The Publisher’s Post: Vol I Ed. XXXIX
Dated: 1st June 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
Best-selling writers to make a beeline for India
Source: Business Standard
India’s flourishing book and burgeoning readership can prove to be the perfect launch pad for international authors to promote their work and noted British writer Jeffrey Archer’s successful tour of the country might just open the flood gates to more big names.
Archer, who was on a six-city visit to India from May 17-24 to promote his 14th novel, A Prisoner of Birth, is likely to release his next book in India. It was quite apparent that he was overwhelmed by the response he got from readers and fans alike.
Landmark, who organised the Jeffrey Archer’s Tour, said this is for the first time in the history of bookstores in India that an author of Archer’s stature came to India.
“We haven’t had this big event in Indian history,” said Landmark COO Himanshu Chakrawarti. “It was a great opportunity for people reading Jeffrey Archer books for over 20 years to met the author and interact with him,” Chakrawarti said.
Unlike the past, when the global book market was solely concentrated on the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia, the attention of publishers and writers have now shifted to India.
“The Indian market is huge and the growth rate is phenomenal. More and more global authors and publishers want to tap this market,” he said.
According to Chakrawarti, Landmark will be bringing in more big names to India but did not divulge details.
Bringing Archer to India was not a problem. “He readily agreed to come here when we approached him last year. Only the scheduling took time,” he said.
Cook’s new thriller questions medical tourism to India
Source: Times of India
India’s fledgling medical outsourcing industry could soon be taking a body blow from an upcoming medical mystery thriller by Robin Cook, the acknowledged maestro of the genre, which is set partly in New Delhi.
Foreign Body , Cook’s new offering on the lines of his earlier hits such as Coma and Outbreak will hit small screen and book stores later this summer, but in a unique first, former Disney mogul Michael Eisner’s media company Vuguru is releasing teaser web episodes to promote the book and the serial that claim to that look into the “dark side of medical tourism in India.”
The story begins with the death of an American woman during a routine surgery in India. Her granddaughter Jennifer Hernandes, a fourth-year medical student, flies to New Delhi to take charge.
What follows are thrills, chills and spills which may make great reading and TV viewing, but could sock it to India’s medical tourism industry that’s growing at the rate of knots. There is some indication though that the story may be even-handed even as it looks at the “Indian nonsense,” as one of the characters puts it. The health industry in the US tries to stem the tide of patients going abroad by scaremongering about the procedures in India.
New Book Releases & Events
Compilation of Mario’s sketches exhibited
Source: Times of India
A chronicler of a changing India and its people, is being chronicled. A collection of over 500 sketches of renowned cartoonist Mario Miranda’s best works, sketched since he was 10, are being compiled into a collection named after him.
Mario Miranda, the book, contains the artist’s photos, pocket cartoons, sketches, advertoons and even the murals and illustrations used by various publishers for their books.
On Friday, these works were exhibited at the Hotel Mandovi. Cradled in thick, plastic-sheeted folders, people thronging into the exhibition appreciated the work of an artist who has taken Goa to the world through his distinct characters.
“I believe Mario Miranda is one of India’s greatest artists; this is my way of putting him on a world stage,” said Gerard da Cunha, who is publishing the book. The architect turned publisher took three whole years to compile the book on the cartoonist, painstakingly researching and scouring through 3000 of the artist’s works sketched right from his childhood. “Finally, and with great difficulty, I settled on some of his very best works,” said da Cunha.
Apart from Mario’s well known characters, his sketches done while travelling, will also feature in Mario Miranda. “He had taken 15 sketching trips to Moscow, America, Israel, Singapore and even Japan and has sketched what he saw at these places - a striptease in London, impressions of Paris in 1984, Russian immigrants etc,” explained da Cunha.
The book is scheduled to be officially released on July 19, 2008 at the Hotel Mandovi and is priced at Rs 2,700 per copy.
Cinema and Secularism
Limiting Secularism: The Ethics Of Coexistence in Indian Literature and Film by Priya Kumar
“Limiting Secularism is a book for our times. Though scrupulously specific to the context of post-Independence India - and invaluable for that reason - its provocations resonate well beyond the boundaries of the unique nation-space. Working through but pushing well beyond the secularism debates in India, Kumar asks the vital question that few have as yet attempted: what vision and modality of the ethical life will enable those of opposed faiths to live well together?
