India’s book trade is characterized by a handful of big multinational publishers and hundreds of small and medium family-run Indian publishing houses. All of them generally resort to ad-hoc decision making, but 2014 started on an unusually stormy note when faced with lawsuits, two successful books were withdrawn by Penguin and Bloomsbury unilaterally without author consultation, while McGraw Hill replaced its VP and MD Ajay Shukla without notice.
Under such difficult and trying circumstances, IIM Ahmedabad — India’s top management school – is attempting to understand and inspire professional management in the Indian book trade by conducting its annual publishing course. Each summer, the intense course teaches leadership, change management, financial and strategy planning in a publishers management training program.
GBO — the first mover
The IIM-A initiative is one of the many by the German Book Office and the Frankfurt Book Fair. The GBO conducted its fifth and most successful GlobaLocal event a few weeks ago in the form of roundtable discussions, presentations, workshops, rights tables and matchmaking between Indian and foreign partners.
The GBO organizes an annual children’s literature congress of content creators from India called Jumpstart bringing together authors, illustrators, publishers, editors, rights managers, translators and educationalists to ideate and take forward a new theme each year.
Another activity is to organize meetings between Indian publishers of all languages, rights managers, editors and authors both before and during the Frankfurt Book Fair. GBO Prashasti Rastogi, director, GBO director, Prashasti Rastogi and her all- women India team is supported by Claudia Kaiser and Katharina Ewald of the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Jaipur widens its footprint
The Jaipur BookMark, an offshoot of the immensely successful JLF started off its publishing industry initiative with interactions between members of the book trade. JLF director Namita Gokhale roped in Margit Walso of Norwegian Literature Abroad (Norla) who provided the international flavour to the BookMark event. The event has been created to provide a distinctive platform for publishing industry professionals to interact, network and exchange views with one another at the Narain Niwas — a few miles away from the overstretched and overly busy Diggy Palace during the JLF.
The initial BookMark in January 2014 saw forty speakers and some big names from the world of publishing. John Makinson, chairman, Penguin Random House; Alexandra Pringle, group editor-in-chief Bloomsbury discussed a range of issues with popular retail booksellers like Anuj Bahri and Paul Yamazaki as well as authors and artists like Paro Anand and Dayanita Singh. Norla also brought to the table a number of Norwegian authors in the non fiction, fiction, children and young adults categories for translation into Indian languages.
Judith Oriol, book attache of the Institut Francais brings to India her knowledge and interest in international and French literature.
The guest country at the WBF 2013 is one of the most vocal champions of author and publisher rights and has taken on the might of the digital giants through proactive legislation. “The French are trying to bring to India their rich repository of literature and culture as well as authors, publishers and thinkers. I am really amazed to see crowds of 500 plus people listening to philosophers and speakers at Jaipur and the young and old interacting with the authors and even asking them many questions,” says Oriol.
