Interview: Ravi Singh

Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, Penguin Books India

The impression in the minds of most young people is that a publishing house just has two departments: copy edit and public relations. Is that the case or is there more to publishing than copy editing and PR?

No, there’s a lot more to it. Let’s start with the editorial side. You have commissioning; where commissioning editors go out and find the books. They may also copy edit, but not always. So, they are the ones who come up with the idea, get in touch with authors and do a primary edit. After that, the copy editors take over and they will do the edit and line edit etc. And then there is the design department which is very important; because increasingly the look of the book is becoming very important.  And then there’s the production department where you have people to see the book through at the printers – they choose the paper, the binding and ensure that you hold a well produced book. And then you have, as you said, a marketing and promotions department which is crucial because you publish books but you also want them to be marketed well and people should know about them.  So that’s a very crucial aspect of publishing. And of course, there’s the sales department. You have to have a good sales team who take the book through retailers and distributors to get it sold. The general public knows them as customer relations people because they are the people who get process and collect orders. And because we are a large publishing house, we also need a warehouse and people to manage the inventory there. You also have a finance department as author royalties need to be paid and expenses need to be managed. There’s also a rights departments because, for some books, you can sell the rights for them to be translated in other languages or in other territories.  So yes, it is a big operation and organisation.

Can you retrace for the readers the journey of Penguin Books India? What it was when it started and its growth over the years?

The Penguin India office was set up in 1985, although publishing had not started back then. The office was set up by David Davidar and Zamir Ansari was head of the sales division. Then, they worked together to get the books in because the idea was not to get Penguin UK or US titles as that was being done before. So, after the office was setup Penguin formally launched its publishing house with six titles in 1987. Interestingly, the range back then was non-fiction; we had a biography of P T Usha, Nude Before God, a novel by Shiv K Kumar, a translation of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Arjun, Anees Jung’s Unveiling India. So, even at that time the range was varied with travel, translation and fiction. And today, we publish 200 titles a year across genres.  Our aim was to publish the best book in every genre. But now, we publish in other areas where we didn’t earlier. For instance, business books have become a big area for us. We do genre fiction as well – not necessarily literary fiction, though we are seen as big literary fiction publishers even though literary fiction forms only 30 percent of our list. The remaining is non-fiction.  And then of course Penguin has – which no other publisher does – is the classics list. And not just international classics but also Indian classics. So, it’s been a great journey. The size of the market has grown and so have we.  

How did you get involved in publishing? Was it something you were always interested in or did it just come along the way?

I joined Penguin India in 1994 and at that time not many people were interested in publishing. But since then, things have changed so dramatically that, back then, I wouldn’t imagine young people asking questions about publishing. We just thought that books happened. We had heard of Oxford University Press and academic books were published but, apart from that, books came from abroad. Or books just mysteriously appeared! So, publishing was not a career you seriously thought of.

To me, it happened by accident because Penguin India had advertised in the newspapers looking for editorial assistants and I applied for the job. At that time, salaries were really very bad.  You had to be seriously interested in publishing or in holding onto your job (which is what many of us did) to stay in. Things back then were tough but also very exciting because you interacted with a different breed of authors. You got immersed into your job.

There’s a myth amongst people that a publishing house doesn’t pay as well as say, a media house would. Is that correct?

Not any longer.  You’re comparing an industry like journalism with publishing which is much much smaller.  Entry level and middle level people get paid pretty much the same as their counterparts in media organisations.  But what happens is that – in journalism – you have a greater number of people who work at the middle level. Also, the other thing is that in journalism, it allows for many levels of employment.  You can keep moving up at different levels. That doesn’t happen in publishing.  In fact, the CEO of a publishing house wouldn’t get paid the same amount of money as the head of a TV news channel. But those are realities which people will have to accept because publishing doesn’t earn its money through advertising. It’s just book sales.

How important is research and fact checking on part of the publishing house? Especially since the bulk of your titles is non-fiction. Of course, the author does his research but how do you as a publishing house corroborate and cross-check the author’s work?

See when you approach an author who, you think, is going to do a good book, you trust them to come with interesting and accurate information.  But yes, it is very important to edit it with the knowledge of the subject. So, if it is a very specialised book, then you would go to people who are referees – specialists in that particular subject. And they would look at it for an honorarium. But mostly what happens in trade publishing – by that I mean general books publishing – we look for editors who have a wide range of interests, are eclectic and have a really good sense of what’s going on in the world. And are pay attention to detail.

