Amish Tripathi

He was recently appointed by the Government of India as the Director of The Nehru Centre, London (a Diplomatic role). He is expected to bring more visibility to the Centre, which is the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR)’s flagship cultural center abroad.

All of Tripathi's books (released and planned) are on religious topics since he is a devoted worshiper of Lord Shiva. Amish had turned into an atheist in his youth but returned to faith while writing his first book. His grandfather was a Sanskrit scholar and a Pandit in Benares. Tripathi says that he gathered most of his knowledge of Hindu theology and religion from his grandfather and his very religious parents. He believes that religiosity and liberalism go hand-in-hand in India. Sandipan Deb, former Executive Editor of Outlook and Editor of Financial Express, writes of the philosophical depth of Amish's books: "Through all Amish’s books flows a current of liberal progressive ideology: about gender, about caste, about discrimination of any kind. And what I believe separates him from the horde of Indian writers who have jumped on to the mythology bandwagon after Shiva’s (Shiva Trilogy's) success, is his historical research."

In the Indian market where large sales volumes of books are rare, Tripathi's books have been enormously successful. His marketing skills and strategies have been widely credited for the success of his novels. He has started, "It’s a fallacy to think that a good book sells itself. I can give you a long list of books that I think should have been bestsellers but nobody’s ever heard of them. My management background along with marketing experience helped me devise effective strategies for promoting my book."

Tripathi launched his first non-fiction book, Immortal India in August 2017. The author has put together a collection of his writings, essentially articles published in various newspapers, speeches he has written, debates he took part in, and select interviews at public forums in his new book Immortal India. Amish writes articles in top publications like Times Of India, Hindustan Times, Outlook Magazine and India Today magazine in India, and newspapers like Washington Post in the West.

In 2016, the author also uploaded another film on YouTube to give readers a perspective on how all books written by him are interconnected, with clues to all futures having been placed within the Shiva Trilogy. In 2019, for Raavan: Enemy of Aryavarta, Amish's team launched a Facebook filter to allow readers to shoot videos in a Raavan getup and even place their pictures on the cover of the book, and share this on social media. This innovative marketing has never been done before for a book and was very successful.

The Scion of Ikshvaku was released on 22 June 2015. It is the first book in the Ram Chandra Series. Like the Shiva Trilogy, this one is also a fantasy re-imagining of the Indian epic Ramayana. It follows the story of Ram and is a prequel to the Shiva Trilogy. Scion of Ikshvaku won the Crossword Book's 'Best Popular Award'. On 18 October 2016, Tripathi announced that he will be releasing two new books in 2017. One will be his first non-fiction book while the other will be the sequel to the book, Scion of Ikshvaku, from the Ramachandra series with name Sita: Warrior of Mithila which was released on 29 May 2017. It opened at #1 on the national bestseller lists and became the highest-selling book of 2017. Raavan: The Enemy of Aryavarta, the third book in The Ram Chandra series was released on July 1, 2019. It held #1 ranking in Ht- Nielsen Bookscan for more than four weeks. Ram Chandra series is the second fastest-selling book series in Indian publishing history

The innovations in marketing continued with the launch of Scion of Ikshvaku in 2015 where again a teaser trailer was launched on YouTube, followed by another book trailer, like in the case of the Shiva Trilogy. TV advertisements were released during IPL to promote Scion of Ikshvaku, perhaps a first for any book.

For the promotion of his second book, Tripathi created video trailers of film production quality, complete with visual effects, and screened them at multiplexes before movies such as the Shahrukh Khan starrer Ra.One. He believed that this would work as the audience that visits theatres is the same that read his books. Three other trailers were released on YouTube. In 2013, a music album called Vayuputras, an original soundtrack based on The Oath of the Vayuputras, the final book of the Shiva Trilogy, was released. The album featured songs by artists such as Sonu Nigam, Taufiq Qureshi, Palash Sen, Bickram Ghosh among others. This was the first time that an original soundtrack was made for a book series.

The Immortals of Meluha, Tripathi's first novel and the first in the Shiva Trilogy, was published in February 2010. The second book in the series, The Secret of the Nagas, was released on 12 August 2011, and the third and final installment, titled The Oath of the Vayuputras, was released on 27 February 2013. The trilogy is a fantasy re-imagining of the Indian deity Lord Shiva's life and his adventures, and it is the fastest-selling book series in Indian publishing history.

Amish's 7 books have sold over 5 million copies in the Indian subcontinent since 2010. Forbes India has regularly ranked Amish among the top 100 celebrities in India. Amish has been listed among the 50 most powerful Indians by the India Today magazine in 2019. Amish was also selected as an Eisenhower Fellow, an exclusive program for outstanding leaders from around the world. He is also the first author in Indian publishing history to have all 6 of his fiction books simultaneously in the top 10 of the HT-Nielsen Bookscan national bestseller list for 4 weeks in a row. BBC has called Amish's writing “gripping and unputdownable”.

Amish is a graduate from IIM- Calcutta (in 1997) and worked for 14 years in the financial services industry (in organizations such as Standard Chartered Banks, Development Bank of Singapore, and IDBI-Federal Life Insurance) before turning to full-time writing.

Amish Tripathi (born 18 October 1974) is an Indian diplomat, columnist and author, known for his novels The Immortals of Meluha, The Secret of the Nagas, The Oath of the Vayuputras, Ram: Scion of Ikshvaku, Sita: Warrior of Mithila and Raavan: Enemy of Aryavarta. The first three books collectively comprise the Shiva Trilogy and the latter three are the first three books of the Ram Chandra Series which are going to be a collection of five books. The Shiva Trilogy was the fastest-selling book series in Indian publishing history while the Ram Chandra Series was the second fastest-selling book series in Indian publishing history. In 2017, Amish launched his first non-fiction book called Immortal India.