Twelve years ago, when Arundhati Roy got a 1.6 million pound advance for her debut novel, The God of Small Things, the spotlight was on the handsome increment rather than the quality of writing.

Now, historian and public intellectual Ramchandra Guha is in the news for having received a huge advance from Penguin India?Rs 1 crore is the whisper doing the rounds?for seven non-fiction titles including two volumes on the life of Mahatma Gandhi. But while Roy and Vikram Seth and the rest of the Indian writers in English are the toast of the town, read the West, are Indian non-fiction writers too going to be serenaded?

Well, it certainly depends on the quality of the narrative and definitely on who?s penning it. People will sit up and take notice if Guha, whose India after Gandhi, published by Picador, has sold half a lakh copies, is writing a book on Gandhi.

Indian fiction has done reasonably well in the West, with rights being sold in multiple languages, but performed moderately in the domestic market. In the last couple of years, however, the domestic market has grown ?Aravind Adiga?s Booker-winning The White Tiger, published by HarperCollins in 2008, has sold more than 1.5 lakh copies. What?s interesting is that readers are also increasingly engaging with non-fiction narratives.

Consider this: While Dr Abdul Kalam?s Ignited Mind (Penguin) sold 3.5 lakh copies, Amartya Sen?s The Argumentative Indian sold 1.25 lakh copies, Thomas Friedman?s The World is Flat over a lakh, Nandan Nilekani?s Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century 50,000 copies.

So, it?s hardly a surprise that non-fiction advances are on the rise too. In the next five months, Penguin alone will publish five non-fiction titles, including Meghnad Desai?s The Rediscovery of India, HarperCollins too has an aggressive 56 non-fiction titles lined up for the coming fiscal. While the growing interest in non-fiction has been a trend in the West for quite a while, it?s finally catching up in India as well, much to the publishers? glee of course. But to sustain the business over the medium term, we will need the right subject and skill.

?sudipta.dutta@expressindia.com