The criteria which you’ve laid out suggest that aspiring or have-been journalists make for good editors.

Not always. And why I say that is because a good journalist would be somebody who knows his/her facts gets the information and goes out there to find a story. But, in publishing, books are about telling a story. And not just in fiction but in good non-fiction books as well. And that may not be the skill that a journalist might possess. Even the best journalists, who write very well, write a 1000-word article. You must also remember that at there is a very essential difference i.e. a journalist wants a byline – there is a sense of possession. Editors cannot afford to do that because their job really is to be invisible.  If the author wants to acknowledge you, he/she will write your name in the acknowledgments section. But that’s about it.  Editors need to be able to judge a book, make it look better, help the writer and do so in an unobtrusive manner.

Another thing I have observed over the past few years is that a lot of small publishing houses have mushroomed all of a sudden. Do you think it will dilute the quality books in any manner?

No definitely not. I think anything that adds variety and diversity in a list, can’t harm quality. In fact, it’s good because if you have the same kind of books – and what people call ‘literary books’ – then it defeats the purpose because you’re limiting or shrinking the market. One has to be democratic and practical about this. You need good books in every genre. And people talk of mass market or best selling commercial books as if they happened in 2008. Remember, Shobhaa De’s first novel came out in 1990. So I don’t think it weakens anybody’s list to have different kinds of books. The only thing is not to have shoddily done books in any genre. A bad literary novel is something I wouldn’t spend my money on but I would definitely do the same for a potboiler.

2008 was a great year for Indian publishing. We also saw the emergence of Pakistani writers in the past year. What do you foresee for the year 2009?

I think 2009 is only going to get better and stronger.  The meltdown has affected the sales of books in India so, to some extent, it’ll be slightly tough.  But it will last only a few months and it won’t affect the growth that we’re seeing in publishing – different publishers coming in and more writers getting published. Last year, I did say that we need to exercise caution and triumphalism is not good. Yes, things are improving but there’s no explosion in terms of growth happening. This year, I would say growth is happening but let’s not overstate the case. Let’s watch how things are going and be careful about how we help this industry grow.

Looking at the Penguin list, one gets the impression that you publish very thoughtful and literary books. One finds books by Amitava Ghosh and William Dalrymple on your list but not something like a Zoya Factor. Is this a conscious attempt? Also, what books can we look forward to from Penguin India in 2009?

 It’s great to see that our books are considered literary, thoughtful and enduring. That said, we would’ve loved to publish Zoya Factor. As I said, we have to publish the best book in each genre. For instance, last year we published this book called A Girl Like Me by Swati Kaushal who’s first was Piece of Cake.  Somebody called these books ‘chick-lit’; a term which I don’t understand.  A well written book is a good read. And we’ve constantly been experimenting with books. We published Samit Basu’s Fantasy and Ashok Banker’s Ramayana series re-tells the Ramayana in a fantasy mould. Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s book You Are Here is another example where we experimented with genres. So, yes, we are doing different sort of books.  In 2009, we are continuing Ashok Banker’s Ramayana series. Two books in this series will be produced as graphic novels.  His Mahabharata series is also coming up.  Then we are publishing a graphic novel called Hotel at the end of the world by Parismita Singh.  And we definitely will concentrate on finance market books.  These are not typically business books but they are general non-fction, insipirational and, at the same time, deal with business. For instance, Subroto Bagchi’s The Ethical Worker is in the context of the Satyam scam.

In our non-fiction section you’ll see an anthology on confronting terrorism put together by Maroof Raza.  There’s also a book on the Mumbai attacks. Then we have N R Narayana Murthy’s new book Better India, Better World which is a cross between A P J Abdul Kalam’s book and Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India. We are also publishing Gurcharan Das and Rajmohan Gandhi’s new books. Pavan K Varma’s Becoming Indians: The Unfinished Evolution – it’s about countries where cultural growth has been interrupted or skewed due to colonialism – will be out soon.  We will also be publishing Shekhar Gupta’s National Interest – a collection of his columns which appear in the Indian Express. So 60-70% of our books are non-fiction and that will remain the case. And I see this happening with other publishers too because, in the Indian books market, non-fiction outsells fiction.