The Publishing Horizon

Balance Bias in journalism

Ari Melber in The Nation on

Balance Bias (bal-ance bi-as)
1. The assumption that there is truth and legitimacy to both sides of every dispute.
2. The iron law in political journalism that one side in a debate can never be exclusively right, or have a monopoly on the facts.

Rosen believes that the worst offenders in media literally care more about maintaining their innocence than their first obligation of accuracy. “Our press has an unacknowledged agenda: to advertise itself as an innocent player in politics, to show off how even-handed it is always being,” he argues. “It will put that agenda before truthtelling. But since nothing can come before truthtelling, the agenda stays hidden, repressed.”

That’s a pretty compelling theory. Balance Bias is somewhat lower on the continuum, I think, because reporters can practice it without repressing anything. They may even oppose the concept but follow its rules, knowing that their editors or management will not accept a political story about one side being completely wrong. Or irrational. Or irresponsible. Because that “can’t be the whole story!”

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.

Sales of DK Atlas, Feluda Comics and a few other Penguin titles

From The Bird (Penguin Group News) Volume 7 | December 2009

The incredible success of DK's Concise Atlas of the World has us all smiling. With over 223,000 copies sold in India through October and with orders for another 100,000 copies, we fully expect to sell 300,000 copies in 2009 — a brilliant way to finish the year.

The Allen Lane imprint was launched in India in November 2008 with the publication of Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India. Since its launch, the imprint has gone from strength to strength with each Allen Lane title being a bestseller, from Imagining India (55,000 copies) to A Better India: A Better World by N.R. Narayana Murthy (40,000 copies, published April 2009) to The Difficulty of Being Good by Gurcharan Das, (18,000 copies, published September 2009). Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice, published in India in July, has also notched over 20,000 copies in sales.

Satyajit Ray's evergreen adventure stories of the professional detective Feluda enjoyed renewed attention and interest with Puffin India's The Feluda Mysteries Comic Book Series. The series enjoys many firsts: it is the first time Puffin India has launched a comic-book series, it is the first time the iconic character of Feluda has been available in the comic book format and it is the first time a major publisher in India has published such comics. Illustrated by the renowned artist Tapas Guha and scripted by Subhadra Sen Gupta, the first two titles in the series, A Bagful of Mystery and Beware in the Graveyard, were published in July 2009 and have sold over 12,600 copies each. By mid-2010 there will be six titles in the series.

Sales figures of Gita Press, Gorakhpur

From Business Standard (July 22, 2009)

Sales in Gita Press grew from Rs 29.5 crore in 2007-08 to Rs 32 crore in 2008-09.

"Even the global economic slowdown hasn't been able to hit the demand for Gita Press books," Gita Press trustee Vaijnath Agarwal said.

The two-hundred-employee strong Gita Press is known for publishing and distributing books mainly in Hindi and Sanskrit, in addition to other Indian languages.

Since its inception in 1923, Gita Press has published more than 45.45 crore copies of various books, including 8.10 crore copies of the Bhagwad Gita and 7.5 crore copies of Ram Charit Manas - the rendition of the Ramayan by 16th century poet Tulsidas.

However, Ram Charita Manas has become the best-selling title of the Press with a surge in demand, especially from Non-Resident Indians. It accounts for 35% of total sales, while the Bhagwad Gita 20-25%.

Every year, Ram Charit Manas copies worth Rs 3-4 lakh are sent to the US as there is strong demand for them from NRIs, Agarwal said.

"We sell more than 50,000 copies everyday. No publishing house in the world sells these many books even today," Gita Press Production Manager Lalmani Tiwari said.

The popular magazine 'Kalyan' by Gita Press sells 2.30 lakh copies a month. "This figure is exclusive of the sales figures that we have mentioned," Agarwal added.

Market size of book retail in India

Technopak Advisors claim in the Business Standard that

The Indian book retail industry is estimated to be over Rs 3,000 crore, out of which organised retail accounts for only 7 per cent.

The industry is expected to grow by approximately 15 per cent a year.

