Bibliofile

But if Bergen is uncomfortable with the speed with which his publisher ran his manuscript to the press, what would he say of Indian publishers, many of whom commission a manuscript and rush it to the printers and the bookshops in a record three weeks?

Even before Maneka Gandhi extracted huge damages from HarperCollins, the publishing house in UK was shivering under the threat of a new round of lay-offs and cutbacks. And now Rupert Murdoch’s parent company wants to part ways with Rupa, which also runs HarperCollins India, and hand it over to a new, more aggressive and ambitious partner. The whisper among authors is that Rupa is getting the axe for Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, their biggest find this year, bombing at the bookshops. Was it bad promotion or bad writing? The debate rages on.