In Aspiring writers from India in The Guardian Anita Desai contrasts the situation there in the 1950s and 60s (”when it was an act of solitary confinement and the actual existence of writers was no more than a rumour spread by their books”) with the post-Midnight’s Children boom.
But there’s still a sense of nostalgia for the bad old days, where:

In this distinctly discouraging atmosphere, one could only withdraw to write without any hope of there being publishers who might want to publish what one wrote, still less of readers who might wish to read it

Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India in Hindi and Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist in Marathi — mainstream English publishers are trying hard to create ripples in regional-language market

“In a country where the primary spoken language is not English, it is lopsided not to publish in Indian languages,” says Minakshi Thakur, editor of Harper Hindi that came into being last year. What began with 11 books now has 40 titles a year. But regional-language market is tough to crack. As Thakur says, “The Hindi market is highly price-sensitive. It’s a market where hardbacks are available for Rs 100-150 and paperbacks for Rs 30-50. We cannot match those prices but can manage to come close. We will give the readers better-produced titles and value for their money.” Vaishali Mathur, senior commissioning editor, Penguin, agrees, “Also, the distribution across a varied cross-section of readership offers its own challenges.”

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All markets are fragmented. Just as there is place for multiple television channels, newspapers and magazines, there should also be room for up-market niche books of various kinds. Yet with returns running at higher levels than ever before, what are the prospects for niche books? Since the financial crisis, it has become clear that the market is neither rational nor efficient. So how can publishers make sure that highly-specialized books, outside the academic market, will bring in returns?

First, to dispense with the assumption that a niche market doesn’t exist: it does because India is a vast market with growing number of serious common readers in practically every field. Moreover, as far as niche books are concerned, Indian publishers are not asking for the moon: they are looking for a print order of 1,000-odd copies, saleable within 18 months of publication. This isn’t a tall order and yet the future doesn’t look too bright if you go by the plummeting sales and returns. Why? Prima facie, there are three reasons.

To begin with, the market for niche books is too scattered and in many cases difficult to service because of the lack of retail outlets. Mail order hasn’t quite worked because customers who are interested in the subject would like to browse through the book before buying it. A modest beginning has been made in some metros of using e-mail servicing, but these are early days and therefore difficult to predict how this will work out. But given the fact that all niche books are highly priced because of limited printing, there is no substitute for the customer examining the book itself.

Second, the niche book is always given to the retail trade on ‘an approval basis’, which means that if it is not sold within six to eight weeks, it could be returned. Sadly, this practice is open to abuse: publishers regularly complain that bookshops are returning books and then re-ordering them in order to extend their credit periods, a practice that is becoming more common now that finance is not easily available from banks. “Gone today, back tomorrow” is the joke in the trade.

Third, publishers argue that the time and money spent on the publication of niche books would rather be expended on mass-market general books that would recover costs plus some profit much more quickly. In the present climate, where success is measured by sales and profits, the argument carries considerable weight. It explains why fewer niche books are being published today and what is available are mostly imported titles in small numbers.

Yet, this is just one side of the story because many niche titles — particularly on Indian flora and fauna, travel guides, wildlife, mountaineering and cookery — have done extremely well and are often reprinted. These books succeeded because they were qualitatively superior to mass-market books in every respect — content, production, marketing strategies. But their greatest advantage has been the lack of constraints over pricing. Highbrow alternatives work even if priced high, provided they are delivered qualitatively. Incrementalism and business-side cowardice do not make a template for success any more.

A snapshot of the Indian publishing industry

The popularity of Indian writing in English has been affirmed by various studies including one by Tapan Basu (Contemporary Indian Writing in English: Is there a market in India for this text?). The National Readership survey 2005 revealed that the time that people in India spend on reading has gone up significantly — from 30 minutes per day to an average of 39 minutes per day over the previous three years. The increase was sharper in urban India (from 32 to 42 minutes per day). This increased reading habit augurs well for the future of the book market.

