What draws readers to his books, says Tiwari, who admits to have never read a single one himself, “is the simplicity of my stories, which are either true to life, or aspirational. My voice is natural and raw”. Tiwari and his tribe have also turned motivational speakers across campuses, offering advice on everything, from love, life and how to become a writer; others, like Durjoy Datta, have offers to write youth-related TV shows and films. There are other trends that are clear: chicklit, typical campus romances are passe, and IIM-IIT stories are now routinely moved to the slush pile. “Out-of-the-box commercial fiction is the only way forward. Publishers are even tiring of mythological fiction,” says Gupta, who’s got two exciting YA novels in the making: Panther, about a child soldier in Sri Lanka, and Me, Mia, Multiple, featuring an unlikely relationship between a manic-depressive guy and a girl with dissociative identity disorder. The latter had six publishers vying for it. Indeed, darker themes—complex relationships (single parents, extramarital affairs), death, illness (made popular by John Green’s ‘sicklit’ bestseller The Fault in Our Stars)—set in exotic locales or in corporate workplaces are in vogue.