The big book of the year so far is Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Last weekend it ruled the books pages, this bestseller-in-the-making, set in a Mumbai slum, with a Pulitzer-winning author. Before last weekend, it was hardly visible — if we discount two or three appearances in the American papers.
Yet the book’s Indian publisher, Penguin (the original is Random House USA), began publicising it in December last year. The book made its way onto lists of “books to look out for in 2012”, including the one I assembled for this newspaper. I knew so little about the book then – apart from the publisher’s summary, which was promising though non-specific as to genre – that I called it a novel.
Odd, isn’t it? On the one hand the publisher’s enthusiasm, on the other the lack of good information.
“Good” means not from the publisher. If you haven’t read a book yourself, you weigh it by what the readers and critics say. In December there wasn’t anything independent being said about Boo’s book. Sure, it had not yet been printed. But when Suketu Mehta and Sonia Faleiro had their big Mumbai books forthcoming, did those books remain obscure until they were on the very brink of release? They did not.
But Boo’s book did. And it was by design. On January 12, a spiral-bound proof copy was hand-delivered to the office. It came with a two-page legal agreement, which I signed. Now, this is fairly routine. Publishers do send pre-publication copies for journalists to read before, say, they interview the author ahead of the official book launch. This concentrates visibility because the press coverage appears all at once. Such an agreement also prevents a reviewer or excerpter making use of passages from the book before it is finalised. This is called an embargo, and typically it is applied to major titles with global release dates, like the Harry Potters.
The agreement I had signed was not, however, typical. Until “the weekend of 10th-11th February”, it said, I and my paper were required to keep this copy “in a safe place”, not make further copies of it, and not print any excerpt. Fair enough. It also said that I must not show the copy to anyone else, or even mention the fact of its existence. Even if by some chance I happened to meet the author at, say, the Jaipur Literature Festival in late January, the paper was not to publish an interview or any “other feature based on, derived from or associated with the work”, until the embargo ended. No wonder there was such a long silence about this book!
This is a bit much, I thought, I could be legally liable for chatting about this book over breakfast. “It’s not to be taken so literally,” said a nice young member of Penguin's marketing team, laughing nervously. She added that the original publisher had demanded a strict embargo, possibly because – this is the other reason for embargoes – an American paper paid for first coverage rights.
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Let the author and publisher earn from the work. Nothing wrong with that, and a burst of publicity certainly gives a good book a flying start. The discomfort I feel as a reviewer is about being so coldly co-opted. With publicity arranged like this, it hardly matters what you write about a book — whatever you say will be lost in the collective exhalation.
I don’t think this is good for the republic of letters, such as it is. With this embargo, a big-market tool has been imported into what is still a small market. (Indian papers are not likely to pay for first coverage rights, for example.) The greatest difference between books coverage in big English-speaking markets like the UK and the US and ours is that they have vastly more space to allocate. A paper can accommodate 20 or so good-quality reviews a week, and magazines and niche webzines much more. Heavily promoted titles need not crowd out all the rest. There are enough reviewers who will treat a book fairly despite the hype. These are advantages that offset the pressure of marketing tools like embargoes. We don’t have them. Now, we really need them.
rrishi.raote@ bsmail.in