Getting started

ayo - loose and flying away, describing a kite when the string is cut and it flies away.

masala - gossipy embellishments in repeating a story.  

You can imagine the tiny snap, followed by a sorrowful gasp as the kite's string breaks: Adios ayo. 

On second thought, you can imagine the horrific thud to chop the kite line, followed by a scream of agony at the loss.

For a quite a few years, breaking into book fiction has been difficult. As publishers, with rare exception, refused to accept unsolicited manuscripts, authors were forced to find an agent to represent them. The publisher had a buyers market: more good submissions than they could wade through. Of course, there was an even larger supply of illiterates who were writing the great American novel, and so the cost of sifting through submissions became very expensive. By shifting the burden to agents, the publisher achieved a way to control the avalanche of manuscripts, particularly those that were less than good, and some of the sifting cost of was shifted to authors and agents.

Nonfiction books are not quite as restricted. In particular, publishers have often haunted the halls of Academia in search of textbooks. The reasons for this are reasonably obvious given the price of textbooks, the captive audience, and likelihood that an author will have his textbook adopted at his home institution. However, even that appears to be tightening. Most consolidated textbook publishers no longer list the names of acquisition editors for the individual disciplines. In essence, the publisher's book representative has become the intermediary between the publisher and the academic. With the economic downturn, access appears to be even more restrictive.

If the non-fiction book is not a textbook, but is a book of general interest, the market still appears to be resonably open.