TN: Link Aadhaar with power bill number to get subsidy.

Enforce ban on violent online games: HC.Dad of murdered Chennai girl dies of heart attack.Chennai: Toddler falls off balcony and dies.TN: Woman missing for two days found dead.'13% TN women of 15-24 yrs use cloth during period'.Here, we take care of our own distribution network, etc. 'They focus on marketing their best-sellers and first-time authors can lose out. For when you go to a larger publishing house, you tend to get lost in the crowd. 'We didn't even bother to approach a publisher although we got an offer,' he says. Bangalore-based journalist Zahid Javali did all the groundwork himself to bring out Mindblock 1.0', a book which he co-authored. 'I wanted to see how the industry worked and how much monetary benefit there is to self-publishing,' says Prabhakar. His reasons were different to see how publishing was as a business venture.

But he still published 10 of them on his own. Chennai-based Pattukottai Prabhakar, for instance, has around 200 published books to his credit. Some writers prefer to publish their own books even if they have offers from larger publishers. 'But it seemed more hassle-free to go to someone who already has the nitty-gritties in place and just pay for the package deal,' says Swaminathan, who has already started work on his second book. Swaminathan says he could have published his book even without going to a company. Most often it's through the website,' he adds. 'We don't even have face-to-face meetings with our writers. His firm works with writers from across the world, especially a large number of NRIs who find it hard to get their work published abroad. Now we publish one book every four or five days,' says Fernandes. 'We used to get very few books when we started out a few years ago. With more and more people wanting to be published, self-publishing firms are kept busy. We tell them the cost of printing and distributing the book, and they can work backwards to decide the price of the book,' says Jha. However, authors get to decide everything from typesetting and cover design to the number of pages and pricing. At both firms, writers are charged for editing, designing and printing of the book. The former Google employee started Pothi when she wanted to publish poems she had written but found that convincing publishers was very difficult. Jaya Jha, who founded Bangalore-based self-publishing firm Pothi in 2008, says they don't even look at some manuscripts. 'If the book has too many grammatical errors, we might ask the authors to clean it up, but it's left to them,' he adds. 'We only check the manuscripts for obscenity,' says Leonard Fernandes, founder, Cinnamon Teal. No manuscript is ever rejected and authors get to publish whatever they write. Cinnamon Teal and (where Dhanapalan published his book online) are one of several self-publishing firms in the country, which work very differently from larger publishing houses. Like Dhanapalan and Swaminathan, an increasing number of writers are beginning to believe there's no need to let a rejection from a publisher get you down. So he took his manuscript to Goa-based self-publishing company Cinnamon Teal, and now his Whistleblowers' will see the light of day in another couple of months. 'I had worked for two-and-a-half years on my book and wanted to publish it because I think it's a really good story,' says Swaminathan, 42. Gurgaon-based business consultant and wannabe author Sitaraman Swaminathan did the same thing after his manuscript for a 'real estate thriller' was rejected by two publishers and ignored by another two.

'I'm passionate about the book and I'm confident about how it will be received,' he says. But if it doesn't work, I'm bringing the book out myself,' says Dhanapalan. 'I published it online and got a good response. And to prove it, the Chennai-based HR consultant has decided to publish the book himself, undeterred by publishers who have told him that the market is saturated with self-help books and so his book will not sell.

That's the title of Muralidharan Dhanapalan's self-help book. CHENNAI: If you are not a winner, who else is'.

Pattukottai prabhakar crime novels list