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Magazine
Between the lines
RUKUN ADVANI
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The story of breakaways and startups ... which needn't mean failure.
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OON after Bill Clinton finished being president, he chose a publisher for his memoirs. It appears Clinton made the choice with two main factors in mind: the amount of money on offer, and the editor he would work with. Since the money was going to be astronomical regardless of the publishing house he opted for, it boiled down to Clinton getting himself the editor he considered best for the purpose of giving shape and direction to his manuscript — even though Clinton's English, unlike George Bush's and Ronald Reagan's, has never given anyone the impression of yet another half-witted American president. Until my colleague and I began our own publishing company, I had never quite appreciated the importance that even writers already adept with the English language often attach to editorial skills when choosing a publisher. We possessed no brand name, we had nothing like the financial and marketing resources that large publishers normally command, and, apart from the generosity of a reputed publishing house which agreed to distribute our books, we had absolutely nothing to offer authors other than a certain amount of experience in tailoring sentences and paragraphs into coherent chapters.
So the key question for us as editorial entrepreneurs was: would a sufficient number of the best academic authors forsake well established imprints and entrust their scripts to us merely because we had small-time reputations for craftiness with prose? We were not just surprised by the response: almost before we knew it we were, literally and metaphorically, overwhelmed by the books that came our way. We are, of course, a completely insignificant part of a very large story. This is the story of breakaways and startups.
Many years back, there was a "scandal" in the advertising industry when Tara Sinha set up her own agency and carried away some big accounts from her former employers.
Breakaways were, in those days, known as scandals. Now, of course, this sort of entrepreneurial move is almost the norm rather than the exception — and not only in advertising. One of the most wonderful essays I've ever read is called "Two Young Men Who Went West" by Tom Wolfe (best known for Bonfire of the Vanities), in his collection titled Hooking Up (Picador, 2000). The essay is really a short history of the Intel Corporation, which was set up by two electronic engineers, Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore.
Noyce and Gordon cut their teeth in a large corporation which was good at making electronic chips small, and then smaller and smaller, until they nearly weren't there at all, and at compressing more and more information into these virtual nothingnesses. The original huge factory in which they started life was dedicated to creating these almost-absences that now comprise the soul of computers, and had itself begun life as a startup. In a few years Noyce and Gordon's teeth were so well cut, they looked so sharp, that they cut loose from their factory and started their own. In nearly no time their silica too gelled into a new corp, called Intel, which is now perhaps the largest maker of chips outside Macdonald's. The point, according to the Americans, is that if you're good at your business, you get good business. The story of Noyce and Gordon in Wolfe's essay looks like a parable of the creation of USA Inc. — from a sometime bunch of rebellious upstarts to a nation of sometimes revolutionary startups. When a hairdresser moves her shop, if you care about your hair and she's been trimming it well, you'll probably go the new distance with her. If your tailor's been giving you a smarty-pants look for years on end, the chances are you'll tail his shop to its new location. It looks rather as if authors, like anyone else, are willing to move house with their preferred editors even if their editors are not as fully equipped with corporate paraphernalia as the large corporates. In a world of convergence and compression — in business as much as computer chips — publishing houses everywhere are increasingly run as adjuncts of media empires by salesmen-barbarians who have, metaphorically, never read a book in their lives.
Reasonably often, however, authors seem to like publishing houses run by people who have read a book or two. This preference for "editorial" over "marketing" is, of course, true in a limited way, with marketing and hype being vital nowadays. It is also truer for academic authors — for whom excellent peer reviews are professionally more important than massive sales (academic sales are seldom huge) — than for those who write fiction in the hope that their novels will become bestsellers. Yet this preference can be true in the fiction-writing community too. When an editorial group specialising in fiction set up Bloomsbury, they enticed enough of their author friends to make the new enterprise a success, and eventually landed themselves J.K. Rowling. The publishing business, like any other, relies heavily on a combination of proven skill and a history of good relationships with customers — in this case, authors. In a context such as ours, where the largest number of author-customers need exceptional services in a language which is seldom instinctively their own, the desire to stick with people or to try out people who have tinkered meaningfully with your tongue can be exceptional. Indian publishing is in fact riddled with breakaways and startups comprising personnel whose major qualification is a record of delivering sentences that add up to very much more than their sales figures. You don't have to be Bill Clinton to know that an editor's work is seldom just cosmetic. For every professional editor, on the other hand, Clinton's acknowledgement that even his prose needs a good editor seems proof of his possessing the sort of intelligence that recent American presidents, as well as heads of publishing corporates, seem to lack.
Rukun Advani is the author of Beethoven Among the Cows and runs a publishing company Permanent Black based in Ranikhet and Delhi.
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