Now that @sanjeevsanyal has done a thread on Indian publishing, let me do mine. Ten years ago, there were very few major publishers, all of them, except one, foreign origin. Their steady revenues came from legacy titles: classics, dictionaries, books of knowledge.

This left editors free of hard revenue targets. Their main objective was to find the next Rushdie, land a Booker. So big parties, cocktail book events, and authors in the “circle” like Tejpal prompted, no matter what they wrote. If the author looked Bookerworthy, money poured.

CB changed all of that, bringing marketing plans, strategies and PR into the mix. The traditional world of long stemmed champagne drinking editors were repulsed and fascinated, they couldn’t look away.

Reluctantly, they started patronizing commercial authors, children of a lesser god, who be taken for drinks to Qba, and not the Taj, book events with sandesh. Bosses were happy, old revenue streams were augmented, and this would subsidize the oversized advances of Bookerbait.

Then the internet killed the dictionary, the atlas, the classics, and all the legacy cashcows. Some Indian local publishers invested in low quality printing, priced to sell romances of the i too loved someone but she is still a friend genre, aggressively distributed.

Coupled with this bookstores started shrinking, people started reading less, the Bookerbait sold even less, so they moved to the next thing, Bollywood and captain of industries biographies and vanity projects.

The bookerbaits were no less formulaic than the love stories, “punching up” at those considered privileged, and they were aggressively promoted through awards. These awards existed only to make these books awarded, a self fulfilling prophecy.

The publishing strategy collapsed, some of the publishing houses started publishing “popular” fiction (ie the kind of stuff that made the editors cringe) under imprints, and popular authors were expected to pay their way to success, buying shelf space in bookstores, hire PR etc

So either it was celebrity biographies, or “you pay your way we affix our logo” popular authors, and all of this subsidized for the bookerbaits. Book stores close, shelf space becomes more expensive, and none of this seems sustainable any more revenue wise.

So if you still want to read books, books that are made to be read, not to peddle an agenda or validate itself through awards, unfiltered by a highly political filter of a certain persuasion, buy direct from author, buy electronic. I still miss the free drinks at Qba though.

Though not so much the sandesh.

The end.