Though the proportion of Indians who speak and read English-language books is very small, given India’s billion-plus population, this stills adds up to pretty substantial numbers in terms of the potential readers that can be targeted by publishers. A potential market of 65 million persons is second only to the 215-million English-language speaking population in the US, and more than the 60 million of the UK and 20 million of Australia. Which is why Penguin’s David Davidar says India is the fastest-growing English-language market in the world today. In the coming decade, India’s book market could be bigger than that in Canada.

While English-language publishing is more active in India, the number of titles published in Indian languages is equally impressive. The Federation of Indian Publishers’(FIP) estimated that 82,537 titles were published in India in 2004. Besides, other books published in India, in various Indian languages on subjects like folk literature and religion (which do not have ISBN numbers) may be around another 25,000 of so. Of the books that have ISBN numbers, the largest number of titles were in Hindi (21,370, or 25.9 per cent of the total), followed by English at 18,752 (22.7 per cent), Tamil at 7,525 (9.1 per cent),5,538 in Bangla(6.7 per cent), 5,475 in Marathi (6.6 per cent), 3,482 in Telugu (4.2 per cent), 3,358 in Malayalam (4.1 per cent), 3,213 in Gujarati (3.9 per cent), 2,172 in Urdu (2.6 per cent), 1,998 in Kannada (2.4 per cent),1,298 in Punjabi (1.6 per cent), 1,285 in Assamese (1.6 per cent), 763 in Oriya (0.9 per cent), 749 in Sanskrit (0.9 per cent), 176 in Sindhi (0.2 per cent) and 140 in Kashmiri (0.2 per cent) — other languages added up to another 5,243 (6.4 per cent). Only two languages — Hindi and English — went into double-digits.

A month ago I became aware of disquiet among some Indian publishers that foreign publishers are actively encouraged to move to India by the Indian government. Demands to scrap the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) have fallen on deaf ears. Indian publishers complain they have no support from their own government and foreigners are able to repatriate their profits. Indian publishers find it difficult to raise funds as they are not usually so well established as their foreign competitors and Indian banks are unwilling to accept books as collateral, so expansion is hampered.

Mr Harish Jain, m.d. of Unistar Books, established in Chandigarh for nearly 30 years, explained to me that throughout its history Indian publishing has been largely based on the family firm, so it could never develop the way it has in Europe and the United States, with massive investment. Despite being the largest producer of books, India has failed to make an impact on the world stage. Eminent Indian scholars are largely produced outside India.  Indian publishing has survived by concentrating on producing books for its captive audience of mainly educational books. These, according to Mr Jain, are badly written, edited and shabbily produced, due to demands for the price to be low and the disorganised and fractured state of the market over a continent-sized country with cultural and linguistic differences. It is this area that the foreign businesses are targeting. 

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Of course, the effect Indian writers have on the UK is not the main reason for India being fêted at LBF. The subcontinent is one of the fastest growing publishing markets in the world, particularly for English-language books. For British publishers in 2007, the country was the 18th most important export market. The amount of English speakers is rising; some estimates put the number at 200 million Indians who regularly use English as their first or second language. As India’s population and economic muscle increases, its book market is certain to continue to grow.

On the academic side, British publishers have a long history in India. Oxford University Press has had an office there since 1912 and Macmillan since 1892. Other big Western academics—including Cambridge University Press, Reed Elsevier and Wiley—have been in the country for decades, many of them publishing locally. It makes sense: as much as 70% of the Indian market is academic and education titles.

It is easy to see why the trade publishers are finally investing: potential. India is the second largest country in the world by population with 1.14 billion people, a growing economy and a burgeoning middle class. Crucially for British publishers, there are those 200 million Indians who speak English as either a first or second language.

