My ten wishes for the book trade in India
In 2004, when I co-founded Yoda Press with an old friend, it felt like my most heartfelt wish had come true. It was almost unreal to plan an entirely new-fangled list of books sitting in our lovely Dickensian terrace office in Connaught Place. We seemed to be on the verge of something exciting and daunting at the same time. The exhilaration of the first book launch event in 2005 which was attended by doyens of the publishing trade like Ravi Dayal, Tejeshwar Singh, Surit Mitra, and Sukumar Das, all of whom I have been fortunate enough to be mentored by at some point or the other, soon turned into the adrenaline rush of the daily grind of making a niche list work. There was no social media yet; the biggest threat that we were all facing was the one posed by chain bookstores; and going digital was something we thought we had to worry about in the sci-fi future.
We were founded with an alternative publishing vision, aimed at creating lists around subjects which were not a priority for other publishers in India, even though they had acquired a critical presence in contemporary discourse, authorship and an audience, such as sexuality, popular culture, cities and urbanism, architecture as a lived experience, and new perspectives in Indian history and sociology. In 2005, after the publication of Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India (edited by Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan), Yoda Press came to be widely known as the LGBT publisher of South Asia. Indeed, it was the only publisher with a dedicated sexualities series in South Asia at that time.
The press also joined with a few big and small discerning houses in initiating efforts to commission writing in the emerging creative non-fiction genre in South Asia, publishing nuanced and well-researched non-fiction narratives written with imagination and without academic jargon and pedantry. In 2011, we launched a trade list with titles on travel, food and memoir, which once again make evident our belief that popular writing need not lose its innate complexity and experimental capacity to be of interest to readers.
The ten years I have run the press has also been the decade when books became synonymous with "content" and the leap from paper to digital established itself in a determined sort of manner. Running a niche indie press remains tough even now, but the parameters themselves have changed considerably. As I keep saying, online selling, digital printing, and eBooks are for now levelling the field, and helping indie publishers experiment and grow. What the next ten years hold for this community of professionals who have always been famous for excessive navel-gazing could be anybody's guess. Although I am wagering that publishers need to start thinking of themselves less as gatekeepers and more as service-providing professionals if they want to survive the next decade. But birthdays are about candles and wishes, not hard business guesstimates. So here's my wish-list as we turn ten:
1. That discerning reading audiences interested in niche books got more effectively connected over social media. Being an indie publisher, one is always aware that growing our niche market is a constant battle. It would be really wonderful if in our era of maximum connectivity, readers interested in indie publishing in Chennai, Brisbane, Addis Ababa, Missouri were efficiently connected over social media and we could reach them about our books in one shot.
2. That independent publishers in India come together to form a collective which efficiently and productively promotes them and makes it possible for them to participate in book events and fairs across the world. Really, it's time we had our own functioning and proactive Independent Publishers Group which acts professionally and does not get bashed in by our individual egos.
3. That institutions in India understood the value of the work independent publishers are doing, particularly since we don't have a university press system here and indie presses are involved extensively in academic publishing in India. Institutional tie-ups have kept important independent presses going in places like New York, Paris and Singapore, where support has been provided via grants, co-publishing, and office space. It's time some of this started happening here as well.
4. That the Indian government too understands that the publishing industry is an industry, and a most important cultural entity which should be nurtured and given space to grow and flourish.
5. That foreign language presses across the world wanting to get their lists translated to English realised that Indian publishers have the capacity to do the most wonderful English translations from almost any language in the world. So selling English-language rights to an Indian publisher is a wise thing to do.
6. That more Indian languages get translated not just into English but other Indian languages. This cross-fertilisation is so important, and it's about time we sat up and made it happen.
7. That the book trade would stop being paranoid about the onset of the "digital" era and instead revel in being the generation that is enjoying the best of both worlds. Print is not going away in a hurry even as exciting experimentation is happening at a furious pace in the digital space. This is a great time to be a reader and a publishing professional.
8. That book retail spaces morph into spaces of book culture which readers visit not just to buy a product but to soak in the entire experience.
9. That readers in India started paying (even small amounts) for book events.
10. That authors magically understood that if we don't take calls very often because we are almost always editing or reading manuscripts.
Celebrating the Alternative in Writing - Ten years of Yoda Press will see readings, discussions, talks, dastangoi and more, on November 21, at Max Mueller Bhavan, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi, 3pm-10pm.