What exactly helps sell a book? The story, the author, the publisher, or the marketing razzmatazz? A holy confluence, finds Rrishi Raote
Nandan Nilekani: the face which launched a thousand copies. Eighty-five thousand copies, in fact. The Infosys co-founder is no beauty, but his famous face was the only visual on the cover of Imagining India, his first book and one of Penguin India’s best-ever sellers.
Celebrity pays — but very few authors start out famous. Consider the publisher’s dilemma.
How would you sell a product if you had no direct access to customers, few retail outlets, a tiny ad budget and hundreds of competing products in the market? Now, what if you produced dozens of such products a year, each of which demanded individual attention? What if your products were neither essential nor aspirational?
That is the situation English-language publishers in India find themselves in. For decades they and their authors have had to make do with sales of 2,000 or 3,000 — if they were lucky.
Not any more. At the top of the market a growing number of first-time authors have begun to sell in big numbers. We’re not talking of Jeffrey Archer and Enid Blyton. We’re talking about relative unknowns like Karan Bajaj, Samit Basu, Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, Advaita Kala and so on.
So how do they do it? They market themselves alongside their books. And publishers are helping, learning and profiting from them.
Looking good
Some authors have turned being photographed into an art. Fatima Bhutto, on the pan-India publicity tour for her memoir Songs of Blood and Sword (Penguin), attended launch events in sari and bindi — different saris for different regions. “The choice to do so seems quite bold,” wrote one Muslim blogger, a man. The press, however, was smitten. Popular historian William Dalrymple is often photographed in a sky-blue shirt with his white cockatoo Albinia close at hand. Chetan Bhagat and Karan Bajaj (of Keep off the Grass and Johnny Gone Down, HarperCollins) both affect a comfortably sloppy “IIT” look. And the goodlooking Tishani Doshi, whose debut novel The Pleasure Seekers (Penguin) is just out, made the cover of First City magazine — and several pages inside.
Every publisher agrees that having an author photograph on the cover helps the reader “connect”. They agree that the photo should look “natural”. (“I’ve often, at author workshops and readings, caught kids matching the picture to the real person,” says Vatsala Kaul Banerjee, who handles children’s books at Hachette.) Yet they all believe the photo makes no difference to sales. An author photo in India is usually taken by a friend or relative of the author, not a professional. In this respect, India is a step or two behind the West (see boxes).
A small publisher of academic nonfiction, Rukun Advani of Permanent Black, has begun to use author photos on his books. It is useful, he says, “not just in terms of being a help to marketing and sales personnel but also in terms of being a factor in authors wanting to publish with us because we’re seen as caring about how our books look”.
In the last two decades, author portraits have changed significantly. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the cover of a novel was only occasionally graced by a photo of its author. Upamanyu Chatterjee’s first and best-loved book, English, August (Rupa, 1988), had a bad-quality photo of his face crammed into a tiny box. For his latest book, Way to Go (2010), a publicity shot showed Chatterjee sitting casually on a balcony, his salt-and-pepper hair fetchingly windblown. The difference in cover shots of Amitav Ghosh between Calcutta Chromosome and Sea of Poppies is as striking.
Telling a story
Tom Clancy bought an army tank. William Dalrymple lives with a family of goats and a cockatoo. Jeffrey Archer added jail to his resume. Salman Rushdie faced a fatwa. Anuja Chauhan coined catchy advertising slogans. J K Rowling was a single mother and wrote her breakout book in a cafe. Fatima Bhutto’s father was assassinated.
An interesting author story always helps. Mita Kapur, CEO of literary agency Siyahi, is handling Wendell Rodricks. “Wendell is known internationally as a fashion designer. Nobody knows that he’s written this huge researched tome on the clothing traditions of Goa ever since the Portuguese. The profile does not match.” So in his profile she played up the fact that “He lives in a village in Goa — no newspapers, bad electricity. Who would expect a fashion designer of his acclaim to have a simple, rooted lifestyle? And then you see the interest! I have two publishers bidding for his book.”
“Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night is a perfect example,” says Rachel Tanzer, a New York native and head of publicity at Random House India, which published Peer’s memoir of growing up in militant-struck Kashmir. So is Mimlu Sen, author of Baulsphere, on life with the Bauls. “She’s a kindred spirit,” says Tanzer, “an old rock-and-roller like me. She followed her heart.”
Hachette India MD Thomas Abraham, who headed Penguin India until 2007, is more circumspect. At Penguin, he says, “A lot of [authors] were high-profile anyway and the books benefited from the profile. As to the rest, I remember putting in the human-interest stuff in some marketing pushes — Samit Basu for instance was just 23 when he wrote The Simoqin Prophecies and had dropped out of IIM-A to write. Likewise Swati Kaushal’s Piece of Cake was corporate chick-lit and her management background made for a good pitch.”
But traditionally, he says, “everybody pushes the book and the author ‘profile’ automatically follows if the book clicks. The author profile at best is an additional selling point on the marketing document.” In other words, the book comes first.
Getting in touch
“Last week I found out that Karan Bajaj already has 10,000-plus people following Johnny Gone Down,” says Lipika Bhushan, marketing manager of HarperCollins India. She is referring to the “Likes” on the book’s Facebook page. The book has sold 50,000 copies in six months.
“As a first-time author your book just sinks unless you make a concentrated effort to get the word out,” says Bajaj, who lives in the USA and works in brand management. The Internet is his highway. He has a website, blogs and uses social networking. “The reader forms a visceral connection with an author,” he says, so he responds to as many reader comments as he can. “I treat it less as a marketing exercise and more as a personal duty.”
Agent Mita Kapur strongly agrees. “I tell my authors, have your websites going, please blog.
Social networking is, believe me, very helpful.” She herself has a new book out, The F-Word. That book, too, has a busy Facebook page, featuring illustrations from the book.
Being pushy
“I hate my authors being laidback,” says Kapur. “There’s nothing like a tripartite effort by the publisher, agent and author. You can’t leave [publicity] to the publisher — they will never do it.” Often told by publishers that “We don’t have the budget,” she responds “OK, let’s look for cheaper solutions. I had my launch this week. I used my contacts for sponsorship.”
Out of that tripartite conversation can come low-budget, high-impact marketing ideas. For Sidin Vadukut, author of Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese (Penguin), Kapur says, “all of us came up with fake visiting cards for Einstein Varghese, fake quotes from Salman Rushdie’s neighbour [and so on]. In two months we had 13,000 copies sold.”
“Some authors are very active, others have a marketing background,” says Lipika Bhushan. “Of late, authors, old or new, are open to new things. They understand that numbers matter.” Karan Bajaj notes, on the other hand, that it was only after he had the numbers with his first book that his publisher became more accessible.
“As publishers we couldn’t afford PR companies, but many a time authors hire their own,” says Thomas Abraham. Bajaj did, and so did Chetan Bhagat. It’s not clear that the effort worked, because Bajaj’s first book and all of Bhagat’s got cool reviews. At least, however, the word had got out.
“As a poet, I’m used to being my own travelling salesman,” says Tishani Doshi. “I suppose when you’ve spent a certain part of your life working on something, you want to make sure it has the widest reach possible.”
Word of mouth
“Buzz-creation,” says Anuja Chauhan, author of The Zoya Factor and The Battle for Bittora (HarperCollins 2008, 2010), and advertising industry veteran, “I really feel it spirals out from the book. I feel a book sells by word of mouth.” Authors and publishers are escaping the market straitjacket by helping trigger that reader interest. To get to that holy confluence of circumstances, however, first there has to be a saleable book.