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Railway bookstalls across the country have had a makeover, thanks to new marketing tactics by publishers and those in the book distribution trade, driven by what they perceive as the changing profile and reading habits of the railway traveller. A quick browse at the bookstall at the New Delhi station reveals Amartya Sen’s Argumentative Indian rubbing shoulders with Mario Puzo’s Godfather; Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies flanking Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City; Aravind Adiga’s and Kiran Desai’s Booker-winning titles White Tiger and Inheritance of Loss cheek-by-jowl with that old Bates’ guide on how to improve your eyesight without glasses (though some would say it would need more than better vision to plough through these two tomes).

It’s a similar scene at the chain of railway bookstalls run by A.H. Wheeler & Co across North India, and at Higginbotham’s stalls at Chennai’s Central, Egmore and Tamboram stations, where you could well find authors like Manjula Padmanabhan, Nandan Nilekani and Ramachandra Guha, and the memoirs and biographies of Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Albert Einstein, alongside staples like Robin Cook’s medical thrillers and competition guides. 

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Ravi Vyas examines the practice of “returns” so prevalent in the book industry in India and elsewhere

First, the fundamentals of the publisher-trade relationship in India. Four factors define the terms of trade: prices, discounts, credit terms and ‘returns’. The first three apply to the retail trade for any commodity; the last is unique to the book trade, here and elsewhere, and is as important a consideration as discounts and credits for the bookseller. In fact, for most other commodities, ‘goods once bought cannot be returned’; for the book trade it is just the opposite, ‘gone today, here tomorrow’.

What are returns? Why are returns today so ubiquitous and running at higher levels than ever before despite massive discounts and extended credit terms? How do returns impact on publishers and buyers, and can the publishing world do without them? Of the three interested parties — publishers, booksellers and authors — who benefits from this arrangement?

As the term implies, ‘returns’ are the facilities provided to booksellers to return unsold stock after a reasonable period, which is usually 60 to 90 days but in practice is extended by mutual agreement. Publishers provide for these contingencies by reserving a proportion of each book’s print run to be given away free to literary editors and reviewers, while another slab, having been given away to booksellers, can be returned unsold. Publishers estimate about 15 per cent returns/free copies for hardback and 25 per cent returns/frees for paperbacks. There can be wide variation in returns/frees, but the point here is that returns are built in the costing of each book. Till the mid-1980s, returns were a special facility provided to special customers, but now it is taken as applicable to all.

From the bookseller’s point of view this arrangement works out fine; he gets an extended period of credit with no risks whatsoever. Booksellers say that with high fixed costs in wages and rent, which falling prices make ever harder to meet, they simply can’t afford to take any more risks with non-bestsellers. Besides, they say that they provide a service by displaying books that would otherwise just be lying around in publishers’ warehouses.

But the practice is open to abuse. Publishers complain that booksellers are returning copies and then reordering them in order to extend their credit periods, a practice that is becoming more common now that finance is no longer easily available from banks. In practice, credit terms can always be extended to 180 days, which has become a marked feature for an ever-widening range of new titles. As a result, many mid-list titles are simply not ordered or they are bought against firm orders. And this is not all.

Some authors these days have taken self-promotion to a new height, but there was a recent case of an author who had bought 20,000 copies of his own book, got into the New York Times bestseller list for eight weeks, then returned 17,000 copies when his job was done. And thanks to the generous returns policy, got his money back. This may be a one-off case but the danger of getting conned is always there.

But the question is how do returns affect the publisher and the author? And can it be avoided?

For the publisher, returns are a nightmare. First, it is simply impossible to monitor sales ex-bookshop: in India we don’t have the field staff to go around bookshops checking unsold physical stock against the quantity ordered. Second, accounting for the number of copies sold, which is the basis for the royalties to be paid to the author, becomes impossible when you know that most have sent to bookshops on a sale-and-return basis.

Can returns be avoided? Not any more because returns are part of the whole sales package. Besides, publishers desperately looking for sales will go that extra mile to place their book in stores in these difficult days.