A work of this kind is not undertaken lightly. Kumar’s assumption of responsibility is everywhere apparent in the seriousness with which she engages the reality of religious violence at multiple levels, theoretical, historical and critical, as the urgent reason for exploring the imaginative possibilities of living otherwise. Intellectual work at such a level of challenge and commitment does nothing less than open the doors of the mind.” Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
“Limiting Secularism is part of the emerging discourse on rethinking secularism in the wake of fundamentalisms of all stripes. Priya Kumar’s cogent, historically grounded, theoretically sophisticated, comparative readings of South Asian literary texts and films makes a significant contribution to contemporary cultural engagements with religion, cosmopolitanism, secularism, and ethics. Kumar’s book is truly superlative in terms of the writing—the clarity, the fluidity, the effortlessness with which dense material is presented is quite an accomplishment.” Sangeeta Ray
ISBN 81-7824-234-6 / Rs 695 / 320pp / hardback / published May 2008 / Co-published by the University of Minnesota Press / For sale in South Asia only
Other voices, other tongues
Source: Scholars Without Borders
Shiv Sena Women by Atreyee Sen
“This fascinating book, based on Atreyee Sen’s immersion in the low-income, working-class slums of Bombay, tells the story of the women and children of the Hindu right wing party, the Shiv Sena, in Western India. The women’s front of the Sena, known as the ‘Mahila Aghadui’, has been instrumental in creating and sustaining communal violence, and the infamous Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992-3 brought them into the limelight.
Sen charts the Aghadi’s transformation from a support group into a militant and partially autonomous women’s task force. She turns feminist scholarship on its head by documenting a situation where women have become the primary retainers and perpetrators of a violent nationalistic discourse, acquiring social and economic status either by default or as reward.”
Published by Zubaan / Available at Scholars Without Borders / Rs 395 / ISBN: 978818988482.
Blogs and Articles
More than a local edition
Source: indiatogether.org
Local problems in India are compounding faster than solutions are being found. But the extent of national and regional coverage in our print and broadcast media is over-proportionately more than local news. More local journalism is the need, and will improve prospects for our local self-governance. The India Together editorial.
The problem with this lack of proportion is this. We cannot all be more aware of what’s going on at the national and international levels but be locally disconnected at the same time, with little say over local decision making. Without adequate local news in print and on broadcast networks, media and citizens may not be able to together build and nurture a sense of citizen allegiance, identity and consensus for problem solving in and around our messed up metropolitan regions. In fact, without more and deeper local news, we may be putting a damper on the development of our civil society itself. National citizenship cannot be developed by shackling its local cousins.
Raise the Volume
Source: Express News Service
Publishers are going for promotional blitzkriegs, even television spots, to sell their books
Even for eyeballs inured to all sorts of advertisements flickering on television, this 15-second one is new: an animated car vrooms into the screen and to the dust jacket of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. An ad for an individual book is unusual, but not surprising considering HarperCollins has reportedly shelled out an advance of $35,000 (Rs 14 lakh) for the debut novel. While HarperCollins India has started a promotional blitzkrieg of sorts, others are pitching in for their authors. Nobody is ready to publish and perish. Not yet.
Chapters on Demand
Source: Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog
There have been countless times over the past several years when customers have asked us, “hey, how come I have to buy the entire book when all I really want are these 3 chapters?” This is a pretty popular question when you’re standing in the WROX booth at a developer’s conference, for example. Well, I’m happy to say that we now have a product for that situation and it’s called Chapters on Demand.
The service launched yesterday and there are currently 47 titles available in PDF format, most selling for $4.99 each. That’s about 900 chapters that are available immediately and we’ve got another 800 chapters (from 37 other titles) that will be added shortly.
My favorite part of this: We’re selling all this e-content without the use of traditional DRM. I say “traditional” because we’re using more of a social DRM solution where we inject the customer’s name in the footer of the PDF. Print it. Use it on however many devices you want to. Just don’t release it into the wild. Is this hack-proof? Of course not, but what is? The key is that we want to make this a very attractive product for our customers and we believe this is the right approach.
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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