The Publishing Horizon

A conversational history of Landmark and book retailing in India

A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Hemu Ramaiah, the founder of the Landmark Bookstore Chain, about her entrepreneurial journey with Landmark. This was part of the Entrevista series of Entrepreneur Podcasts by Venture Intelligence. The interview seemed almost like a history of the last 30 years of bookselling in India. Download / listen to the interview (77 minutes, 35 MB, mp3). 

During the conversation, Hemu Ramaiah talks at length about

• how the idea for Landmark came to her sometime in her 5th year of her eight a half year term as the manager of a chain of hotel bookstores in Chennai and was developed (all in her head) over a 2-3 year period before launch.
• her thinking in breaking away from a 250 square feet hotel bookstore format to the first Landmark store which was a 5,000 square feet sprawling store
• her belief in computerised inventory and billing from day one and how she went about the process of developing the software.
• dealing with a supplier (IBD, the book distribution house) who turned competitor by setting up Fountainhead, a bookstore in Chennai and began to short change Landmark by offering preferential pricing and supplies to Fountainhead compared to Landmark. This is was the spark for her to backward integrate into book distribution by setting up Westland.
• her struggles with foreign publishers who refused to deal with a small player like Westland, how she persuaded, one of them (Random House) to help her out. This required her to take one of the biggest decisions of her life overnight at New York - deciding to supply books to all her competitors, thereby growing the book market in India and her business as well, without worrying about the growth of her competitors.
• how she took a huge gamble during the foreign exchange crisis in 1991 and turned what was seen by everyone in the book retail trade as a showstopper into an opportunity and ended up building the Landmark brand across India and growing sales by leaps and bounds.
• the experience of expanding the Landmark brand through franchising (in Coimbatore) and a joint venture (in Calcutta) - which didn't work out well
• the thinking in setting up the second Landmark store at Spencer Plaza in Chennai and how she went about negotiating the lease, doing up the store and ended up buying the place.
• her bad experience with a private equity investor, why she became dead set against private equity investors and ended up looking only for a strategic investor
• her thinking on when to sell out - which was led by more by timing rather than how much she would make by selling her stake.
• how she got completely new readers into the store and turned them into regular customers. When she learns that her daughter’s schoolmate has never visited a bookshop in her life, she decides to turn the problem (of parents not exposing their children to books), by “taking the bookstore to the school”. Listen to this bit which is not part of the main podcast.
• her views on the future of online retailing versus physical retailing - physical book retailing has been taken over by accountants
• balancing home and work, and,
• opportunities for entrepreneurs today.

Download / listen to the podcast interview.

Comparison of estimates of the size of the Indian Book Publishing Industry

At the outset, it should be borne in mind that the cardinal word when referring to size of the Indian book publishing industry, whether in this post or anywhere else for that matter is "estimates" - unfortunately, there are no proper studies of the Indian book publishing industry so far.

The Strategist (October 21, 2008) provides estimates of the size of the Indian publishing industry, based on data provided by Technopak Advisors.

THE INDIAN publishing market is estimated at Rs 20,000 crore (~ US$ 4.5 Billion)

IT CONSISTS OF books, magazines and newspapers.

THE BOOKS MARKET IS estimated to be Rs 13,000 crore (~ US$ 2.9 Billion) , which is segmented into education and non-education books market.

THE MAGAZINES market is estimated to be 15 per cent of the total market, which is Rs. 3,000 Crore (~ US$670 Million).

THE NEWSPAPERS market is estimated at Rs 4,000 crore (~ US$ 890 Million)

Technopak Advisors haven't mentioned the basis for their estimates, but the above estimates from Technopak Advisors for the Indian book market are a good 30% higher than the estimates provided in the The India Publishing Market Profile 2008 (also only rough estimates based on hearsay and not any study) which had suggested that

The total book market was worth around Rs. 10,000 Crore, of which

The school book market may be worth around Rs. 3,500 Crore

The higher education book and journal market may be worth around Rs. 2,500 Crore

The trade book market may be worth Rs. 4,000 Crore, of which the English language segment may be worth about Rs. 2,400 Crore

The figures from Technopak Advisors for newspaper and magazine revenues in India are much much lower than other estimates for the same.

