I was scanning the headlines in Publishers Lunch, when I saw one that read, David Davidar: What's the Next Chapter?
Well, being the curious sort, I clicked on the link and read the article. I'll just quote the first few paragraphs (in italics), to give you an idea.
I was hired by Penguin in August 1985. I was working as executive editor with Gentleman magazine at that time and I was bored. I was at a loose end. I decided to do a book publishing course from Harvard since it was very highly rated. It was six weeks on campus and then some months interning at a publishing house. But I had no money to pay for the course. Luckily that year Penguin was offering a sponsorship and I got that.
Peter Mayer, who I consider my guru, delivered the keynote lecture and I was introduced to him. We talked. I was the only Indian in a group of about 85 people. Peter said that they were starting Penguin in India, would I like the job? I was 26 years old. I said yes immediately. I took a small flat in Gulmohar Park in Delhi which had a teak boardroom table, easily the most expensive thing in the house!
At that time, general book publishing was almost non-existent. Oxford University Press was doing a few books. Vikas was doing a bit. Rupa were mainly distributors. I remember R K Narayan telling me, ‘You’ll be done in two-three years.’ I was very young. I didn’t know any better. I was very excited. That enthusiasm and lack of knowledge carried me through. This was the late Eighties. It was when the greatest writers of our time had their beginnings. Salman Rushdie had got the Booker. There was Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth.
Pupul Jayakar was part of the first lot of books we did. I got Dom Moraes who was an old friend to do a book of poems. Then I published Shiv K Kumar who did a novel for us. In the first year we did six or seven books. There was no one on the staff but me and an assistant. I was the only editorial employee. I got a lot of attention. Slowly things started picking up.
I met Vikram Seth at the Austrian Embassy. I didn’t know him. I asked him to give us a book of poems. He said, “Why should I give it to you?” So I said, “Because I will give that personal touch, passion to publishing it.” I sent him an offer in a sonnet form. He replied likewise. (Vikram was very loyal. Actually once upon a time authors were loyal to their editors. And over time, all of Vikram’s books came to Penguin.)
I asked Vikram what he intended to do next. He said I could come to his house and read his new novel but I couldn’t take it away. So I went to his place, he took me to this shed-like room which had carton after carton of his new book. It was A Suitable Boy. I read enough of the book to know it was a work of genius. In the history of publishing there is no book which has achieved perfection. But there are great books, exceptional books. Then there are the good books and mediocre books. It’s all subjective of course. There’s no objective criteria. There’s no formula.
Can you kind of see where this is headed? I'll skip ahead a bit.
By ’97, other publishing houses had started coming up, such as Harper Collins. I became CEO of Penguin when I was 39 years old. I was increasingly doing things like running Penguin India, DK India, etc. For the last 12 years I have had very little to do with actual publishing. I missed that. I wanted to get back to making books. I love publishing. That’s why I decided to set up my own company Aleph, along with Rupa (they have the best distribution network in the country). I’m 52 years old now – another 15 years and I will have no stamina to do the things I want to.
At Aleph, I want to do brilliant books and sell them to their potential. I want to keep it small and beautiful. If you grow too big, you start getting into problems. You can’t pay attention to your books. I want to do about 15 to 20 books in the first year, take it up to about 40 in year two and 60 to 70 in year three. We will do fiction and non-fiction. Also borderline commercial. Like, I would like to publish books of the sort Stieg Larsson wrote. See, the US is a very mature market so you have a lot of genre fiction. India is a very young market, but it will happen.
Right now, I have just hired an editorial assistant. I bounce ideas off Kapish (Mehra, of Rupa), my wife, my friends. I’m thinking of hiring people by the end of the year. Though I’ve been away for many years, I’ve been keeping track of the growth of the market here. So it’s not a shock at all. Today there are tons of young, new, writers. There are so many litfests, which didn’t exist back then. I had attempted to start something of the kind, but it didn’t happen. There is a time for everything. If you’re too far ahead of the curve, it won’t happen. But hats off to Namita (Gokhale) and Willie (Dalrymple) for having organised the Jaipur Litfest so successfully.
