Metro Reads Posts

Metro Reads, Penguin Books India’s commercial fiction list, 2 Sept 2012

Metro Reads, Penguin Books India’s commercial fiction list, 2 Sept 2012

(This article was published in the Hindu Literary Review on 2 Sept 2012. Here is the link: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-literaryreview/article3849375.ece )

Rajni blew her hair away from her face. My heart skipped a beat. ‘I love you!’ I blurted out. Her cheeks turned a deep pink. I could sense that her anger had completely disappeared.

Anup, a happy-go-lucky boy next door, finds himself a misfit in an IT company. On the bright side, he has great friends in office—Chetan, Subbu and Parag—to help him out of sticky situations. Also, in the same office is the love of his life, Rajni. But Rajni’s strict family and her paranoia of tongue-wagging colleagues play villain in their love story forcing him to be satisfied with clandestine meetings, secret phone conversations and emails. Just as Anup decides to turn over a new leaf, sinister happenings at work force him to take some life-changing decisions—to quit his job and pursue his long-cherished dream of becoming a writer; and also, to marry Rajni.
Love Over Coffee by Amrit N. Shetty

‘All these bangers have gone and simply put us in trouble.’
I blinked. ‘Bangers?’
‘All those foreign bangers, you know,’ he said. ‘Recession, sub-prime, liquidity crunch. All bloody bakwaas. Making a fool of us.’
I remained silent. I hoped he wouldn’t ask me about my work!
Jack Patel’s Dubai Dreams by P.G. Bhaskar

Metro Reads. A list of commercial fiction established by Penguin Books India that has gained sufficient significance in less than two years to be granted its own space as an imprint. (It now boasts of its own logo!) It was established in January 2010 with Love Over Coffee by Amrit N. Shetty; Where Girls Dare by Bhavna Chauhan and Dreams in Prussian Blue by Paritosh Uttam. According to its website, these books “do not weigh you down with complicated stories, don’t ask for much time or do not required to be lugged about”, they are “fun, feisty and easy-to-read” books. This is a list that encompasses all genres – chik lit, murder mysteries, “romance-thriller” etc. According to Vaishali Mathur, Commissioning Editor, Metro Reads, “We felt that there was a great need in the market to have books for the youth. The college students and the working population which finds difficult to read heavy literature and prefers to read books that they enjoy, storylines that they can relate to and characters whom they can identify with. Penguin Metro Reads basically publishes what the reader would enjoy rather than what we as publishers would like them to read.” Earlier about 8-10 books a year were being published, but due to the great response from the readers, in 2012 the number has grown over a hundred per cent to about 20 titles. To put this in perspective, it is one-third more than the average output of a successful independent publisher.

Vaishali adds that most of “these authors are new as this imprint encourages them. In the past two years we’ve published more than thirteen new authors, but we are publishing Ravinder Singh’s Can Love Happen Twice? in December and this is his second book. With a target audience of 18-35 year olds, it does tend to blur the lines between young adult and trade fiction, and yet, it has created a neat little identity of its own. The tag line for these books is that it is meant “For the Reader on the Go”. The average sales of this list are doing well and if stories doing the rounds of publishing are to be believed, then even the pre-order sales of some titles are phenomenally robust. More often than not, these books work on volume sales. Some of the biggest bestsellers of this list have been Madhuri Bannerjee’s Losing My Virginity and Other Dumb Ideas, Love Over Coffee, and P.G. Bhasker’s Jack Patel’s Dubai Dreams. Last December, Ravinder Singh’s Can Love Happen Twice? has sold over two lakh copies. It has also been translated into Hindi. Considering the range of genres it tackles it has the potential of doing well overseas as well, especially amongst the Indian diaspora. Having said that, the rights of some of these books have only been sold into Malayalam, otherwise customers have been buying their copies directly from India.

Metro Reads has a distinctive identity with its snazzy book covers in pure colours and the edge of the pages painted red (very reminiscent of the Georgette Heyer books published in the 1950s). With Metro Reads, Penguin Books India is tapping a niche market that is growing rapidly. It consists of more than thirty per cent of the population that is literate, and eager to read in English and improve their language skills. Plus they have the disposable income (and plastic money) to buy what appeals to them at an impulse. These books are largely conversation-driven plots, with barely any use of nuanced language, but edited well, so easy to read. Reading light fiction also helps to kill time while commuting daily to work or stuck for long hours in a long distance journey. In a sense, after eighty years, Sir Allen Lane’s vision of high quality paperback fiction being made available to the mass market, at an affordable price and edited well is finally coming true. Yet, it does take away from the personalized attention of an editor once the list begins to grow at this rapid pace.

