Brought To Book

ANNA ROHLEDER

At 8 o’clock in the evening, just before closing time, the lights at New Delhi’s Oxford bookstore have dimmed and the air-conditioning switched off. It’s not an atmosphere conducive to browsing, but people still linger around the shelves and at the tables of the in-store cafe. A young couple sit at one of the tables, engrossed in books on home decoration, while their toddler gleefully pulls paperbacks off the shelves and throws them on the floor. The other customers who remain in the store seem to feel equally at home: hunkered down here and there in chairs or on cushions, oblivious to the fact that the store is closing for the day.

Such is the picture of a changing book publishing scene in India, which is witnessing a boom. The boom is perhaps quieter and less frenetic than most — there are no frenzied stockbrokers and, mercifully little talk of “creating value” — but it is a steady swell all the same. One of the main features in the Rs 1,500-crore industry’s growth is the emergence of a new retail environment, of which the bookstore-cum-café just mentioned is a part. These national chains of large-format bookstores are destination shops by virtue of their size alone. Landmark’s largest store, for example, is 45,000 sq. ft in size and many of the others are in the same range. These stores have changed the image of books from dusty tomes of wisdom to slick entertainment packages, sharing the shelves with CDs and DVDs. At the same time, the growth of trade publishing in India — meaning fiction, self-help, non-fiction and the like — is a reflection of changes in society. Today, people are better educated and more affluent, even if a bit more solitary as well. “As we all lead busier and lonelier lives, books, films and music become emotional substitutes,” observes Karthika V.K., the editor-in-chief of Harper Collins India in New Delhi.

One factor that drives the book publishing industry today is the reader’s needs and aspirations. Some of the categories of books leading the growth are obvious. Romances, for example, or even the new breed of commercial fiction with a recognisable, contemporary Indian setting. “There is a tremendous popularity of books among the youth that are coming up, where a book like One Night At The Call Center becomes a topic of conversation,” says Kapish Mehra, publisher of Rupa Books in Delhi. But other “hot” genres are less obvious — at least on the face of it. “Narrative non-fiction is the new best-selling category, which includes titles such as Maximum City or The World Is Flat,” says Thomas Abraham, president of Penguin India. Maybe the appeal of these books lies in education and entertainment — a winning premise for the reader who is deprived of both time and intelligent conversation. Publishers also like these titles. They sell well in hardback, at two or three times the cover price of the Rs 225 anti-piracy paperback editions of bestsellers.

Children Hold Out Promise

At the opposite end of the pricing spectrum is another growth market — children’s books. Almost all the major publishing houses agree that this will be one of their biggest categories in future. Even traditionally niche-minded publishers want a piece of the action in this section. “Aside from fiction and self-help, we are also diversifying into children’s books,” says Pramod Kapoor, publisher, Roli Books. However, the children’s book market is one of the toughest for an A- or B-ranked publisher to crack. That’s because C- and D-grade publishers have a stranglehold on the production of primers, activity books and story collections that sell for Rs 70 or even less. These books could be printed on the same flimsy paper as the railway timetables produced by the same publishers. But it also a fact that most parents either cannot or do not want to spend more. That poses a problem for trade publishers who need to price a quality children’s book at Rs 200 and up.

The economics may change later, but the sales figures are compelling now. “Our No.1 category is children’s books,” says Aniyan Nair, head of operations marketing at Mumbai-based Crossword, India’s largest book chain with 44 outlets nationwide. “It contributes 40 per cent by volume and 28 per cent by value.” By contrast, all of fiction is responsible for only 22 per cent of sales volume. The children’s reading areas and toy sections at places like Crossword and Landmark, reveal an effort to tap a key consumer niche. Oxford Bookstore, a smaller national chain, has even opened a dedicated children’s bookshop called Oxford Junior next to its flagship store in Kolkata.

