Among the many changes that the pandemic has brought to their workplaces listed by the speakers, the first faced delays in payments. “The advances were coming late. The payment schedule was also one-sided for the contracts. The publisher was unwilling to pay a lot of money,” Kanishk said. However, he believes that the pandemic years are the best years for him as a literary agent because he could take the time to read the manuscripts calmly, in addition to his own writing. While Swati applauds this for giving a much needed break from the deadline to the deadline. Did the job, prompting them and such people to step back and review their lists as publishers and reflect on what they’re actually doing. “It pushed us to find new ways of dealing with things. We were suddenly discovering new ways, new ideas and we were asking the question, ‘Things have changed so much, what would people be reading,'” it adds. It was like guessing.”
Pragya, who belongs to a slightly different but related field, said that reading as a habit came to the fore during the pandemic, especially for children. Children’s books, graphic novels and regional books were some of the genres that saw phenomenal growth in sales. However, the fact that she was able to provide a platform of sales to the affected businessmen was her major source of satisfaction.
While the definition of a good read was not immediately affected by dynamic conditions and did not change contemporaneously; The change in the latter half of the sale with respect to specific styles can hardly be missed. Pragya also highlighted how travel restrictions forced people to read travel to feed their wanderlust. Speaking about the downside of the pandemic for the publishing industry, Kanishk spoke about how new writers have suffered. Elaborating further, Swati, as editor, added to the difficulty of bringing new writers into the limelight and expanding their reach to a more diverse audience. The present generation can be defined by digitization. Everything from clothes to groceries can be accessed at your doorstep with a single click. Books are easily accessible in the form of audios and e-books. During a time when the world came to a standstill and we were all locked inside our homes, a marked increase in sales of these alternative forms of reading can be easily expected. However, it was a shocking revelation that physical books continued to outperform their digital contemporaries despite the lack of accessibility during the pandemic.
In addition to accessibility, discoverability is a major concern for online sales platforms like Amazon, where the presence of multiple titles prevents list building. To solve this problem, the concept of book market was brought on the Internet. Pragya elaborates, “India has been home to these quirky book markets over the years. They are spread across the streets of many cities, but during the pandemic, we have partnered with thousands of booksellers across India to bring their experience online.”
Partnerships and alliances also became imperative for publishing houses to overcome the barriers holding back new authors. Swati said, “We could not shut down our social media by promoting every book, so we had to resort to alliances and publicity.”
The session concluded with speakers addressing the widening gap between bestsellers in the space of foreign authors and new Indian authors. “If the literary fiction doesn’t get any award or recognition or any kind of recognition from the West, it won’t sell more than 500 or 1000 copies,” said Kanishk, whose tone was a mixture of despair and sadness. Suggesting a viable solution to the problem, he said, “We need to develop Stephen King and JK Rowling in our house.” And we couldn’t agree more!
(Byline: Bhavya Sharma)
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