According to the 2008 PriceWaterhouseCoopers report    

Print Media (Newspapers and Magazines)
Current size in 2007 – Rs 149 billion (Rs. 14,900 Crore) ; Rs 128 billion (Rs. 12,800 Crore) in 2006
Projected size in 2012 – Rs 281 billion (Rs. 28,100 Crore) projected for 2012
Growth in 2007 over 2006 – 16%; 14% CAGR for 2008-12

According to a recent article in Knowledge@Wharton

Magazine advertising revenues are Rs. 1,400 crore, while circulation revenues are Rs. 500 crore.

For newspapers, the corresponding figures are Rs. 8,000 crore and Rs. 5,000 crore.

PwC projects growth in magazine advertising revenues over the next five years at 16%, compared with 10% growth for circulation revenues. For newspapers, the numbers are further skewed, at 16% and 8%, respectively.

Hachette India test-launches "part works" in India

 

 
Hachette India has quietly test-launched a "part work" product in the state of Tamil Nadu. It is neither a magazine, nor a book, which is why it goes by the technical name of "part work" in publishing parlance.

Hachette has named its part work Tree of Knowledge - The Collectable Encyclopaedia for Children. The first issue was available on the stands in September 2008 and a new issue was planned for every fortnight. I haven't yet noticed the second edition on the stands as of November. They launched the first issue at an introductory price of Rs. 30 per copy, though they have set the price at Rs. 60 per copy.

A few other lines in their communication on the product packaging include

The definitive children's encyclopaedia
Build a complete reference series and give your child a headstart at school
The encyclopaedia for every school child

Tree of Knowledge is a new way to learn and understand the world around you. it is an indispensable source of information and knowledge for your children and will help with their homework and school projects.

Issue-by-issue, you will build a complete encyclopaedia. This easy to use family guide covers all the facts kids want and ned to know about science, technology, the Arts, history and geography.

Each issue is divided into 5 sections o cover all of the key subjects. Each section is colour-coded for quick and easy reference. Issue-by-issue, you will build a complete encyclopaedia to help your child discover, learn and understand the fascinating world around him.

So what are part works? A recent article in Kidscreen Magazine explains the genre and the business of part works in fair detail.

In a nutshell, they're collectible magazines containing quizzes, games and fun facts, usually published weekly or bi-weekly. Each part can range from 16 to 32 pages, and they often include a toyetic cover-mount like a figurine or mini-pack of trading cards. Much emphasis is placed on the first issue as a starting point from which kids can build a whole collection of exclusive products. When the first issue of Nickelodeon's Dora Dress Up & Go launched in January, it came with a Dora doll, and subsequent parts featured doll clothes that tied into a different theme each time. So the "Ice-Skating Fiesta" issue sported a lycra figure skating costume, and "Cowgirl Adventure" offered a tasseled vest and denim skirt.

Although partworks have been around since the 1950s, they really made their biggest gains in popularity in the '70s, most prominently in the UK and France, but also in Australia, Japan, South America and Latin America. They experienced a resurgence in the market in the '90s, thanks to new technologies that allowed publishers to package them with higher-value cover-mounts such as DVDs and CD-ROMs, driving the retail price up to a top end of about US$15.

A typical series lasts anywhere from 30 to 60 fortnightly issues or between 70 and 100 weekly releases, so they tend to be on shelves for around two years - and sometimes even longer. Eaglemoss Publishing Group's Lord of the Rings partwork, for example, has been in distribution since the first movie's release in 2001 and was recently extended to 140 issues.

But not all properties are good candidates for the partworks format. Brands that do well in this category tend to already have a solid and widespread fan base, as well as a wealth of characters and environments that can be translated into the vast amounts of content needed for an extended print run. Gregoire Halbout, VP of home video and publishing for Nickelodeon & Viacom Consumer Products International, which derives 25% of its total publishing revenue from partworks, stresses that they should really only be considered for the second or third phase of a property's licensing program. "The partwork is not a trendsetter that can be used to establish a franchise," he says. "You would always wait to have established your main product categories, especially where publishing is concerned. The (brand) awareness has to be sufficient enough to sustain such a heavy investment-based project."

