The Publisher’s Post: Vol I Ed. XXXVIII

Dated: 25th May 2008

The Publisher’s Post is a weekly newsletter that contains information relating to the book publishing and book selling industry in India.

News This Week

Aptara to step into Indian market
Source: Shailendra Paranjpe/ DNA MONEY

Aptara - an US-based company providing publishing technologies — will enter the Indian market soon.

Aptara’s chief operations officer Dev Ganesan told DNA on Thursday that the company would be entering the Indian market. It has manpower of over 3,500 across the globe, including 500-odd skilled software professionals and designers at the Pune office.

Aptara India helps publishing houses by outsourcing content development, design and layout from them. It has 10 offices in US, India, UK, Germany and Australia.

Ganesan said that the company intended to harness its capabilities in the backdrop of new trends in content transformation and e-learning.

Award for woman playwright
Source: The Hindu

Saroop Dhruv, the Gujarati playwright, poet and social activist, has received the 2008 Hellman/Hammett Award for courageous writing by Human Rights Watch. She is a member of Women’s WORLD (India), a national network of over 200 women writers de aling with censorship. This is a part of an international free speech network, Women’s WORLD (International) which had nominated her for this award.

Saroop Dhruv has been recognised for resisting censorship by the State governments in Gujarat (both Congress and the BJP) for her plays including “Suno! Nadi Kya Kahati Hai” (Listen to the Stream) (2004), “Jiva no Adhikar” (Right to Live) (1985), and “Raj-Parivartan” (Regime Change) (1987), and her work with victims of communal and other violence and the socially disadvantaged and oppressed —Dalits, adivasis, and women.

She is involved in popular street theatre and since the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, has been particularly active in protesting against communalism. She has to her credit four collections of verse in Gujarati including Hastakshep (Intervention), many street plays and a play, “Dilma Chhe Ek Ash” (A Hope in My Heart), with Hiren Gandhi. She lives and works in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

Human Rights Watch distributes funds from American playwright Lillian Hellman’s estate to writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, anywhere in the world, who are in financial need due to political persecution. Eight distinguished authors and editors form a selection committee to choose the Hellman/Hammett award recipients. By highlighting individual cases, these awards help focus attention on repression and censorship around the world. Hellman and her companion, the novelist Dashiell Hammett, were both interrogated about their political beliefs and suffered professionally during the anti-communist paranoia of the McCarthy years in the United States after World War II. Her bequest has helped more than 500 writers from 88 countries.

Indian-origin writer wins Commonwealth Writers Prize
Source: newindpress.com

Indian origin writer Indra Sinha’s book ‘Animal’s People’ , based on the Bhopal gas tragedy, has been adjudged this year’s best book in Europe and South Asia by the Commonwealth.

Canada’s Lawrence Hill won the top Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for her ” The Book of Negroes “, a novel about forgotten story of 18th Century Africans. Hill has been named the winner of the best book award.

Bangladesh’s Tahmima Anam bagged the award for best first book for ‘A Golden Age’ , a fictionalised account of her country’s war for independence in 1971.

Celebrating Tamil pulp fiction
Source: The Hindu

A tea kadai aficionado fell in love with the Rs. 10 Tamil pulp fiction novels stacked in the stalls and wished he could read what was between their lurid covers.

The result? Blaft, a new publication house that aims to introduce a wider range of English fiction, graphic novels and so on, to the reading public than is currently available.

“I got interested in Tamil pulp fiction novels after moving to Chennai in 1998,” says Rakesh Kumar Khanna, a mathematician from U.C. Berkeley and IIT Madras.

“But I found that none of these books were being translated, and I really wanted to read them!”

So, he began a personal project to translate the treasure trove of pulp literature in Tamil. That morphed into Blaft when his wife Rashmi Ruth Devadasan and their friend Kaveri Lalchand came on board.

“Pulp from America gets shipped around the world, and Mills & Boon is pulp that our aunts and moms grew up on, but how many people have read Ramanichandran?” asks Rashmi, who worked as Gautham Menon’s associate director for several years.

Ramanichandran, for those not in the know, is the queen of romance in Tamil fiction circles with 125 novels to her credit, and the 126th on the way. She is one of the 10 authors whose work was included in ‘The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction’, which is one of three books recently launched by the new publication house at the Park.

But Blaft isn’t only about pulp fiction. The other two books released include a quirky collection of black and white drawings by Natesh called, ‘When This Key Sketch Gets Real Tongue is Fork Hen is Cock When This Key Sketch Gets Real My Baby Eagle’s Dream Comes True’ (yes, that’s really the title) and ‘Zero Degree’ by Charu Nivedita, a transgressive novel that isn’t what you’d think of as typical Indian English fiction at all. (’Zero Degree’ and the anthology have both been painstakingly translated by Pritam Charavarthy.)