Book retail contributes only about 1 per cent to the overall retail industry. Text and curriculum books account for about 50 per cent of the sales. Second-hand books are also a big chunk of the book retail market.

In the past few years, several large format book store chains have come up, such as Landmark, Crossword and Om Book Shop.

Book retailers are focusing on improved customer experience. Many book stores have also introduced coffee shops and provide a library-like atmosphere where customers can sit and read, while sipping coffee.

I expect better from Technopak Advisors. This kind of estimate is such a generic and meaningless estimate with no information on the basis for it, that I would discount this completely. It doesn't give me any data or insights that I can trust or use. They seem to be saying something for the sake of saying it and meeting a weekly deadline. It also does no good for their brand - I now wonder about all their other estimates of market size.

The sad part is that there is little or no other data on book retail out there and this is likely to be taken as correct and quoted over and over again by virtue of being the only data on the Indian book retail market out there. Use it as you please, but don't get taken in by it.

Sunil Khilnani speaks on The Paradox of India's New Prosperity

Prof. Sunil Khilnani, the noted historian, is visiting Chennai. New Horizon Media is organising a talk by Prof. Khilnani on Sunday, November 1st, 2009. Details of the talk are provided below. Please spread the word to any of your friends who might be interested in attending. We look forward to seeing you there.

Topic: The Paradox of India's New Prosperity
Venue: C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation Auditorium, 1, Eldams Road, Alwarpet, Chennai 600 018
Date: Sunday, November 1st, 2009
Time: 4.30 PM

About the speaker:

Sunil Khilnani is the Starr Foundation Professor and Director, South Asia Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. His publications include Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (Yale, 1993, German translation 1995)), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (with Sudipta Kaviraj: Cambridge, 2001), and The Idea of India (3rd Edition, Penguin, 2003) – translated into several languages, most recently Arabic.

Sunil Khilnani was formerly Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and was a visiting Professor of Politics at Seikei University, Tokyo. He has been a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge; has held a Leverhulme Fellowship and has been Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. He has served one the editorial boards of Economy and Society, Critique Internationale, and Political Quarterly, and is a member of the Scientific Council of the Institute for Advanced Study in Nantes. He was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and King’s College, Cambridge. He is at work on a study of Jawaharlal Nehru, and on a history of democracy in India.

Reading Spa: A great bookselling idea

From The Penguin Blog: In praise of independent bookshops

But [Mr B’s Emporium in Bath, England] have also started what I think is a brilliant initiative. It’s called a Reading Spa: for £55 a person gets an hour of undivided attention from one of their extremely nice and knowledgeable booksellers. You sit and have tea and cake and talk about what you like, what you don’t like; they talk about what’s come out recently, what’s selling well. Based on this, they then go away and come back with a pile of books. £40 of that £55 goes towards these books, plus of course any extra you want to spend. So far they’re doing at least one a week and one chap spent an extra £400 a couple of weeks ago.

I wonder if bookshops in India would think of something like this. Maybe not since the floor staff are not very well informed these days.

Translating The Economist into Indian langauges? Why not!

Andy Baio discovered The Eco Team.

... a group of dedicated fans of The Economist newsmagazine are translating each weekly issue cover-to-cover, splitting up the work among a team of volunteers, and redistributing the finished translations as complete PDFs for a Chinese audience.

...

It's an impressive example of online collaboration with simple tools, a completely non-commercial effort by volunteers interested in spreading knowledge while improving their English skills. In the process, they're taking a political risk in translating controversial articles about their homeland behind the Great Firewall.

...

They call themselves The Eco Team, a group of about 240 passionate Economist fans led by a 39-year-old insurance broker named Shi Yi. The ECO China forum was originally founded in May 2006 by a mysterious character named "nEo," though he's no longer involved with the site. On their About Us page, nEo delivers the mission statement:

"Like the forum name says, producing a Chinese version of The Economist is our goal. But we're still young and immature; very amateur, not professional. So what? Because we are young, we have the fervor, the enthusiasm, the passion. Because we are amateurs, we'll double our efforts to do our best. As long as we wish, we can be successful and do a good job!"

