Print Only on Demand

As the publishing world goes through an overhaul, the quality of our books hits a new low. First in a series of articles, Nidhi Dugar Kundalia finds the cost of mergers and consolidations of big publishing houses, beyond their price stickers.

Last month, I was rootling through a stack of books and catalogues sent in by publishing houses for book reviews. Amid the dusty necropolis where self-published poems, almanacs and desi pulp fiction had come to rest, there was a major publishing house’s catalogue of the term Oct-Dec,2013. How to Keep Your Man Happy by Seema Hingorrany was one of their fetching books. Beneath it, a blurb said ‘a practical’, ‘hands-on’ relationship guide that ‘Will help make your man stay put, forever.’ Now if I wasn’t being curmudgeonly, that would have perhaps humoured me.

I flipped through briefs of novels spattered with margarita and sunscreen, through those ubiquitous pastel covers and titles with illustrations of students smoking on non-descript rooftops.  There was The Love Diet by Shonali Sabherwal, with insightful notes from ‘celebrity clients’- ‘The Love Diet is your go-to book for advice and solutions on how to feel happy and sexy.’ How Not to Make Money by Raj Kundra, who very explicitly stated a while back in an interview that his favourite author in India is Chetan Bhagat and otherwise, he doesn’t get time to read much. And of course, a book that seemed a best seller from the word go- ‘Hair Yoga- Caring for Your Hair the Right Way’ by Jawed Habib. There was all this and this was it.

Perhaps my reasons are ostensibly rooted in literary snobbery, but it is a question worth asking – where has the literary fiction disappeared? I’m not talking about the books which are soaked in Booker-type praise but even the light, unimportant para literary fiction without a cringe worthy label.

An overarching reality that is determining the potential course of book publishing, lucid and inescapable, is the scale of operations – the ability to use size as a competitive advantage in any venture. In the 20th century, scale in publishing was really just an internal notion. Big publishers had more resources to sign books, get to bookstores, and roll out marketing than smaller ones. Crossword and Landmark had supply chain and cost advantages over independent bookstores. But a single operator could still get enough editors to make a genuine case that he or she could place a book as efficiently as the giants.

But that’s changed entirely in the past 10 years. Now publishing operates in a world increasingly controlled by Amazon, Apple, and Google, all companies that make far more money outside of books than through books. The conception of Penguin Random House, and the crux of our story, is partly a response to unparalleled pressures on these “legacy” publishers — especially from Amazon, which came out on the winning end of an antitrust lawsuit over the setting of e-book prices. It is also a way to gain power and funds in an industry that has been hit by changing tides of time. This endgame may be predestined, but its penalties can hardly be ignored.

Think of fewer assortments among books. Envisage less personality. And then think of a relentless conveyor belt of paperbacks that will enforce this lack of character. Take this- Twenty five releases in three months by one of the Big Five publishing house, of which five are chick lits, five are on losing weight and eight are self help books. That’s the new-fangled dystopian world of publishing.

Calling their union ‘the world’s first truly global trade book publishing company,’ Penguin and Random House merged into a publishing company that will control about half the most commercial titles in the marketplace. The Guardian reported a while back that after Penguin and Random House’s merger earlier this year, the merger has created a “powerhouse with £2.6bn in sales a year that will control 25 percent of the world’s book publishing industry, with around 250 imprints. All this will allow the company to publish 5,000 new books a year.” The finalisation of the merger – which was first announced a year back– came days after Hachette announced it was buying the Hyperion adult imprint. While that in virtual terms is a smaller deal, it continues a  business model that worries – the swallowing-up of smaller publishers by bigger ones, thus leading to a monopolised publishing industry less willing to take on unproven new authors or publish works that have literary value but might not count up to “Harry Potter”-level sales.

So many books are being published – positively, more than ever – that predicting a blanket decline in quality would be silly. But whether literary society is best served by the ceaseless centralisation of publishing is a question worth asking. What do these thousands of books published by one giant look like?

Think of fewer assortments among books. Envisage less personality. And then think of a relentless conveyor belt of paperbacks that will enforce this lack of character. Take this- Twenty five releases in three months by one of the Big Five publishing house, of which five are chick lits, five are on losing weight and eight are self help books. That’s the new-fangled dystopian world of publishing.

Decades of consolidation have cost writers and consumers alike. And although Penguin Random House executives insist in interviews that they will continue to compete at auctions for manuscripts, not everyone is convinced. There is, for one, the constant gripe of writers and agents that companies either outlaw (as at Penguin) or put a ceiling on (at Random House) their constituent imprints from bidding against one another for a manuscript. That means fewer options for writers to get the kind of painstaking attention from editorial team, PR, marketing and distribution that it takes to turn their manuscripts into something valuable.

Consolidation also carries costs you won’t find on a price sticker. Dozens of formerly independent firms have been folded into this conglomerate: not just Penguin Ananda, Hamish Hamilton (which under its original owner, gave the world J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye) and Viking, which still wield significant resources, but also storied names like Jonathan Cape and Jeremy P. Tarcher. Many of these have been reduced to meager imprints; trademark stamped on a book’s title page, though every good imprint bears the faint mark of a long-gone firm with its own aim and receptivity.

Among the imprints that have endured, the tendency is to homogenise and focus on a few general fields like ambitious non-fiction, chick lits or thrillers. “Legacy” publishers then do what they are best at doing- Losing a Kilo a Week by Nishi Grover.  It gets the advances needed for research, the editing flair to contour the writing and the marketing brawns to distribute those doorstop biographies on Friendship Days.

The Big Five have been so busy reducing old publishers to brands that they’ve neglected the idea of what a brand should mean. Can any reader tell a Pantheon from a Riverhead book? The logo does not do the trick. The worth of a publishing house — and now an imprint — has been its objective of a gatekeeper. Only that in the past, the gatekeeper wasn’t a cabal but a cacophony, competing head to head.

Meanwhile, the new Penguin Random House logo is up on their respective websites-  a giant penguin looking away from a house ,a gauche fusion of two logos.  It’s of course a necessary visual negotiation, a sign of regard for the two of the world’s biggest publishing houses. But maybe Random Penguin, as a few of the circulating gags suggest, would have been perhaps a more fitting name.