How you buy books today has also changed so much. The chain bookshops are big well-lit spaces but they don’t have the range that indie bookshops do. In the US, once Amazon came, the chains were in trouble. Indie bookstores used to be 50 per cent of the market, today they account for only 11 to 15 per cent. They were first destroyed by the chains, then by online buying. But I think indie bookstores will come back. Online buying can’t replicate the human touch. Chain bookstores usually have very ignorant staff.
Everything is in a state of flux right now. It’s difficult to say how things will settle down in the next two or three years. But I’ve always liked change – I see it as an opportunity, not a threat. People are reading and that’s not just a notion. Sales are up.India is the only English language market that is growing. Here it’s growing at 15 per cent, so there’s room for many players. The other thing is digital publishing. Anyone can upload a book and become a writer, even if only two people read your book. All you need is a computer and an Internet connection.
And there's more about indie publishing. So let's skip ahead to this part ...
The DIY Novelist
Meet Amish. He’s a financial services professional and the author of The Immortals of Meluha, the first book in his Shiva trilogy, which has sold 1,25,000 copies since it first hit the bookshops in early 2010. His publisher has just placed an order of another print run of 50,000. Also meet Ashwin Sanghi. He’s a businessman and the author of The Rozabal Line and Chanakya’s Chant. The latter has sold 50,000 copies since it got to the bookshops in February 2011.
If it wasn’t for their strong belief in the stories they had to tell, chances are you’d never have heard of these two authors, let alone read about their pretty impressive sales figures. Because both of them, when they sent their books to publishers here and abroad, were rejected repeatedly. Ashwin sent out hundreds of manuscripts to publishers and literary agents and heard from only about 15 of them (the answer was a resounding no).
Amish says he lost track of the number of rejections he got after 20. “My literary agent had told me publishers are a rather fractious lot. No one ever agrees on anything. But in my case, there was a rare unanimity. No one wanted my book,” Amish says.
That could have been that for the two of them, but they were stubborn. Both Ashwin and Amish decided to put their money where their hearts were and self-publish their books.
In 2006, which was when Ashwin finished the Dan Brown-ish thriller, The Rozabal Line, he went in for a publish-on-demand option on Amazon.com. The idea was that if any reader wanted to buy the book, one copy would be printed for her or him. If no one wanted it, nothing was printed.
Marketing the book himself, Ashwin managed to sell about 1,000 copies this way on Amazon. “I blogged furiously at the time, and offered other bloggers free copies of the book if they’d review it,” he says. And then one copy of Ashwin’s self-published book landed up in the hands of Hemu Ramaiah, then the owner of the Landmark chain of bookstores, and head of the books distribution agency, Westland, which now also owns a publishing firm with the same name. “I got a call from her and she said she would pass the book on to Westland,” says Ashwin. “She also said that it would need a little work, and I said, sure.”
So Westland re-published The Rozabal Line and also published Ashwin’s second novel, Chanakya’s Chant. In 2010, when Amish finally finished The Immortals of Meluha, the first book in what was meant to be a trilogy based an imagined life of Lord Shiva as a mortal, he was luckier. After all the rejections from publishers – which included discussions in which Amish was asked to substantially change his book – his agent, Anuj Bahri of the bookshop Bahri Sons in Delhi, decided to publish the book himself, with Amish responsible for the marketing.“In four months, we’d sold 4,500 copies of the book and then many of the publishers who’d turned me down before came back,” says Amish. “But I decided to go with Westland because they had been our distributors.”
Neither Ashwin nor Amish hold grudges against the publishers who turned them down. “Publishers and literary agents get hundreds of manuscripts every week,” Ashwin says. “So where do they have the time to read everything they get? You have to be very lucky to have your manuscript picked up and read.” Amish agrees: “Publishers don’t really have the bandwidth to deal with the number of manuscripts they receive.”
There's more where this came from, and I could go on and on and on ...
But, clearly, not everyone in publishing is a complete idiot. :-D
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