Every week, in their Weekly Topics forum (translation), a moderator creates a thread linking to every untranslated article from the newest issue on Economist.com. Here's the list for this week's issue, published on February 21.

Volunteers choose their stories in the comments, while the moderator keeps track of assignments. As each story's translated, it's posted as a new thread in topic-specific forums, like Special Reports or Science & Technology.

Each article weaves together paragraphs of the original text and its translation, while other volunteers suggest their corrections in the comments. The lead editor incorporates all the comments, eventually arriving at a final draft ready for publication.

The best part is that The Economist is actually ok with the Eco Team doing their thing - an extremely smart move on the part of The Economist.

How long before we can get Indian language translations of magazines like The Economist? Time we did something about it.

As an aside, The Economist is part of my staple media diet. Though I don't necessarily agree with all the views expressed in The Economist, I'm an unabashed admirer - it is a simply superb magazine.

Who willl be the brands in future in publishing? Authors? Editors? Publishers?

When we look at a book or consider buying a book, the first thing that strikes us is the Title or the Author, not usually the Publisher, let alone the Editor, who is more often than not unknown except for a mention in the acknowledgements. But could it be different? Kate Eltham wonders.

… is the author the only brand? Isn’t it possible, however unlikely, that some publishers could create an identity so strong and a community so vibrant that audiences seek out their books because they trust and like the people producing them?

and David Henley looks at the possibilities and suggests what authors and editors can do to promote their books better.

I think the long tail of the internet makes branding more and more important than ever. But not just for publishers, for authors, editors, designers, contributors and reviewers. The internet never forgets... unless someone actively deletes their content but few people ever do this. This is something I've been thinking about for a while and this is the place to share it to test whether I'm crazy or not. My partner and I speculate that books will take on similar aspects to films. Not everyone chooses a film because of who directs it or who the screenwriter was, but some of us do, and now with databases like IMDB we can easily find lists of films containing the actors we like, or directors and discover more things we might like to watch. I think books can be the same. Currently I don't get to know who edits each book, or acquires the rights, but if I did I might start to follow their work. Authors need not be the only brands. Publishers can establish a brand identity the way imprints used to. Most will have to start over as they've diluted any meaning they ever had. Now to tie back up with the review sites, and the desire to have every book ever be reviewed, the reason people want this is because they're writing books and nobody is hearing about them. Getting something reviewed is nigh on impossible for the little guys, but to get the ball rolling just imagine that every author has a blog, every editor has a blog, every producer has a blog etc, so when they are working on a project they tell the public about it. Links are created, discussion is begun. Add to this a circle of blogging beta-readers (pre-reviewers if you will) and by the time the book is released into the wild there is four or five independent sources of information about the book, all hopefully tied to an author hub site. Remember aswell what Jamie said, external links are important, so lots of different blogs interlinking is better than one site with internal links. Its a small start but better than nothing. And the game changer for the industry is that the sales window for ebooks and POD books is limitless, so you can play a long-strategy game rather than the current one of timing your efforts for impact in a 90-day opening while the books are on shelves.

Indian fiction market in English - going from back-list to front-list?

So says Thomas Abraham, head of Hachette India.

Commercial fiction will be a significant genre in India. “We may not have a first- mover advantage but the market is changing from being a backlist one to a frontlist one,” said Mr Abraham. At 60-40, the ratio in favour of backlists (classics or bestsellers), India still compares badly to the rest of the world where 75-80 per cent of the business comes from new books. Mr Abraham also feels pricing, which hasn’t changed in a few years, will need to be raised steadily.

The mega promotion (author tours, publicity hype, and awards won by the authors) the front-list fiction titles in recent years might well be driving this trend.

The report also adds,

The Indian business under Hachette UK is already in discussion with authors and will be launching 20-25 books in 2009, with the full programme bringing out 75-80 titles a year by 2010, said Mr Thomas Abraham, Managing Director, Hachette Book Publishing India.