CEO Anantha Padmanabhan Shares how HarperCollins Creates it’s Yearly Catalogue

This is part of a series of conversations from The Bound Publishing Course, India’s first comprehensive course on book, magazine and digital publishing.  This article covers the best insights from an hour-long discussion with Anantha Padmanabhan, where he took us through the inner workings of one of the big five publishing houses of India, and the intricacies of what goes into creating a book from start to finish.  Click here to apply for the 2024 edition.

Anantha Padmanabhan is the Chief Executive Officer of HarperCollins India, the most awarded publisher in the country. His career and love for books both started in 1992 while working at a bookstore in Chennai. After being appointed as the CEO of HarperCollins, he has been working to expand his publishing footprint. He is also actively involved in policy making to create a level playing field for Indian Publishing, protecting author’s rights in terms of Copyright and Infringement, and ensuring fair pricing in the market.

ENTERING PUBLISHING

1. How did you get into publishing?

I grew up in a home where my father was a big reader, so I grew up reading Ludlum, Desmond Baglet and Colin Forbes. I would also read commando comics and other action books. I started working in a bookstore at age 16 or 17, but even before that, my father ran a lending library, so there were always books at home. As a reader, there is a certain hierarchy of things that influence what you read. It depends on which kind of school you go to, are your parents reading, do your friends read, which city you grew up in and so on. 

 

Your cultural context and cultural choices play a very large part in the kind of books you choose to read when you grow up. 

2. What is your role within HarperCollins as a CEO?

When you become the chief executive of a publishing house, there are many divisions that need to be taken care of, such as editorial, finance and operations, sales, marketing, production, and so on. All of these functional divisions of a publishing house will report to one person. My primary job as CEO is to create a strategy for the immediate and long term future of the publishing house. That strategy will involve growth, brand management, and profitability so that we can invest in more books to create a vibrant catalogue. 

THE DAY TO DAY

1. How do you determine which books go into a catalogue for the year?

We have editorial teams that concentrate on different aspects of the publishing program. There are teams for different genres, different categories like non-fiction, literary fiction, children’s literature, lifestyle, business, and more. In each of these categories there is a large number of voices and authors. We pick a certain number of books from each category to be featured in the catalogue. For example, ten books will be part of the business category, six to eight books will be translations, and so on.

 

The editorial team at HarperCollins always tries to publish the best 200 books of the year.  Publishing is a human business, because what people read is their own personal choice, so we trust our editors’ choices and what they consider to be the best books in a particular category. All of us read books that we want to buy in the next year, and then we publish them. Sometimes it’s not about whether you like the book or not, it’s also about the commercial relationship. The agent and author have a certain publishing vision or ambition which has a broader base, and they sell their book to a particular house. All of these factors are considered when choosing the books to be published for the year, and at HarperCollins, 50% of our books are written by first-time writers. 

2. How does one develop the marketing strategy for a book?

It is always important to remember that when you work for a publishing house, you are working to sell a book so that it can be profitable. The heart of the matter is that you’ve published a book, it has a story, or an entertainment value. The people that you are trying to sell to are available at the end of their devices through whatever channels they follow. 

 

As a publishing house, it is your responsibility to take your author’s voice to as wide an audience as possible. Pure love for books will only take you so far, as harsh as the truth might be.

 

It is important to understand what each channel of media can achieve in terms of publishing and selling a book, and capitalise on that aspect of media, whether it is traditional or social media. For example, television is still influential in terms of marketing. If you put an author on a primetime interview, it will garner views and immediately push the book to number one.

 

Design is one of the most important things to think about when publishing a book. Publishing has to be sandwiched by seriously good design, a book can have good content but it has to have a great cover design to get people’s attention. Books are the perennial objects on people’s shelves, and it is important that they are designed well. Copy is also important to generate the right kind of interest. There has to be a one line elevator pitch for the edit meeting, which also becomes the catch-line to bring awareness by word of mouth.

3. What role does data play in publishing?

Like all organisations, publishing is also a beast. There are many things that need to come together to transfer a story on a single sheet of paper to a bound book. That process takes time, money, and innovation. I appreciate the colleagues over in financial operations, because data is very important. There is this tendency to have goldfish memories and only celebrate the last book that we’ve heard of.

 

Data tells us how many people have bought the book that you have heard of. Data tells you what Amazon AI says when it recommends other books from the same category, whether there are enough books like that, and whether the book has reached its optimum potential. Data can also tell you whether the book has sold throughout bookshops, which formats the book is sold in, and which language and region has it performed best in. 

 

Always ask for the data to understand the lifestyle and opportunity of a particular book. Marketing will give you valuable information about digital engagement, and bookstores will give you information on what has worked and not worked. This will help you determine the success and failure of your current project, and guide you on how to commission the next one. 

CHALLENGES

1. How can the big five of the publishing industry introduce translations, books written in regional languages, and marginalised voices to the general reading public?

I think it comes down to how you engage with publishing houses. For example, we have a newsletter called the Harper Broadcast in which we put out announcements of which books are coming out. This newsletter goes out to over 150,000 readers, and is the largest newsletter by an Indian publishing house. That is one way through which we promote our catalogue, but with the way social media controls what you are able to see, you do not get an idea of what is there in our entire catalogue.    To discover new voices, you must visit publishing catalogues, look through them and see what is new and exciting. It’s also important to know where you get your recommendations from, does your favourite bookseller send out recommendations for new books?    Writing a good book and getting it published is only 10% of the job, there is more work which needs to be done to make sure that the book reaches people, especially in a country like India.

2. How do you ensure that the books HarperCollins India publishes are at par with the rest of the offices of HarperCollins?

There is no difference in how India and America publish, they publish for an American audience, we publish for an Indian audience. There are books that we have published which have sold well in other markets, and around 70% of the books you see in an Indian bookstore have been published somewhere else. If we removed the author’s names, I don’t think a reader would be able to make the distinction of whether this was written in India or abroad.    In a large country like India with a large readership, there will always be gaps. The job of the publisher is to find out the interests of that reader, whether they like sci-fi, fantasy or romance. If you are looking for a book and bump into something by us, then the marketing has worked, the algorithm has worked, and we will sell more to you. 

ADVICE FOR THE FUTURE

1. What advice do you have for young people looking to enter the publishing industry?

Don’t wait to make your dreams of publishing come true. If you have a book that you love, and it has been edited and peer reviewed, don’t be afraid to publish it. It actually doesn’t cost that much to publish a book physically, and publishing an 80,000 word, 250 page, B Format, Paperback costs about 75 rupees per copy.    Funds can also be raised from social media. There is an imprint called Unbound which actually takes reader investment, because readers want to buy books which interest them, and they can decide how much they want to invest in what they want to read.   You don’t have to work in a big publishing house, or become a commissioning editor to publish a good book.    You can find a really good debut novel and make it big purely by marketing on social media. Innovation in publishing allows you to do things outside the traditional model.    The internet is a great resource for many things, a simple Google search can provide you with the contact information of people who can help you put a book together and design the cover. If you don’t know much about production you can go into audio or ebook publishing. There are so many ways to go about it, so if you have the intention don’t wait for the right time to make it happen.

In this in-depth interview, Anantha Padmanabhan sheds light on the different departments involved in the functioning of a large publishing house, and how all of them come together to create the books that we all love. He also shared how newcomers to the publishing industry can use innovation to their advantage.

 

The Bound Publishing Course is designed to help you understand India’s publishing scene and give you the resources you need to get started in publishing. It is a 3-month annual certified course that teaches you everything you need to know about India’s publishing and digital media landscape. The course will start from 14th September till 15th December. Applications are open now. Know more here.