New Book Releases & Events

Decoding her secret mission
Source: The Hindu

Calling Sehmat
By Harinder S. Sikka
Konark Publishers

The book has an elaborate description of the Navy’s role in the 1971 war, a fascinating insight that the author (a former Navy officer) has managed to weave into the narrative with support from the Indian Navy. Later again, the narrative goes into a spiritual plane to explain how Sehmat grapples with the consequences of her actions that included betraying and killing people in or close to the family.

And though both chapters are important, their elaboration tends to digress a little from the main narrative, especially since the storyline is then at its crucial point. The exceptional descriptions of the protagonist and her family also seem a little too perfect to be human. And the abrupt manner of Sehmat’s death may leave the reader wanting a little more detail on her life till it ended. But then again, is there a reason why the end was kept open-ended, is a thought that can be put to rest only by the author.

Calling Sehmat is an engaging spy story that flits between fact and fiction. As indicated by the author (who is with pharmaceutical company Piramal Healthcare), the book is a product of eight years of research into the complex backdrop against which it is set. But whether or not the book goes on to become a Bollywood film, the war-related spy and emotional drama does provoke thought on the sacrifices of the country’s unsung heroes.

Blogs and Articles

Pirates and plagiarists
Source: The Assam Tribune

One has only to scan the footpaths of any Indian metro to realise that book piracy is flourishing in the country. Best-selling pulp-fiction is the main target of our pirates and the latest Ludlum or Grisham can be bought at one-fourth the price of the original. However, even serious fiction decorates the footpaths, testifying to the fact that book piracy must be profitable enterprise, never mind the cost of paper which the pirates cannot avoid. Yet, despite being an author and a bibliophile, I cannot climb up on a moral high-horse and castigate those who purchase pirated books despite being aware of the totally reprehensible nature of the act.

This is mainly because prices of books, particularly those published abroad, have gone beyond the purchasing power of most true book-lovers. Coinciding with rising book prices is the deterioration in the library movement, with most state libraries not able to put latest books in their collection. In an age when the reading habit is on the decline, I am inclined to salute anyone who purchases a book to read, even though a pirated one! I honestly believe that the onus of stopping piracy in any form vests with the State and the clientele of pirates are far less culpable than the pirates themselves.

The editorial can be accessed here

Surviving By The Skin Of Their Teeth
Source: The Telegraph, Calcutta

Like all retail trades, successful bookselling depends on three crucial factors. First, the ‘mix’ between up-market and down-market mass paperbacks of sex, violence and romance that would cater to a wide crosssection of readers. Second, visibility or display: it isn’t just enough for the spine to be seen because books have to be seen before they are bought. Third, easy accessibility to the neighbourhood bookshop because we loathe to travel long distances just to buy a book.

Prices have often been cited as an inhibiting factor but more than prices it is the terms of trade between the publisher and the distributor that becomes inimical to a rapid turnover of stock. What are the usual terms of trade and how do they affect the nature of bookselling in India?

The entire article can be read here

Found in translation
Source: Hindustan Times

In India, we keep translating every moment of our life and most of us are bilingual if not multilingual by necessity. We often mix languages and shift from one to another almost unconsciously in our everyday speech. This is true not only of the middle-classes — unfortunately turning increasingly monolingual under the impact of modern education — but even more of the poor who are forced to learn more than one language to earn their livelihood. I have seen fish-sellers at Delhi’s INA market announcing the day’s arrivals in Malayalam as the fish-loving Keralites frequent this market, and the rickshawpullers of Hyderabad switching over from Telugu to Tamil, Hindi or Urdu, depending on the mother tongue of the passenger. We need translators to hold India together and help us understand one another’s culture, literature and world view. Multilingualism is the very soul of our collective being and our great poet-visionaries like Kabir, Nanak, Vidyapati and Meera each composed their verses in many tongues, adapting their speech to the people they addressed.

The entire article by K. Satchidanandan can be read here.

So much to read, so little time
Source: antiblurbs.blogspot.com

Such logorrhea is most unfair on the part of the authors concerned. Their respective Muses may well be perched on their shoulders urging them on, but surely all of them ought to get together to ration their offerings? “Sorry Salman, you had a book out two years ago, it’s my turn now.” “But Hanif, this is topical, it can’t wait.” “Both of you get in line, my debut is the fresh new voice the world is waiting for!” “Shut up Aravind, my tale of growing up in a dysfunctional family is the one that will bring succour to millions.”

Lest such exchanges degenerate into hair-pulling and ear-biting, I propose an organisation that follows the OPEC model of laying down quotas for oil supply – call it the Organisation of Literature Writing Countries — which could allocate the number of titles published every quarter. Publishers and literary agents attempting to break the embargo could be blacklisted and exiled to the Polynesian Islands, a place where no-one has been spotted putting pen to paper since recorded history.

The whole article can be read here.

Other Announcements

Organizations and Publishing Houses willing to advertise for various positions related to publishing are invited to do so in this section.
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This newsletter is developed by Queenie Fernandes and Leonard Fernandes with inputs from various individuals, publishing houses, websites and blogs.

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