Hachette India To Publish EJ1

By Maureen Kelly

I’m pleased to announce that Hachette India will be publishing Sramana’s book, “Entrepreneur Journeys”, in February.

Soon after the book was published in October with Amazon’s BookSurge division, the online buzz and word of mouth about Sramana and her book caught the attention of editors at Hachette. Her controversial Forbes article, How Amazon Could Change Publishing, and the follow-up piece about her own publishing experiment, My Adventure With Amazon, forecast the crisis now facing many traditional publishing houses.

At a time when entrepreneurship is on the rise around the world and is increasingly seen as the best way for jobseekers to rejoin the workforce, “Entrepreneur Journeys” serves as a “scalable mentoring device” for aspiring entrepreneurs. In the book, Sramana spotlights and analyzes the unique start-up stories of a diverse group of successful technology entrepreneurs. Readers are introduced to important disciplines like bootstrapping, positioning, disruptive business models and addressing unmet market needs through intimate conversations with the founders and CEOs of AdventNet, Finisar, Kayak, Simply Hired, Adify, Qualys, Concur, MercadoLibre, HotChalk, Energy Recovery Incorporated and SELCO India.

“In these times of global recession, these boom-bust-boom tales of technology entrepreneurs who survived the dotcom disaster by a careful reassessment of their ideas, their clientele and its specific requirements, are very relevant to the situation today and make compelling reading,” says Nandita Aggarwal, Editorial Director, Adult and Business, at Hachette India. “Sramana Mitra, herself a technology entrepreneur and a strategy consultant, knows what questions to ask her subjects. What you really glean from these stories is not just the importance of bootstrapping, or clear entrepreneurial vision, or that sustained commitment to a good idea requires never flinching from making tough decisions at every stage; you learn that, in fact, you can work the odds in your favor and that a good idea can be bankable.”

“In entrepreneurship, I believe, lie solutions to many of the problems facing our modern world,” explains Sramana Mitra. “’Entrepreneur Journeys’ is my attempt to capture that tribal knowledge accumulated in the private lives of great entrepreneurs and institutionalize it, so entrepreneurs all over the world can vicariously experience those conversations, those dinners, lunches, coffees, which I have been fortunate to have access to, and through which I built myself up.”

And here is more praise for Sramana and the book:

“It’s a good read. If you’re looking for inspiration, ENTREPRENEUR JOURNEYS
does a good job.”
–InfoWorld

“I enjoyed ENTREPRENEUR JOURNEYS and found it worthwhile. The stories are inspiring and could have a significant influence on a student of entrepreneurship or an aspiring entrepreneur. To paraphrase a trite phrase; “Yes, you can!” The stories are more than inspiration though. The insightful questions and the thoughtful answers give much guidance, and general wisdom. The book occupies a nearly empty niche between lightweight collections of anecdotes and ponderous but often irrelevant academic research. A great opportunity to come close to sitting with masters and learning directly.”
–Barrett Hazeltine, Professor of Engineering Emeritus, Brown University

“Inspiration awaits readers in this volume of interviews with entrepreneurs. [ENTREPRENEUR JOURNEYS] will provide great insight into the questions and answers behind a start-up business. It succeeds in sharing the enthusiasm and sense of adventure of these technological pioneers.”
–Kirkus Discoveries

“”Entrepreneurship is not a career. It is a way of life”. And what better way to learn about it than to listen to people who have done it, successfully, and to learn about their lives in that fast lane? In a carefully structured set of interviews, Sramana Mitra gives the readers an opportunity to discover their paths, their successes, their setbacks sometimes, and the joys of meeting the immense challenges that have been theirs in a dizzying world where technical competence and management skills have allowed them to leave a deep and lasting mark.”
–Professor Elisabeth Paté-Cornell
Chair, Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University

Happy New Year!