With the exception of upmarket literature, almost all books are commissioned now. That is, publishers invite authors to write for a particular segment of the market and provide a detailed brief of what needs to go into the book. Unsolicited manuscripts are rarely accepted. Those that are taken on are heavily edited to suit the requirements of the market.
Some author briefs may be very detailed, such as down-market fiction or crime/violence/ soft porn — now a sub-division of the entertainment industry. In such books, there is a detailed breakdown of chapters to enable spin-offs into TV sitcoms or films.
The raison d’être behind this is simple: publishers say they know the market and its needs, and therefore, authors should deliver as required. Three questions arise. Do publishers really have a feel for the market when it is known to be highly unpredictable? Second, does the author’s fulfilment of the brief ensure the publication of the book ? Or are there some other criteria that determine the final decision to publish or not? Third, can the publisher or author back out of the ‘deal’? If so, what are these contingencies?
The brief that forms the basis of the book depends not only on the editorial and marketing team, but also on the wholesale and retail trade, a cross-section of the ‘common reader’ and the academic community, librarians and so on. This exercise, which is a kind of market research, is then incorporated into the final brief for the author.
But it is the publisher’s hunch that decides whether a book would work. The history of publishing is full of rejection slips that went on to become bestsellers. And its reverse: stories of huge advances that flopped. For instance, George Orwell’s Animal Farm was rejected by T.S. Eliot for Faber in Britain (he was their reader) for being “politically incorrect”, and in America because “Americans didn’t like animal stories”. Similarly, many advances failed to recover production and publicity costs.
Many factors go into the success and failure of a book: its timing, relevance (which can mean anything from pure entertainment to professional advancement), price, trade terms, marketing and publicity, and ‘packaging’. But even if all these are in place, you can still come up against the ‘hidden hand’.
In India, this intangible is the quality of writing. There are many books that have worked in India not because the content was good or served a specific purpose, but because the language was understood by the common reader.
You might ask, whose fault is it that a commissioned work doesn’t come off? It is the publisher’s, who hadn’t done enough homework on the author’s ability to deliver. All the same, don’t shoot the pianist, he did his best.
