Publishers’ darling

Book publishing being a complicated affair, two questions have always troubled Indian publishers: the size of the book and the number of copies for the first edition. These questions determine the success or failure of the book, measured by the only criteria that matter today: sales and profits. The number of pages determines the investment on printing the required number of copies; the print run determines the unit cost and hence the price.

The bigger the book, the higher the investment, the larger the print run and the lower the unit cost thanks to economies of scale. Every publisher has his own answers to the two questions based on experience and hunches. All the same, are there any pointers to go by, and if so, what are these?

Size has always been a sticky question because our authors overwrite and are extremely sensitive to editorial trimmings. Verbosity, and perhaps our oral tradition, keep Indian authors from clear, precise writing.

What goes out and what stays is, of course, the author’s prerogative. However, most of the recent works of fiction and non-fiction (especially autobiographies and memoirs) would be twice as good if they were half as long.

Authors complain that Indian publishers do not have the expertise to ‘cut and paste’. Although this is partly true there have been editors who have reshaped copy without tampering with the unity of the work or its style.

If authors feel that editors have been insensitive (or incompetent), they do not realize that, with so many distractions, no reader wants to read more than is required. The editorial principle is not what you need to put in but what you can no longer take out. There is a lot that could be profitably left out by purging sentences of useless words and paragraphs of useless sentences. This does not mean lopping off whole chapters but only shortening them without destroying the connections and interconnections.

With authors reluctant to accept the suggested cuts gracefully and publishers anxious to meet their production quotas, manuscripts go through in their original forms, with a few cosmetic changes at best.

Determining the print run for the first edition is also a tricky business. There are no hard and fast rules to determine the size of the market and how best to exploit it. Despite the standard marketing procedures such as pre-publication publicity it is difficult to calculate how many people would actually buy the book.

If it is difficult to determine the sales potential of retail outlets, it is so much more difficult to estimate individual buyers. With volatile markets and their bottom-line philosophy, publishers do not want to handle more than they can chew. Why print more when advances in print technology can ensure reprints within days?