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'It's The Age Of McDonald's Booksellers'

And a McDonald's is not interested in recherche chicken. He is interested in a meat patty that can feed thousands ... we're in a mass culture.

Sheela Reddy

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It wasn't exactly "a five-star exile" for the 68-year-old Ved Mehta, former staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, where he wrote 18 of his 24 books, before he was "umm, let go by the Tina Brown regime". Mass culture is changing the publishing industry beyond recognition, he tells Sheela Reddy. Excerpts from an interview:
When you started out to be a writer, it must have been even tougher than it possibly was for V.S. Naipaul, given your blindness...
Then why do you publish at all? Why don't you just keep a journal?
Do you find a vast change in the way Indian English writers are regarded in the West since your time?
But why should they attract attention because they are Indian even if they lack what you call a "special kind of talent"?
Why do you think Indian writers have become a fashion?
How much of a writer's career depends on hype?
Are these advances imaginary then?
So the marketing department in publishing houses calls the shots?
Don't publishers have a prestige list where they take something that is a potential award winner?
But how does it make sense for publishers to pay, say, $100,000, as an advance, which we hear happens almost routinely nowadays?
I still don't see the connection with the advances.
So when you started out what kind of advances did writers like you get?
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