TWO and a half years ago, I packed up all my books and moved back to India.

I had worked as an editor in a publishing company in London for the past seven years. When I joined Bloomsbury Publishing, five days after my finals in 1999, it was a smallish company, known for its serious list and its great style. Our offices were in a narrow Regency building in Soho Square, with orange coloured walls and rooms that were unbearably cold in winter and distractingly hot in summer. 1999 was also the year Bloomsbury published the third book in the Harry Potter series, The Prisoner of Azbakhan, and what had been a popular children’s series exploded into a phenomenon. With it Bloomsbury became a different place.

In the seven years I worked – and indeed grew up – there, publishing in Britain changed indelibly too. Most publishers in both Britain and America will tell you that publishing is tougher than ever, a situation massively exacerbated by the recession. Retail is in particular a challenge – with bookshop chains ordering books centrally rather than locally, demanding increasingly high discounts and payment for books to be placed in front of the stores, window displays and special promotions. In recent years, these conditions have been taken to fever pitch.

What this means is that like the movies, the big books, often by well-known writers or celebrities, become bigger, and the small books can be swallowed up. You could be forgiven for thinking that for books to succeed, you need to be throwing a lot of money at them: money for bookstore promotions, money for advertisements, money to make beautifully produced early bound proofs, almost as good as the final book, and nifty marketing materials.

It can be increasingly hard to take a chance on a ‘small’ book which may neither have a strong subject, nor be written by a well-known writer. Joseph O Neill’s marvellous Netherland, a novel about the dissolution of a marriage against the backdrop of 9/11 was, for example, turned down by countless publishers in UK. It is a flawed and beautiful novel, written by an (hitherto) unknown writer, the kind of book to take a chance on. Publishers will often use the term ‘quiet’ to say no to these kinds of books and what they mean is that they don’t quite see how to make them work.

A literary book needs to win prizes, a commercial book needs to be a seller. And, of course, all of us publishers want this. But the possibility of taking a bet – the very essence of publishing – on a book that might do neither becomes increasingly harder where retail is so tough and the media so hard to break into. There is a wonderful, and apocryphal, story about Tom Maschler, the legendary head of Jonathan Cape, buying six of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s books on a reader’s report. I can’t quite see that happening today.

Reviews help of course, but papers in both England and America are devoting less space to book reviews and in any case most of these reviews have, apart from The New York Times, very little impact on sales. Getting the odd book on TV, especially in the Ophrah Book Club or the Richard and Judy Book Club in UK can be the key to salvation. But these are for the lucky few. In general, it is hard to break into the entrenched world of media and it’s quite hard to think out of the box when it comes to publicity and marketing.

 

When I received the offer to become editorial head of the newly formed Random House India I was, I now realize, unconsciously responding to these conditions. Seeing Bloomsbury grow and struggle with the changes in the industry had been exciting, but I felt a kind of ennui, the apathy of being a small individual against an unshakeable system. I was twenty nine then, surely too young to be feeling pessimistic and bored.

I felt at the time, with no experience of Indian publishing, that there was the possibility of doing things differently here. But I never imagined that it could be so much fun. There are two reasons why this is so. First, we don’t have agents, so publishers here need to be entrepreneurial to find books. I’ve always thought that getting Shobhaa De, then a journalist at Stardust, to write her sex and shopping stories is one of the cleverest moves David Davidar, the head of Penguin India made. And it’s this kind of commissioning that defines Indian publishing.

Last year, I thought I had come up with a really clever move myself when I hit upon commissioning a diet book from the nutritionist responsible for Bollywood’s top actress, Kareena Kapoor, becoming ‘size zero’. It had been one of the big stories of the year and I thought there might be a book there. Because this is India, I smsed a friend who knew someone who knew Rujuta, the via-via route as a writer of mine calls it, and had her mobile number within minutes. Rujuta was interested but guess what, she’d already had another offer from a rival publisher. She handled the auction superbly, sometimes with carrots, sometimes with sticks, rousing us into a frenzy. To conclude the battle, she drew up a detailed excel spreadsheet comparing our offer with the other publisher from advances to royalties to publicity plans. Luckily we got the book and Don’t Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight is our first best-seller of the year.

 

Apart from Rujuta, I’ve courted engineers and civil servants, politicians and actresses, heart surgeons and hotel managers, sometimes with success, sometimes not. If there’s a big news story, you can bet that I, as well as every publisher, am on to it. When I recently asked a financial journalist about who could write me a book about the Satyam financial scandal, he laughed and told me that I was the third publisher in the last few days who had asked him the question. I’ve often called people to get them to write me a book to be told, as Rujuta had told me, that I was in a waitlist of publishers. Neelam Katara, for example, has been deluged with offers the minute her trial, and successful battle with her son’s killers, ended. I should know. I was one of the publishers who called her, via-via, as soon as the headlines hit. She’s promised to get back to me if she does decide to write the book.

