Hound For A Hack
In the West, authors regard Nielsen BookScan, which tracks book sales on a copy-to-copy basis, with terror. If the sales figures of your book, accessible to every subscribing agent, editor and publisher, show a slide, you can forget about publishing the next one. But in the year or so since the service came to India, things haven’t been so bad—thanks partly to the impossibility of getting accurate data. Nobody knows how many books are published every year, or the number of publishers, let alone being able to track sales. Still, authors whose books aren’t selling are jittery, with their earlier publishers only too glad to let them go and hunting for new ones—not easy, considering they all want more debut authors these days.
Latest Bloomer
Prospective authors, spoilt for choice with over 15,000 publishers in India, will have another publishing house to go to with their manuscripts. Bloomsbury, publisher of the Harry Potter books, is the latest international publisher to set up shop. They’ve been here for the last 25 years, but with Penguin as their distribution partner. The Indian Bloomsbury, headed by former Macmillan publisher Rajiv Beri, will start operations from May. It plans to develop an Indian authors’ list of its own.
Previously A Potter
For a generation grown up on Harry Potter books, what can be better than an adult novel by their beloved author? J.K. Rowling has signed up with Little, Brown for a new book. All Rowling has revealed is that “it’s very different to Harry.” But London literary types are betting that it is a crime thriller as her editor is the legendary thriller editor David Shelley.
