21.10.16
www.thebookseller.com
FEATURE INDIAN AGENTING
15
Indian agents in the media. In a piece for a major daily newspaper, DNA, a leading publisher wrote: “Many a time the manuscripts that agents send haven’t even been edited. Often, agents just throw everything at you, hoping some of it will stick. There’s no real qualitative difference from unsolicited submissions.” In a piece on Indian agents in
the country’s English-language newspaper Hindu, a commissioning editor proclaimed how he hadn’t
‘‘
INDIA’S TOP 20
TITLE
1 Harry Potter and the Cursed Child 2 Word Power Made Easy 3 Quantitative Aptitude 4 Manorama Yearbook 2016 5 Our Impossible Love 6 The Alchemist 7 Half Girlfriend 8 Wings of Fire
9 To Kill a Mockingbird
10 The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari 11 Think and Grow Rich 12 Scion of Ikshvaku
13 Who Will Cry When You Die? 14 Objective General English 15 Everyone Has a Story
16 How to Win Friends and Influence People 17 Rich Dad Poor Dad
18 And Then There Were None 19 She Swiped Right into My Heart 20
Mrs Funnybones Source: BookScan India, 36 weeks to 24th September 2016
of editorial intervention in the drafts. One is tempted to ask editors how many Man Booker or Pulitzer winners they themselves have discovered and groomed, and not just had the chance to publish by virtue of being a part of a global publishing behemoth.
An Indian agent often has to contend with submissions that have already done the rounds of some publishing houses
commissioned a single book from an agent to date. He later added “but what is the point of signing up authors left, right and centre? Yes, you have an Amitav Ghosh. But what are agents doing to create another Ghosh? The point is to commission, not acquire.” Those who have been making such
pronouncements sitting on their high horses don’t realise that, unlike powerful foreign agents who have been around forever, Indian agents seldom have access to world-class authors and writing. Often this is what results in a certain rawness and roughness around the edges of submissions, not a lack
AUTHOR
Rowling, J K et al Lewis, Norman Aggarwal, R S
Mathew & Manorama Datta, Durjoy Coelho, Paulo Bhagat, Chetan
Tiwari, Arun & Abul Kalam Lee, Harper
Sharma, Robin S Hill, Napoleon Amish
Sharma, Robin S Bakshi, S P
Sharma, Savi Carnegie, Dale
Kiyosaki, Robert T Christie, Agatha Nagarkar, Sudeep Khanna, Twinkle
PUBLISHER
Little, Brown Goyal
S Chand
Manorama Penguin
HarperCollins Rupa
Universities Press Arrow
Jaico Publishing House Amazing Reads Westland Jaico
Arihant
Westland Vermilion Plata
HarperCollins Random House Penguin
WESTERN LEANINGS A few publishers in India are also inherently biased towards submissions from UK and US agents. One publisher told me he couldn’t offer a UK/US agent less than a certain amount of money because then they would be left with very little after the currency conversion. That an Indian agent is generally left with even less doesn’t make much of a difference to them. Because of direct commissioning,
many well-known authors sell Indian subcontinent rights directly and leave the herculean and near-impossible task of finding a UK or US publisher to the Indian agent. Some authors also sell the lucrative English-language rights directly and expect agents to sell the rights in different Indian languages, where the usual first print run is a thousand copies, and the advance a princely sum of INR20,000–30,000 (£250). Authors also haggle over the standard (and globally accepted) 15% agent commission. Several authors are not comfortable with agents getting anything more than a fixed percentage of commission from the advance royalty. How does an Indian agent work around these seemingly
ISBN
9780751565355 9788183071000 9788121924986 9789383197903 9780143424611 9788172234980 9788129135728 9788173711466 9780099549482 9788179921623 9788192910918 9789385152146 9788179922323 9789351768449 9789386036759 9780091906351 9781612680019 9780007282319 9788184007459 9780143424468
A.S.P. (INR) VOLUME
631.95 120,462 123.56 421.01 264.86 115.45 199.04 119.64 193.16 208.42 126.80 79.61
220.48 102.66 189.27 87.91
115.33 208.79 113.95 114.59 209.60
81,842 49,442 47,955 47,903 47,104 46,174 45,532 37,639 37,020 36,296 34,667 34,659 34,429 33,755 33,339 32,818 30,907 30,611 28,503
insurmountable issues? The answer is by being ingenious, proactive, creative and aggressive. In order to survive as an agent in India, one has to don the hat of a commissioning editor and approach authors with ideas and offers before a publisher can. While representation by a foreign agent promises a global deal and access to lots of top prizes, it is limited to only a certain kind of high- end literary fiction and non-fiction. A US or UK agent will not have the right sensibility for 90% of the books published in India. It is this segment that I have been targeting. There is the occasional stellar
literary fiction and non-fiction title that crosses my table too, because not all authors are enamoured of foreign representation and realise that, when it comes to the subcontinent, an Indian agent is on par with any global agency. India is not a market where one can
survive by selling a dozen books a year. It is important to achieve volume, and
in order to do that an agent should be open to all genres, so long as they are good and marketable. In order to be a full-time agent in India, one has to sell a minimum of 80–100 books a year, a large number by any standard, but very much possible. It is also important to have transparent communication channels, and to contribute to the book and communicate with its author at every stage. While it is true that every agent has to do this, an Indian agent must pay even more attention to it because of the constant threat of losing our authors to publishers.
Kanishka Gupta is the c.e.o. and founder of New Delhi literary agency Writer’s Side
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32