To this point, the creation and approval process on partworks can take quite a bit of time, not to mention the intensive market testing that's typically involved. Susan Bolsover, a category director at Brit agency CPLG, says the company's latest Shrek partwork with DreamWorks and publisher GE Fabbri was in development for two years, going through many rounds of editorial tweaking, testing each new version vigorously, and then waiting for licensor approval.

Although tedious, the testing phase is vital to the process because it determines whether the partwork is marketable and what distribution levels it will support. Hachette Partworks starts off the process by testing concepts, magazines and cover mounts with focus groups. Then if the feedback is favorable, the company will release a handful of issues in a specific geographic region. MD Celeste Surugue says he waits for statistics from the first four issues to come back before making a final call about whether or not the title is viable. A good test not only yields decent sales on the first issue, but maintains or exceeds that level of buy-in on the next two or three to indicate that consumers will keep coming back for more over the duration of the program.

If a partwork comes out of testing successfully, then the publisher embarks on an expensive, high-profile media launch. It's not uncommon to spend upwards of US$1.5 million on the television campaign alone, says Hachette's Surugue, delivering the same number of ads in 10 days as a Fast Moving Consumer Goods company does in a month. Because the program will hit retail with so much marketing behind it, Surugue adds that retailers are generally quite eager to display the product to its best advantage. He says an average partwork running in the UK will be distributed in as many as 25,000 to 30,000 newsstands, kiosks and supermarket magazine aisles across the country.

Subscriptions have also become an integral part of the sales strategy in this category, and most programs kick off with subscription inserts in the first few issues. Eaglemoss's editorial director Maggie Calmels says that this distribution method is experiencing increasing success and observes that "some people subscribe based on seeing the URL on the TV ad, without buying anything at all in the shop." CPLG's Bolsover says that in some cases, subscriptions can account for more than 50% of a program's total lifetime sales.

Royalty rates in this category are based on cover price and can range between 2.55% and 6%. CPLG's Bolsover expands that companies don't start recouping on their investment until about 15 or so issues into the run, which can make for a stressful first year. But despite the inherent risk, a successful partworks program can do wonders for a brand and trigger a high revenue flow. Nickelodeon sold 19 million units of its Rugrats, Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants partworks in four years. And though he wouldn't divulge specific numbers, Halbout says it's a multi-million-dollar business, and NVCP is currently working on developing partworks for other territories. For its part, Eaglemoss's Lord of the Rings program experienced a US$27.6-million turnover.

With such solid potential, you may be wondering why this publishing model hasn't hit North American shores. It's certainly not from lack of trying. But almost without fail, partworks sales for test programs in the US and Canada have tended to drop instead of increase as time goes on. Hachette's Surugue believes that one factor working against the category is that North America doesn't have the same penetration of newsstands and smaller kiosks as Europe, which gives customers better and easier access to product.

Nickelodeon's Halbout theorizes that the economic model of partworks doesn't jibe with consumption habits in North America, where shoppers have become accustomed to and almost reliant on a heavy and constant barrage of marketing to remind them to keep buying an ongoing product range. Instead, the "declining curve" of the average partworks planogram funnels all the investment into the beginning stages of the program to maximize brand exposure, and then consumers are left to their own collecting pleasures with no further promotions beyond the initial push.

It will be interesting to see how Hachette drives this forward in the Indian market.

But this is not the first part work in India. That honour, to my knowledge, should go to the Amar Chitra Katha, which used to launch one new issue every few weeks back in the late seventies and early eighties. Each issue was numbered, but there was no date on the issue. The new issues were available on the news stands. I used to buy my copies regularly at the local news stand as when a new issue was out.

