Nothing sells a book faster than a pre-pub controversy, as Ayub Khan's son, Gohar, will probably discover when his autobiography hits the stands in December, with or without the name of the Indian brigadier he claims sold our '65 war plans. Perhaps he should have asked our ex-IB man, Maloy Krishna Dar, how to run a teaser ad campaign for his book. Says Dar, who has just sold his second book—ISI: The Fulcrum of Evil—to Roli for an undisclosed but "very satisfactory" advance: "A controversy is useful to sell a book, but it should come close to the book's release, not months in advance." He should know: his first book, Open Secrets, has crossed 10,000 in hardback, thanks to the hornet's nest it stirred up a week before its release by a disclosure of the BJP's post-demolition meeting.
Then there are the sad, self-published authors who having failed to get the papers to notice their masterpiece, send the book out to the Who's Who, then cash in on the acknowledgement letters they get. One indefatigable writer, Asiananda, has collected a bunch of such letters from Abdul Kalam, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, Pranab Mukherjee, Jaswant Singh...
