| Indian publishing houses were in their infancy, willing to publish anything, no matter how indifferent, so long as it looked original. If the author was successful, he would over a period of decades find himself in the position of patron rather than seeker, dispensing blurbs, introductions and tips as he saw fit. |
| The contemporary model is more like a calculated gamble on both sides. There is the author, desperately seeking foreign literary agent, but willing to settle for a desi contract if all else fails. |
| There's the publisher, desperately seeking the next big thing, but willing to settle for a string of also-ran books and bet that one or another of them will make its mark. |
| Insiders, celebrities and page 3 stars have the drop on an unknown author of untried merit; but the closed circle of publishing has enough in the way of gaps and hidden doors for an outsider to find his or her godmother in the end. |
| Two conversations summed it up for me. The first was with an editor I respect, who was discussing changing trends: "I get far more unsoliciteds [uncommissioned manuscripts] than I used to, but the bulk of them are terrible," she said. |
| "The percentage of publishable to unpublishable manuscripts is the same""there are just about one or two every month that might work. But the range of experimentation has increased. I can't help feeling that there are good writers out there; I just don't get to see them." |
| The second was with a young writer whom I also respect, whose work is raw but shot through with the unmistakeable signs of a talent that will grow with some discipline: "How do you get your work to an editor? If you call, you can't get an appointment. If you go to the office, you're told to leave your manuscript at the desk. I've picked up work by me and by some of my friends a year after it's been left, from the publishing house, and found that it's in the same envelope""unopened." |
| In a more organised literary market, agents would be the interface between publishers and writers, sifting out the good from the indifferent, brokering the right marriage between publishing house and author. |
| But the cold statistics of publishing in English make this unlikely for a while at least. Authors and publishers are happy if their books do as little as 2,000 copies in sales. |
| Penguin India might celebrate the demand for Shobhaa De's Spouse""it has crossed 10,000 copies in sales, or at any rate, in orders from bookshops, in the first two weeks of publication. |
| Rupa might doff its hat to Chetan Bhagat, whose Five Point Someone has been a steady seller that reminds old-timers of the success of another coming-of-age campus novel, Anurag Mathur's The Inscrutable Americans. |
| Even a cynical columnist like me might be willing to admit that perhaps the local-grown bestseller is beginning to find its feet. |
| But look at the numbers: we cheer every time a book crosses a puny ten thousand in sales, which is what a B-list debut literary novel with weak reviews might be expected to do in a more evolved market like the UK. |
| The point is that with sales figures in the thousands rather than the millions (and often, if truth be told, stuck in the hundreds), a literary agent whose income depends on skimming off the cream wouldn't find enough to cover a fair-sized saucer. |
| But there are straws in the wind that make me wonder whether the Indian publishing market isn't already moving into stage three. |
| This year, HarperCollins and Penguin India are out with anthologies of new Indian fiction; Roli Books is also likely to move into the anthologies game shortly. |
| I see a lot of familiar names""writers who've been around for years, whom we used to tap for short stories as reliable sources""in some of these anthologies. |
| But as with last year's special issue on new fiction from The Little Magazine, there are also brand-new names, writers who've emerged from nowhere or from the slush pile or from the weblogs. There are more contests, as I mentioned in a recent column. And they work at different levels. |
| The Outlook-Picador Non-Fiction Contest is the kind of literary challenge I'd recommend to any aspiring writer""it allows you to focus on a subject that might not otherwise have snagged your attention, it forces you to think about what you have to say, and it provides an avenue to explore writing beyond the 800-word limit. |
| It's one of the very few contests around that hasn't been axed after just one hopeful year and that goes beyond the confines of the short story. This year's winner was Dilip D'Souza for "Ride Across the River". |
| The recently announced Sulekha/ Penguin Global Contest""India Smiles is for unpublished writers who haven't made it through the slush pile, though the money involved is substantial enough for published writers to perhaps want to chance their arm as well. |
| It's bait, and it might well work. The New India Foundation's scholarships, if they become an established presence in a few years, should help provide the kind of solid support academic and non-fiction writers need. |
| It's not the prizes alone, or the anthologies taken in isolation, that I see as an encouraging sign""it's also the growing volume of criticism, discussion, new work and even workshop-oriented sessions that are emerging online on forums like Another Subcontinent, the venerable if slightly uneven Sulekha, Caferati and personal blogs and websites. |
| So much for stage three. Personally, I can't wait till stage four kicks in. That would be when we have more good books coming in across all genres, literary, historical, experimental, bestsellers, than we can singlehandedly review. |
| It would also be when good writers have to work that much harder to be published, when good editors have to raise the bar that much higher to make the book work, when readers start buying more books because there are more books to buy. |
| As for the author, no advice works better than Samuel Beckett's old dictum: "Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." nilanjanasroy@gmail.com |
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