Repro India aims to print 200 million books per year in its Surat facility

Printweek.com reports,

Publishing giant Repro India is investing INR 52 crore (£6.1m) in a massive 5388sqm-printing unit that it hopes will supply 200m books to the global educational and children's book markets.

Repro has a long client list that includes international companies such as McGraw Hill, Pearson, Longman, Oxford and Heinemann in educational publishing, and Igloo, Arcturus, Beaver Books and Dalmatian in children's book publishing.

The group has purchased a wide range of kit, which will be housed at the site in Sachin – a special economic zone (SEZ) – near Surat in Gujarat, India.

According to Repro, the site is being housed in Surat because it is a SEZ and this means it is a free-trade zone and offers benefits such as reduced regulatory paperwork and no duties or levies.

When fully operational, the unit will be able to supply 100m books to the educational and children's book markets in USA, Europe, UK and Africa, but the company aims to increase this figure to 200m "soon".

Unni said: "We have successfully garnered a position of leadership in global education. Our results are 19% growth in revenue with INR 155 crores (£18.2m) in 2007-08 and 69% growth in profits (after tax) at INR 15.55 crores (£1.8m)."

According to a recent presentation on the Indian print services industry by Satish Malhotra of SWAN Press,

India has over 130,000 printing presses in active operation all over the country, a 1.5 million work force, 20 Printing Engineering Colleges and print training institutions churning out over over 2000 Printing Graduates every year.

The Indian book printing industry is set for healthy growth.

Indian book publishing firm, Frank Brothers, acquired for Rs. 43 Crores (~ US$ 10 million)

Macmillan India Limited announced that it had acquired an 80% stake in Indian book publisher Frank Brothers in November 2007. The Macmillan India web site, their 2007 Annual Report, and the Frank Brothers web site provide more details on Frank Brothers and the acquisition.

• FRANK BROTHERS & CO. (PUBLISHERS) LTD, New Delhi was set up by Shri. K. L. Govil, a dedicated educationist, in 1930. It started off as a proprietary concern which was later converted to a partnership. The Company was incorporated as a private limited company in 1977 and converted into public limited company in 1993. Their web site has more on their early years.
  
• "Frank Bros (FB) is one of the oldest publishing houses in India and is engaged in publishing of quality education books for schools, institutes, government and other educational intermediaries. Frank Brothers is today one of the most reputed brands in the field of school publishing and has more than 1000 active titles in all subjects catering to the needs of ICSE and CBSE students and professional institutes in the areas of hotel management and tourism. Frank Brothers operates through 10 offices all over India with its Head Office at New Delhi and enjoys excellent relationship with around 10,000 Schools and institutions, and trade links with around 5,000 booksellers across India."
• FB's annual turnover for the financial year ended March 2007 was Rs. 31.5 crores.
• FB's sales in the month of December 2007 was Rs. 2.46 crores with a profit before tax of Rs. 20 lakhs for the month.
  
• FB's sales in the JFM quarter of 2008 was Rs. 22.33 crores. Macmillan India's total publishing sales for the same period, including FB's sales, was Rs. 31.5 crores.
  
• FB had a paid-up share capital of Rs. 25 lakhs (2,500 shares with a face value of Rs. 1,000 each) and reserves of Rs. 1.78 crores as on December 31st 2007.
• FB had assets of Rs. 26.53 crores and liabilities of Rs. 24.5 crores as on December 31st 2007.
• FB had 225 staff as on December 31st 2007.
  
• Macmillan had acquired an 80% stake in FB in November 2007 for a sum of Rs. 32.87 crores and has committed to purchase the balance 20% stake for Rs. 9.43 crores (if purchased before Sep 30, 2008) or for Rs. 10.83 crores on or before June 30, 2009.This effectively values the transaction at about Rs. 43 crores (~US$ 10 million).

Macmillan's publishing business focussing on publishing for schools has gotten a big boost thanks to its acquisition of Frank Brothers.

Subsequent to the acquisition, Macmillan India has announced that it is planning to demerge its publishing business and hive it off into a separate company to be called Macmillan Publishers India Limited (MPIL) and has called for an EGM in August 2008 to consider the demerger.