Of course this happens in Europe and America too but not to the extent it happens in India, where a large number of our best-sellers have probably been commissioned. We’re constantly sniffing around for ideas, in the way European and American publishers must have done in the first half of the 20th century such as when the Left Book Club sent George Orwell to write what would be The Road to Wigan Pier. I rarely remember an editorial meeting at Bloomsbury where editors proposed their own ideas for books while the rest of us thrashed it out. Mostly editors brought in a proposal or a finished manuscript submitted by an agent which the rest of the team had to read and discuss. I would guess that’s the way it works with most other publishing companies in UK or USA. On the other hand, I have a weekly meeting with my commissioning editor Milee, and we mostly discuss the ideas she has for the week. Some are thrown out of the window, some are finessed, but rarely do we discuss submitted work.

Because of this we are constantly taking chances. Half of my list consists of subjects that I think would make a good book and then finding a writer who might be suitable for it. There are also plenty of unknown names on it. And I would guess that’s the same for most other publishers here. I don’t always get it right. But it feels so good when a book does work and you know you’ve been responsible for its success in a way much more profound than politicking about marketing budgets.

 

This leads me to the second reason why publishing in India is so much fun. We’re a media obsessed country. Most households receive two newspapers; there are three major English news channels; countless in Hindi and the regional languages which have even greater impact; radio is booming; and the online stuff is really growing (my sales manager even met his wife on an online dating site which I’d never imagined happening in middle class India). What this means is that with a bit of ingenuity it’s possible to get immense amounts of coverage even for a first time writer.

I’ve got whole pages from prominent dailies for some of my books. I’ve even come to expect it. It’s true, I’ve hustled, but often the generosity comes from the papers themselves. India Today, the biggest selling Indian newsmagazine, will often devote a double page spread to a novel, for example. Once we created a trailer for a wonderful book called The Music Room, and I offered it as a visual to all the newspaper websites who were going to carry the online edition of their reviews of the book. One website created an entire web page for it because they liked it so much. This is tremendous stuff by itself and with a generous media the battle to bring attention to your books without resorting to expensive marketing campaigns can be won.

 

Part of the reason why the media is so generous is that, like us publishers, they’re hungry. There’s a lack of structure in Indian professional life that allows people to makeshift and improvise or perhaps leaves us with no choice but to do so. So the press are more open to ideas. All we have to do is use the via-via and voila. Even outside the media, the possibility to use other spaces are endless. Penguin, for example, have held competitions in coffee shop chains and even advertised a book in a phone bill. These things are possible in the West but books have so much competition for attention that it’s harder to make them get cut-through.

In India, the publication of the latest novel by Jhumpa Lahiri or Amitav Ghosh can become big news, worth a feature on prime time TV. Mobile companies are excited by audio book downloads and working with serious historians. Everyone is looking for a good idea. And the barriers that I often feel as a publisher, the gaping distance between the book and the reader, feels like one we can bridge. At its heart, that’s what my job’s all about.

 

Of course, there are problems, worryingly so. If book retail in the West is facing its toughest hour, ours barely exists. Some of our cities have glorious independent shops, in particular Delhi, but usually Indian book-shops don’t compare with the well-displayed and ordered bookstores in the West. Kishore Biyani wrote in his book that Indian retail worked on filling up – and hence maximizing – the shop space and then doing quick turnovers. Most bookstores I see here work on that principle. Titles are ordered in small numbers, then reordered if they shift. Book upon book lies piled up, one atop the other in stores; there is sometimes an order in the arrangement, and sometimes not, and like in a bazaar, you have to sift through all kinds of stuff before finding what you’re looking for.

There are also some who seem to view books as just another type of commodity, akin to soap or toothpaste. I once asked a prominent book trade figure if he ever read any of the books he sold. He said to me, ‘I don’t need to read a book. I can just smell it and tell you if it will be a hit.’ That’s not to say that those in our trade don’t have commercial instincts – maybe they can smell a hit – and I’ve met some canny and very impressive folk in the last few years. The real problem with retail, however, is not chaotic book displays and the trade not reading, but payments. And this doesn’t have a lighter side. Receiving timely payments from distributors is a real issue and with the recession this is getting graver than ever, with payment times being stretched sometimes to six months and more.

I think all of these reasons contribute to the relatively low sales for most books in India. The highest selling hardbacks will usually hover between thirty thousand to forty thousand books and rarely cross a lakh. Chetan Bhagat’s under Rs 100 paperbacks sell above those numbers in their first year of publication and would probably, I would hazard, be the top selling commercial books in the country. But most paperbacks don’t run anywhere close to those numbers. Although these are really good figures that would make any publisher anywhere in the world happy, they don’t seem proportional to the huge amounts of press these books get. Nor do they compare with the highest selling books in UK – a smaller country than India, let alone USA.

 

I think, however, that these things will change – and indeed are changing. The bigger question is whether Indian publishing will lose the ingenuity and quick instincts which make publishing life in the country so exciting as it professionalizes with the creation of stronger retail and reliable payment structures, crackdown on piracy, and the inevitable and necessary rise of the literary agent. Will indeed the shape of media change in the coming years? And will there be a day when it will no longer be possible to pitch ideas to TV stations and excite coffee shop chains about books? I don’t know. For the moment, sitting in my offices in a building that’s part Parthenon, part Dubai, in an arid, dusty suburb of Delhi, far away from beautiful Soho Square, I am having the most fun I’ve ever had.