The tyranny of geography

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Consider this: we are at a point in human history when you can access a book on the Net regardless of where you or the author may live and when a finished manuscript can be emailed to anyone in the world. Why should geography continue to play a significant role in the publishing industry?

This question has been surfacing with some insistence over the last few months, from places as diverse as Australia, Africa and India.

Take India, to start with. In just the last few weeks, we've seen the release of three books of interest to the Indian reader: Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of short stories, Patrick French's biography of V S Naipaul, and a new novel by Salman Rushdie.

All three books have come out under Indian imprints, but Indian editors and publishers have had very little to do with the actual production of the book. Lahiri, Naipaul, French and Rushdie are all, to quote one of my colleagues, "players" in the international marketplace, and Indian editors are now resigned to the idea that they will have very little input in the "prize" books on their list.

All of us understand that we may be consulted on some editorial and design matters, and that our part in the book's release in India is significant. We also accept that the situation is very different from a few decades ago, when writers like Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth were handled as a matter of course by Indian editors. It's the price you pay for being allowed to join the game in the international marketplace in the first place.

Indian publishers and editors are less happy when they discover that younger writers "" fresh talent "" have migrated from an Indian to a foreign publishing house. It's not that editors don't want their authors to do financially well and to have access to a larger readership. But many editors feel almost more deprived at the thought of losing out on the chance of seeing an author grow and change at the early stages of his or her career.

The assumption among many Indian publishing houses has been that we don't yet have enough to offer authors: our print runs aren't large enough, and until we can "grow" readers, we can only offer authors relatively small advances and royalties. Once we have a larger market to offer, we should also have more influence.

This argument may not be true. In a recent article, Harold Rosenbloom charted the rising resentment of Australian publishers at being cut out of the "financial gains that go with territorial rights". Australia is a significant market. However, UK publishers are reluctant to give their Australian counterparts in-house rights for that very reason""they would be giving up a large chunk of their profits. This should make some of us in India very nervous; if we do see the much-anticipated "book boom", what point will there be to it if publishers and Indian authors don't benefit from it?

Perhaps the most terrifying instance of the tyranny of geography comes from out of Africa. Several decades ago, publishing in Africa seemed to be, if not thriving, at least off the sick list. There were small independent publishing houses to encourage local writers, and the success of writers like Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe seemed to indicate that the future was bright. But as the US and UK publishing industries grappled with their own problems "" a glut of writers, a shrinking of editorial resources, more emphasis on bestsellers to the detriment of other kinds of writing "" Africa went off the map.

Today, Africa is a case study of what happens to writers in the absence of a flourishing publishing industry: writing dies. If it is harder for a younger generation to imagine writing as a career, fewer writers emerge, the conversations begin to shrink "" and the next Soyinka remains sadly undiscovered.

If I knew what would change any of these situations, I'd be ruling the international publishing world. Unfortunately, I'm not that bright. I can see a few ways forward: if the Kindle and other e-readers spread, they might have the same beneficial effect that the spread of the iPod did on, say, world music. The iPod allowed geographically separated clusters of "niche" listeners to come together in significant numbers: it became far more possible to market "niche" across the world.

There is a small chance that this could happen "" if publishing figures out what to do about territorial rights, if the industry is willing to look at new models, if the e-book really does catch on. There are too many "ifs" in that sentence for my liking, but it does offer at least a faint ray of hope.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com  

(Disclaimer: The author is chief editor, Westland Limited/ Tranquebar Press. The views expressed here are personal.)