Ravi Subramanian
Age: 42
Profession: Banker, writer
Genre: He has written five books that deal with the banking industry. His first book If God Was a Banker was a huge hit in the banking industry and readers felt it described the culture of Citibank in early 2000. His fourth novel The Incredible Banker won the Economist-Crossword Book Award in 2011.
Ravi Subramanian’s fifth book, The Bankster, launched a few months ago at a Bombay bookstore to a packed audience: Friends and former colleagues from HSBC, yes, but also a sizeable contingent of fans, and even financial journalists. Subramanian told the assembled throng how he had released characters from his book in the form of comic strips and had given away almost 40 percent of the story on Facebook. He had done so with a clear plan. He wanted to create a buzz about the book on social media so that when the book was launched, there would be enough people who would go and buy it. He had hired a team of professionals to do the graphics and a slide show for the launch.
And it all paid off. He was able to put The Bankster on the bestsellers list from its very first week in the wild. It hadn’t always been that easy, though.
Subramanian, despite his clearly South Indian name, is practically a naturalised Punjabi: He grew up in Ludhiana, where his father taught in an engineering college. After his parents moved back to Karnataka, Subramanian stayed on to finish college.
He had grown up reading the usual round of imported bestsellers that Indian kids in the seventies and eighties had access to: Jeffery Archer, John Grisham, Arthur Hailey, James Hadley Chase and so on. He also started reading paperback thrillers in Hindi, by Surendra Mohan Pathak and the like, which he bought at railway stations and devoured on the overnight train journeys he took to visit his parents. These moulded his reading tastes and also his writing ambitions.
For, though he went on to IIM Bangalore, and has since had a very successful career in banking, he knew he always wanted to be a writer. That, he decided, was the only route to a kind of immortality.
As he says, “Ask someone who the CEO of a certain organisation was five years ago, nobody will remember. But if you ask who wrote a particular book—if the book is successful—they will remember. Somewhere I always wanted to be remembered by my books after I’m gone.”
And so, in the mid-noughties, settled in his career and personal life, he began to write. He chose to set his story in the world he knew best: Banking. Two drafts later, he did the rounds of the publishers, and collected a respectable sheaf of rejection letters.
Then he did the thing all successful executives know well: He networked. He got in touch with Kapish Mehra and chatted with him, CEO-to-CEO. Mehra, scion of home grown publishing major, Rupa Publications, had made his bones publishing Five Point Someone, the Chetan Bhagat bestseller.
His methods were straightforward: Look for a pool of readers large enough to be a good market, then find content that they would relate to. He had spotted the emergence of a new generation of young Indians, brought up on popular Indian cinema and television and at ease with their Indianness, comfortable enough in English, but not particularly at ease with either the subjects or the literary writing that the top Indian writers were putting out.
When Bhagat’s book came his way, he gambled on this generation loving a book that told the stories of their particular lives. And Bhagat and he have been chortling their way to the bank ever since. Mehra was now on the lookout for his next big thing.
When he went through Subramanian’s work, he connected the dots to a trend he had noticed: People migrating from smaller towns to big cities to work in banks, lured by the sector’s fast growth and attractive salaries. There were enough of them, and with money to spend, to form an attractive target audience.
“Besides,” he says, “Ravi has this talent of building a story that takes the reader into the book from page one. He understands banking and he wrote about its problems before the global crisis. I knew this book would do well because there was a hungry reader waiting for such a book.”
When he commented, awed, Archer smiled and said, “If your best fan is the 500th person, then you will be doing him injustice [if you sign sloppily].” Subramanian says this is a very Dravid-attitude, and, incidentally, “Archer is a huge Dravid fan”. When we bring up Archer’s prison sentence, Subramanian smiles and indicates that his admiration is only for the professional side of Archer.
(This story appears in the 22 February, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)