While children’s books symbolise the biggest opportunities for the Indian publishing industry, they also illustrate some of the challenges. Pricing is the primary issue facing almost all publishers. “For the past seven to eight years, prices for other entertainment options have been going up, while the cover price of a book has remained static,” says Penguin India’s Abraham. Meanwhile, production costs have also increased manifold — from paper prices to design services to packaging. How are the publishers still making money? Part of the answer is volume. “When you have fewer titles and larger print runs, you get better profits from economies of scale,” explains Kapoor of Roli Books. That is particularly true of some imported titles, which can sell in the blockbuster range of 100,000 copies-plus (see ‘Making The A-List’).

Another strategy is expansion into more profitable areas. Business and management books, for example, fly off the shelves at a higher price point than most fiction hardbacks. Even publishers without foreign parents are selling their lists abroad. “We now sell everywhere in the world, from the US to Australia,” announces Kapish Mehra of Rupa Books. Margins vary widely by book and by category, however. “In general, a publisher’s profit depends on the individual project,” says N.S. Krishna, national sales director at Random House India. And because a distributor’s typical 30-35 per cent discount takes one of the biggest bites out of that profit, some are experimenting with direct sales. Taking a page from the book pirates, as it were, they are sidestepping both distributors and retailers and hiring their own roving sales force to go out and sell to the public in malls and markets.

Distributors Call The Shots
Distributors, as in any other industry, play a vital role. In fact, they retain an outsize role in determining which books actually reach consumers in stores because the Indian book retailing scene is still dominated by small, independent bookshops, despite the high-profile expansion of big chain stores. But distributors are not particularly interested in books for their literary merits. They are just middlemen trading in a commodity. “When a new product comes, we push that quantity, and after a day or two we see what is the outcome,” explains Baldev Verma, regional manager for North India with India Book Distributors based in Mumbai. Because the percentage of books the distributors can return to publishers is capped at about 10 per cent annually, they are cautious buyers. They may place as few as two or three copies of one book with each shop, and spread their risk even further by supplying hundreds of different bookshops in one region or zone.

In some ways, this helps new or unknown authors get a better, if random, shot at exposure, but it makes organised marketing more difficult. Publishers complain they have little insight and even less influence on how their books are promoted. However, their range of marketing tools does not typically extend much beyond posters, display boards and bookmarks either. Well-known authors may get a book launch in the capital, but the Indian book tour as such is yet to be conceived. Publicity budgets is one area of publishing that is not growing much. “Authors have to become more responsible for maintaining the life of a book,” says Karthika of Harper Collins.

Fortunately, the ‘hype cycle’ for new books is still not quite as attenuated as it is in the West, nor has the market reached a saturation level. With 500,000 additional sq.ft of book retailing space slated to come up nationwide over the next two years, there are a lot of shelves to be filled, and not just with bestsellers. Internet sales are keeping pace too. “Our online sales have been growing at over 40 per cent a year, though the base is still low,” says Rajiv Chowdhry, CEO of Oxford Bookstores.

Amidst this scene of plenty, however, shortages are one thing that threaten to dampen the industry’s exuberance. There is a shortfall of people in every segment, from editors to sift through growing piles of manuscripts, to marketers who can think of creative ways of making a book stand out, to retail salespeople who can help customers find their favourite authors. Space is also in short supply, be it for warehouses or land to build the 30,000 sq. ft-plus new chain bookstores.
But there’s one type of shortage that may have the opposite effect and keep the market humming. With people finding less time for family and friends , the mental and emotional territory for books can only get bigger.


Making The A-List
Definitions of a bestseller vary widely. In general, a novel that sells more than 8,000 copies in India can be said to have beaten the odds and possibly made a small profit for its publisher. In the mid-range of bestsellerdom are authors who move tens of thousands of copies of their books — Vikram Seth, for example. At the blockbuster level, every Harry Potter book sells at least 200,000 copies in India. But Paulo Coelho is also not far behind, with sales in the 100,000 range annually.

What are the qualities that make a book a bestseller? David Godwin, the UK-based literary agent who represents Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai, among others, thinks it is a matter of connecting to the reader at a deep level. “Books that do this manage to both display and transform the Zeitgeist, and speak to concerns that are universal,” he says.

Courtesy: Businessworld