Vaishali is extremely upbeat about this imprint and the future plans for it are plenty. “We already have readers who identify with this imprint and want to read books published under it. We also have writers who send their manuscripts for this imprint. We are already working with the vision of building a stronger author list, introducing more and more variety by publishing in different genres of commercial writing, making the brand stronger.”

The Reader, my column in Books & More

The Reader, my column in Books & More

Reader

The sheer pleasure of immersing oneself in a book, flipping through its pages, dipping into it in parts, inhaling the heavenly smell of ink and freshly printed pages, stroking the cover to feel the design, are all part of the experience for me. It is fast becoming an equally thrilling adventure for my twenty-eight-month-old daughter, Sarah. She brings out her books and says, “Mummy padho.” What I find exhilarating is to see Sarah browse through the books that I owned as a child, to discover a fascinating new world. The spine of the book maybe falling apart, the pages have turned yellow and there are doodles done by me in pencil, years ago, but The Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh continues to enchant Sarah, representative of a new generation of readers. These are tangible objects that she can touch, feel, flip the pages, trace the images and letters with her fingers, and crumple the pages…the first step to reading, recognising alphabets, words and creating a language and becoming a reader herself.

The modern reader, however, is faced with an over-abundance of choice. Today the market is flooded with books. There is a variety that is available to suit all reading sensibilities. Publishers are willing to experiment and develop lists, especially in the category of mass market fiction after the phenomenal (commercial) success of Chetan Bhagat, Advaita Kala or of Penguin’s Metro Reads. There is an abundance of fiction dealing with years spent in college or school like Arjun Rao’s Third Best or Amandeep Sandhu’s forthcoming novel, Roll of Honour. There is a wonderful variety in crime fiction ranging from Steig Larsson, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Lee Child, Madhulika Liddle, Andrew Lane, and Jo Nesbo to name a few. For a niche genre like historical fiction, Indian fiction in English is spoilt for riches with Indu Sundaresan’s Taj Trilogy, Chitra Bannerjee Divakurni’s Victory Song, Greta Rana’s Rana Women of Nepal, Alex Rutherford’s Empire of the Mughal series and an old one (but a classic) of Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold.

There are finer distinctions like chick-lit and narrative non-fiction that are doing well, but it does beg to ask the question, what is the profile of the reader of [for?] this literature. Who is this person/s? Who is buying these books? In spite of experimentation, publishers are careful of their bottom line and do not necessarily publish all that comes their way. Yet the examples cited illustrate that professional editors still have a good sense of the kind of books that will sell.

The other solution is to reach out to readers, make them part of the process. The internet and the blogosphere provide a range of opinions and at times provide a platform for literary tastemakers [who] to inform and shape the discourse. It is especially important for publishers to continually create a new generation of readers. It happens by creating targeted marketing campaigns, fostering and nurturing literary spaces. Literary soirees and book-launch parties are fashionable, but an engagement with the readers is a long term relationship. These could start early (as is happening with Sarah) or via book clubs, literary societies in institutions, or even literary festivals. The presence of efficient online book retailers that ensure an order gets shipped anywhere, anytime and at a reasonable cost to a customer, will only strengthen the reading environment. Today, with books available in a variety of formats, makes the profile of a reader even more difficult to ascertain. Yet, it is an exciting challenge for publishers. Anil Menon, author of The Beast with Nine Billion Feet says “reading might (in future) be a social act. A print book enforces a solitary experience. But I’ve noticed that when I’m reading on the Kindle, I can access other people’s comments if I feel like it. The solitary reader may be a thing of the past. Books written to facilitate social reading might be different from books written for the solitary reader. Children’s books– very young children– are already designed to be read by parents and children together. I can imagine books for teens written to be enjoyed in a group.” All these factors can only add up to the growing significance of the reader, who forms the market.

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose is an international publishing consultant.

(p.58, Books and More, June-July 2012)

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