Authors don’t crib about editors and publishers in their columns. It has to do with the survival instinct. This is why I took notice of the recent column of Vanita Kohli-Khandekar. Writing in Midday about her experience, she lambasts the entire community of book editors. She had written one-third of a book and now thought of approaching some book editors and publishers. She had a hard time fixing a meeting with the editors of Penguin India, and even after she got an appointment, she had to wait for 45 minutes before she could meet the bored-looking book editor. Within two minutes of listening to her, he told her that “Short stories don’t sell.” She had a similar experience with at least three other people who were ‘rude, unresponsive and put her down’. Vanita is not some tyro author. She is the writer of ‘Indian Media Business’ and writes at least two columns, one each in Midday and Business Standard. And if a lady with her background had this experience, the fate of a tyro writer can only be imagined. Like she says, the publishing industry is staring at annihilation, if not extinction, because of this attitude. Yet, according to Vanita, the editors working for the publishing houses don’t care, are incapable of reading and running through several manuscripts and book proposals they get every day, and they are not trained. Not surprisingly, the most successful books have not come from regular publishers but from self-published authors or small publishers.
I have known this for a very long time.
I’d go several steps ahead and compare the bunch of editors in Penguin, as well as in other bigger publishing houses, with the army of salesmen in malls and the waiters in the mushrooming coffee shops – uninterested, untrained, insecure and jealous. You can see them huddled in one corner of Croma or Reliance, or other outlets where the ‘boss’, two rungs above the huddled staff, was once a part of this group.
But what the three ‘rude’ editors told Vanita is true.
She should have taken the hint right in the beginning when it became difficult to meet the editors.
Short story collections don’t sell. Period. Short stories written by any Indian author, except Munshi Premchand and Sadat Hasan Manto, don’t sell. Yes, it is hyperbole. There might be some other writers too but they’d be few, very few.
And the anthologies of short stories of lesser names don’t make money for the publishers.
The reason short stories don’t sell is same as that for the fiction. Bhavin Jankharia, a columnist in ‘Mumbai Mirror’, wrote in a column aptly titled “Who reads anymore!” that, “Sure, everyone ‘reads’ (blogs, columns, tweets, pulp, texts) but the ‘reading’ of literary fiction, both classic and contemporary …seems to be dying. aBy the way, Vanita’s column was entitled: “Why book publishing is dying”. And I am going to call this piece “The Dying Indian Book’.
Bhavin writes about the period, almost 30 years ago, when so many of ‘us’ were able to (read) all the time. He explains, and I agree with him, that there were few other distractions, and reading was one relatively inexpensive activity we all had recourse to.
It was the same 20 years ago too… before private TV channels overshadowed DD and all the other entertainment. Instead of just Phool Khile Hain Gulshan Gulshan and Chhaya Geet, the improved version of DD had Mahabharata, Ramayana, interesting sitcoms and watchable serials. With more and more channels and more dependence on the lowest common denominator, books are almost finished.
But I blame the bookshops, the distributors and publishers for the ‘The Dying Indian Book’.
The first mistake they all have made is to treat a book as a product. A book is not a product, it is a work of art!
The second mistake is to let the reading public treat the bookshops as reading rooms or libraries. This has worked in developed countries. I have seen the behaviour pattern of the browsers at Waterstone’s Piccadilly in London, or Barnes & Noble, which I visited in Manhattan, and even the Mysterious bookshop in New York. While people browse, some may even read for a long duration, unlike in their Indian counterparts, the privilege is not abused.
As for the Indian publishers, the situation is identical to the scene in most TV channels and Bollywood.
I have not lost hope.
Indian fiction, and as a result Indian book, has deep roots. Epics like ‘Mahabharata’ and ‘Ramayana’, and plays like ‘Shakuntala’ and ‘Meghdoot’ from Vedic era and Chandrakanta, the first work of prose in Hindi have resulted in a strong flourishing tree where the literature of scores of languages has grown.
Indian cinema once depended on Indian literature, but degenerated in its own caricature with remakes. The stories written with a Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan in mind further damaged the cinema. But happily, the Indian filmmaker has started returning to Indian novels.
*Mohan Deep is the author of several books including his latest novel “The Five Foolish Virgins”.
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