Born to a peasant’s family, having pursued his academics till twelfth standard from a Telugu-medium school and with absolutely no experience in publishing, Narasimha Karumanchi managed to self publish six books that he authored in English. The task though wasn’t easy and meant that Narasimha had to reinvent himself.
His books are guides for IT aspirants with information on data structures, data services and so on, as well as tips on tackling big pay masters during interviews, the kind of questions asked and so on.
The idea for the same came when he was preparing material for coaching classes he conducted in the city for such aspirants.
“While preparing notes for the classes, I used to prepare content and had enough of it with me. That is when I thought of getting a book published about the same,” shares Narasimha who completed an M. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) -- Mumbai and started working at Microsoft. There after, he worked at Mentor Graphics, Amazon.
A native of Guntur, Narasimha decided to take coaching classes at Ameerpet on his off-hours and even travelled to districts like Karimnagar and Vijaywada on weekends to conduct the same classes.
While some publishing houses rejected his book initially, some left him hanging with an indefinite response. Determined not to give up, he got 2,000 copies of his book titled ‘Data Structures and Algorithms Made Easy’ printed at a road side printing shop and distributed them to the faculty and head of departments at the engineering colleges located in the state. He also distributed them around the nation through an online portal.
“Feedback from the faculty was encouraging. I was appreciated for the content of the book, but was asked to improve my grammar. I had to discard close to 800 copies because of the flaw,” recounts Narasimha.
By the time he came up with an improved version of the book, the demand picked up and publishing houses located all the way in China, Taiwan and even Korea started to buy copyrights of his book. The icing on the cake was when a company which has initially rejected his work, approached him for the copyrights.
Narasimha tells us that his books are available in the USA, Canada and European nations as well, courtesy Amazon.
With six self-published books, the astute man makes a profit of about `8 lakhs a month. But that doesn’t stop him.
“I am going to come up with a book for B.Tech graduates about the same subjects in simplified language,” shares Narasimha about his future plans.