David Davidar's insights on book publishing, in Canada, in India and their implications

from an interview with Sharif Khan.

Book publishing

But think of the odds...There are about 100,000 books published every year. How on earth are you going to get each of those books to a reader's attention!

Let's say you walk into a bookstore, you face the first novel that appears and you have no idea what it's about. There is so much competing for your attention. Most novels sell only about 400 or 500 copies. If it's a good seller it will sell 5000 copies if it won an award and got great reviews.

It is only superstars that sell more and superstars are very few and every one knows who they are. The question we need to ask is why are there so few superstars? Why isn't every writer published famous? There isn't enough attention available for these writers. So that TV time, radio time, bookstore sales, all mitigate against every writer getting in.

Two or three industries suffer from the same thing, movie and TV, and music being closest to the book industry. Think of the tens of thousands of artists who've produced CDs and nobody's heard of them, and nobody will hear of them because that is the way the system works.

....

Finding a good agent is becoming increasingly tough because they too are inundated with manuscripts as well. The agent comes to us generating interest in a book and we have special editors, one specializes in Canadian writers; she says okay or no, I like it or don't like it. The book is brought to a meeting where she says she wants to pay this kind of money. You have a price on this book say $35 dollars, so the author will get a percentage royalty on every book sold. For a 10% royalty you will get $3.5 dollars on every copy sold.

So what we will do, is advance the author, through his or her agent x amount of money, say $35,000 dollars because we expect to sell 5,000 or 6,000 hardback and 10,000 copies in paperback, so we figure its worth about $35,000. So it's not an outright gift...it's an advance against royalties.

Then hopefully the book is published and lives up to expectations and earns out and the response is we're happy, the author is happy, and the agent is happy...but in 90% of the cases it doesn't earn out the advance and so you're in trouble. Of the 100 books published in Canada, I expect 20 books to support the rest.

in Canada

Canada has certain problems and certain advantages like many markets in the world. I'll deal with the problem first. It's a small market. It's 35 million of which 5 million are French speakers, so you can't do much with that size of market. Whereas America is 200 million plus, UK is over 60 million, Australia is really small, about 20 million. So tens of thousands of books are jostling for attention in this country.

Plus you have the major superstore Indigo Chapters which controls over 50% of market, so if they don't support a book it's dead in the water. And there is immense pressure on them as well because there are so many books pouring in. So these are the problems people have to deal with including the fact that there are lots of writers, agents, lots of publishing houses, everyone competing for that elusive customer.

On the positive side, because of the way Canada has been encouraging immigration for the last 30 years, you have the whole world sitting here, and so Canada's stories are quite fresh; whereas writing about one's experiences living in Mississauga that's where a lot of these books get bogged down because if your domestic experience is not interesting, how will you make your book interesting?

Your life is interesting to friends, family, and about a 100 people who know you. That is where most first novels fail because they are so autobiographical, instead of trying to sell a story. Why would people want to read a book unless they're interested in your life?

The interesting thing here is you have people from Somalia, Kosovo, Taiwan, India, and they're all writing books about their own experiences and that's what makes it interesting. So I think Canada has a great future about the stories its writers are starting to tell. And it is a very good domestic market for its size because per capita people read a lot more here than other countries.

I was once asked at the Canada Book Expo, where I was giving a presentation, what advice can I give aspiring writers. My reply is they should always take risks. There's no point in writing a small, safe, book...it just disappears. Take risk! What do you have to lose? Stretch yourself, write a big, huge, ambitious book! And those are the books that always leave a mark because there's so few around.

in India

The Indian publishing scene in 20 years will be the second or third largest in the world overtaking Canada and Australia; I'm talking about English language publishing. I've heard there are about 300 million Indians using some form of English, so they've already taken over the US and UK, but for the publishing industry you need to use English as first language or frequently because otherwise you're not going to go to the bookstore to buy a book. You might go to a street fair, but you're not my market. That's going to take a while.

I think today there are 7 to 8 million Indians who use English effortlessly, so that's about the size of New Zealand, but because you have next generation teenagers and young people learning English at the speed of light, they are going to join the market in another 5 to 10 years; this generation will continue to be the market, and there's going to be bit of the previous generation also in the market, so from about 7 to 8 million India will go to 30 to 40 million in the space of 15 to 20 years which means it's just going to explode. It's already the fastest growing market in the world and it's a huge market.

Penguin India is fortunate, we came in the beginning so we got in on the ground floor; all we need is to reap the benefits of our earlier labor because this market is growing, while the Canadian market is pretty much static. However, it is growing through some immigration. That is why Canada needs to look out for itself constantly and build its strengths to the world if it's going to keep its economy and lifestyle going.

Davidar's observations are pregnant with implications for book publishing in India.

• Unlike Canada, or the other major book publishing markets of USA, UK, Europe and Australia, there are no dominant superstore or even small bookstore chains in India controlling over 10% of the book retail yet. In fact, the penetration by the organised retail sector in India in the Books & Music segment is just about 10% (Ernst & Young India retail report), which is itself fragmented across the few chains that are there today. Publishers ought to think about the extent to which the chains can help in reaching the readers, and the extent to which they can/should invest in supporting the growth of the independent/unorganised book retailers. 
  
• The potential audience for English publishing in India may be about 30-40 million in 15-20 years, but the potential reader base for Indian language book publishing (across all the top Indian languages of Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu) is close to 500 million today! According to the National Readership Survey 2006,

  • Over the last 3 years the number of readers of dailies and magazines put together, among those aged 12 years and above, has grown from 216 million to 222 million.
  • 359 million people who can read and understand any language do not read any [newspaper or magazine]. It is not just affordability that is a constraint, since 20 million of these literate non-readers belong to the upscale SEC A and B segments

• If the excitement of an experienced publisher like David Davidar, by the diversity of the demographics of the small Canadian immigrant population and the interesting stories emerging from them, is any indicator, the sheer demographic diversity within India and the stories waiting to be told in all the Indian languages including English, is an opportunity that's visible but unseen.