Nitish Bakshi, who basically hails from Delhi, has been writing for as long as he can remember and his passion for writing took him to Mumbai. His hard work paid off over the years. Bakshi, in the past has been on the screenplay team for the erstwhile popular TV show Diya Aur Baati Hum, has written the screenplay of Akbar for Big Magic and is currently a co-writer of the show TV Tu Aashiqui on Colors. Bakshi, is a now all set to release his Hindi audio book – Mohabbat Under Constrution – on Valentine’s Day 2018. In a chat with Nation Next, Nitish Bakshi speaks about his book, the concept of audio books and more.

How and why did you decide to write for your audio book – ‘Mohabbat Under Construction’?

The audio format has been quite popular in the west since long but it’s not very popular in India right now in spite of the digital penetration. Storytel is a Sweden based Euproean publishing house, which entered the Indian market currently. They are one of the biggest publishers of audio books. They got in touch with me and discussed the idea on an audio book, which I found very interesting. Everybody today wants to consume content in different forms and people are constantly on their phones. Audio books give authors a chance to reach more people and people a chance to just enjoy listening if they don’t want to read.

Tell us something about your book

Mohabbat Under Construction is a romantic comedy based in Delhi. It’s about a girl who is approached by a publishing house for writing a romantic story. Having an opinion, that these days there’s no such thing call true love, the girl does an experiment for the book. She decides to date two of her friends. The book is about her emotions, her experiences and about finding and exploring love. Since, I’m from Delhi, there’s a lot of North Indian flavour to the book. There are ten chapters in my audio book and each chapter is one hour long.

Unlike physical books wherein a author plays the most important role, in an audio book, there’s a voice-over artist involved as well?

Audio books generally have just one narrator. That narrator changes his voice a little bit as per the different characters. It’s very important to get the right voice-over artist. Fortunately, we had Uplaksh Kochar, who’s an amazingly talented voice-over artist, to do the recording. Before we started recording, I spoke to him about the book in detail. He understood the story really quickly and he was superb during the recording. He also brought a lot inputs on the table.

Since audio book is a relatively new concept in India, were you apprehensive about penning the book

Not at all. In fact, I was quite excited right from the start. Audio books are the future. Physical books will always carry their own charm, but audio books will have their own niche market. People will get aware about the concept with time.

How can the listeners listen to your audio book

Once you download the Storytel India app, you will be able to not only listen to ‘Mohabbat Under Construction,’ but also many other audio books in Hindi, Marathi and English. For the first 14 days, the subscription to Storytel is free of cost. My book can also be read in Devnagari on the app.