For perspective, in an earlier transaction, Cambridge University Press acquired a 51% stake in Indian publisher and distributor, Foundation Books for a sum of £2.7 million (~ US$ 5 million) on July 17, 2006. Foundation Books was subsequently renamed as Cambridge University Press India Private Limited. Foundation Books had declared revenues of Rs. 25 crores for the fiscal ending March 31, 2006. According to the Cambridge University Press 2007 Annual Report, CUP India's revenues grew by 25% post-acquisition to Rs. 31 crores for the fiscal ending March 31, 2007, which is on par with the revenues of Frank Brothers for the same period.

Are these transactions likely to pave the way for more such acquisitions in the Indian book publishing sector, with plenty of family owned publishing firms? Unlikely. Subroto Majumdar, the then head of Pearson India had stated in an NBT seminar in mid 2007 that Pearson India had seriously considered acquisitions of Indian publishing companies, but gave up after coming across due diligence issues, presumably in terms of copyrights and contingent liabilities.

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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.

English translations of Tamil pulp fiction

Mukul Kesavan gains access to the world of Tamil pulp fiction through recently published English translations (published by Blaft, a Chennai-based publishing house) and is overwhelmed.

But like many Anglophone Indians, I find reading in an Indian language a chore. The reason our reading lives aren’t nourished by popular novels set in locales we know is not because they aren’t written, but because they aren’t translated.

Which brings me to this anthology, a riveting collection of stories written by 10 bestselling Tamil writers. They are real professionals who make Stephen King and Barbara Cartland look like amateurs. Indra Soundar Rajan, who is represented here by a splendid story on the theme of reincarnation, has written 500 short novels. If that sounds like fiction manufactured on an industrial scale, wait till you get to Rajesh Kumar, who has published 1,250 novels and 2,000 short stories in 40 years.

To the discriminating Anglophone desi, who buys Rushdie for literary sustenance and Dick Francis for base narrative pleasure, this suggests that everything they write is awful. Not so fast. He might consider the fact that during the boom years of Tamil pulp fiction, the mid-’90s, Rajesh Kumar’s novels sold in millions. Then he might actually read the stories and novellas in this anthology. My personal favourites are two private-eye tales: Hurricane Vaij by Subha (pen name for two writers, Suresh and Balakrishnan) and Sweetheart, Please Die! by Pattukkottai Prabhakar, but a reader looking for romance should read Dim Lights, Blazing Hearts by Ramanichandran, while someone in the market for lurid, "real-life" squalor might sample My Name is Kamala, a massively popular novel about prostitutes in Delhi.

I don’t know Tamil so I can’t tell what’s been lost in translation, but the magical thing about this anthology is that I never once thought of the stories as Tamil stories. In Pritham Chakravarthy’s translations, the characters in these stories live and breathe an English that smells like a neutral ether: neither elaborately English nor annoyingly vernacular.And it’s hard to convey the delight I felt in reading time-pass fiction where the starlets, the hard-boiled detectives and the vengeful goddesses came from the world I inhabited, were mine.

There are two reasons to buy this book. One, it’s a wonderful read and, two, it’s the best-produced paperback in the history of Indian publishing. From the luridly brilliant cover (complete with gun-toting, full-breasted Tamil rose) to the colour plates, the line drawings, the perfectly judged author introductions and the high-quality paper inside, this book is an object lesson in how publishing is done.

The Hindu describes the origins of the idea for a publishing initiative like Blaft.

“I got interested in Tamil pulp fiction novels after moving to Chennai in 1998,” says Rakesh Kumar Khanna, a mathematician from U.C. Berkeley and IIT Madras.

“But I found that none of these books were being translated, and I really wanted to read them!”

So, he began a personal project to translate the treasure trove of pulp literature in Tamil. That morphed into Blaft when his wife Rashmi Ruth Devadasan and their friend Kaveri Lalchand came on board.

Shobhaa De interviewed by Foreign Policy on the Indian publishing scene

An excerpt from the interview titled India’s Literary Wake-Up Call (subscribers only).

