The other way seems equally perilous: publish over 200 new titles a year in the hope that some will hit the bestseller lists. Penguin, Rupa, even Roli, seem to be taking this path to literary bedlam. The rationale: how else do we make our rozi-roti? As one leading publisher put it: "If we don't publish 200 titles a year, how do we pay our staff of 100? Only a few titles sell over 2,000 copies, so the only way to sustain ourselves is to publish more books." And we thought finding a publisher was hard work!
If the number of readers is abysmally low, the size and scale of book launches here startle even publishing giants from the West. "Never been to such a huge launch before," Random House's Simon Littlewood exclaimed at Vikas Swarup's diplomat-embedded launch recently. Not all are happy. One forthcoming author from Penguin's stable remarked: "When I told a publisher in London how publishers here make the author pay for his book launch, he laughed outright."
