trailers “to attract the Bollywood crowd,” as Surve puts it, for huge pre-order response.
- They also created a Web site campaign to explain the trilogy’s tales of Lord Shiva, and they decided to create a music video based on the books in order to find “a free way to get content online.” So successful was that effort that they went on to make a complete album of music for the Shiva Trilogy, with various composers contributing.
- To date, the Shiva Trilogy material has sold more than 4 million copies—extraordinarily big numbers for the Indian market—and has film deals with both Indian and Hollywood studios. Most recent efforts involve engaging media personalities and other influencers in exclusive puzzles and other clever quiz-based campaigns.
- Surve has worked with publishers such as Penguin Random House, Hachette, Westland, and Rupa.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