FOREIGN POLICY: What are people in India reading these days?

Shobhaa De: India is a huge country, with over 36 recognized languages. People are increasingly turning toward regional literature. Self-help books dominate, especially those in the management category. The Secret is doing very well, too. [So are books like] the Chicken Soup series. Other than that, biographies and Bollywood books are selling brilliantly.

FP: What topics or themes would you like to see Indian authors write more about?

SD: I look for originality and spunk. I would like to hear contemporary female voices talking about changed realities. We need writers willing to take risks. I am bored with the scene at present. I want to be shocked and stunned. There are far too many politically correct writers indulging in “safe” books. India is undergoing such dramatic and swift social change. But where are the books that reflect this moment? India needs a wake-up call.

FP: Are there any topics that Indian authors are discouraged from writing about?

SD: No! The only limits are the ones we set for ourselves. There is absolute freedom of expression. We are not bound by any laws to avoid certain subjects—religion, politics, sex. Despite this luxury, writers refuse to take chances. There is far too much self-consciousness,...

Writer's Side - India's first manuscript assessment service

Jai Arjun Singh interviews Kanishka Gupta, a 25-year-old writer and editor, who has set up Writer's Side - India's first manuscript assessment service. For a flat fee, Writer's Side will read, critique and edit manuscripts, and recommend the good ones to publishers.

What was the genesis of Writer's Side? Why does the Indian publishing market need a service like this?

When I was working for the literary agency Siyahi, I often wondered why we had to go through a hundred manuscripts in the hope of finding one publishable one. Why not try and give exhaustive feedback (for a service fee) to writers, rather than a cold, impersonal rejection letter? I feel that a combination of editorial support along with the occasional recommending (only for really good manuscripts) would work better.

I am not happy with some Indian publishers. Innovation is zero, or close to it. The global conglomerates coming in are hardly buying books written by promising new writers; they're relying on building up book ideas conceived in-house and commissioning already established writers.

What does the first-time, inexperienced writer gain from all this?

Nothing. Writer's Side has been established to empower emerging writers and help them evolve through our several feedback options.

What is the nature of your agreements with writers? What services will you provide?

It's a simple writer-editor agreement. We don't promise publication or recommendation — we can only work on the manuscript and try to bring it to a publishable level. The rest of it depends on a particular list a publishing house is planning to expand, and, I am sorry to say, an individual editor's mood. We provide reading, critiquing, all kinds of editing — exactly what an editor at a publishing house would do.

The work you are doing — as middlemen, providing advice and guidance — is similar to that of literary agents in the West. Do you think such agents will catch on in India?

Agents take a cut in the royalties, while we charge a flat, one-time fee. In the long run, we are bound to benefit more because we don't have to waste our time on reading unpublishable manuscripts. We make money on every submission, at the same time offering the opportunity to improve it.

We need many more outfits like Writer's Side to unearth first time talent. The bigger publishers are unlikely to have the time and inclination to deal with a large number of first time authors, but there are a large number of first time authors with potential and they will only get better as they get published. It is important to build a feeder channel of authors to grow the publishing industry - after all it is the writer who is at the root of the publishing industry. I think Writer's Side has caught on to the leading edge of a trend.

Hachette India launches its first titles

reports the Publishers Weekly

Hachette Book Publishing India is now in business. The group is a subsidiary of Hachette Livre UK, based in New Delhi and led by managing director Thomas Abraham. Its first titles will be released nationwide in India today. They are The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow (Hodder) and Cold Steel by Tim Bouquet and Byron Ousey (Little, Brown). Pricing will be in Indian rupees and all books will be in English.

Hachette India currently has a staff of seven with two more signed on to join by the end of the month, and the company plans to up staff numbers to between 20 and 25 by the end of the year. In the first phase of its development, the new venture will concentrate on sales and marketing for Hachette’s trade lists from around the world. Hachette Book Publishing India will launch its local list in early 2009.

They had announced their plans of entering the Indian market in late 2006 and it will be almost two years by the time they launch their first local titles sourced and published in India.