How did you first get started in the publishing business?

Twenty years ago I was working in Bombay and there was a colleague I knew who had done a publishing course at Harvard. And she said, "Why don't you go there and check it out?" So I came to the States, and I did the course, and at the course was Peter Mayer, Chairman of Penguin world-wide. He said, "Look you're from India?" (I said "yeah"). He said he was thinking of starting a company in India and asked me, "Would you like to run it?"

I was then twenty-six years old, I'd never done a publishing company in my life, I had little or no idea, but when you're twenty-six years old sometimes you're foolishly confident about your abilities, so I said "yes." I went to Delhi where the office was going to be and I had never been there before, starting from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Delhi ? and there was nothing there. There were exactly 3 employees in the first year of operations and they invested ten thousand US dollars in the company in 1986. And that was it...Now Penguin India is Asia's largest English publishing company and has done over 10 million dollars in sales. It was quite an interesting experience and I had a ball! It kept growing and growing. It's so fascinating...Now every multinational is in India. Penguin was the first.

Can you tell us about the BUSINESS of publishing? (I think for most people it's a mystery veiled in secrecy and delusions of grandeur).

There is the myth that if you write a novel you'll become rich, famous, attractive to women, or whatever the case may be, but I think that's largely a myth. Very few books break out in a way such as God of Small Things and A Suitable Boy did because its only 1% who get to superstardom because they won a big prize or it's an amazing book and enough readers caught on to the fact. But think of the odds...There are about 100,000 books published every year. How on earth are you going to get each of those books to a reader's attention! Let's say you walk into a bookstore, you face the first novel that appears and you have no idea what it's about. There is so much competing for your attention. Most novels sell only about 400 or 500 copies. If it's a good seller it will sell 5000 copies if it won an award and got great reviews. It is only superstars that sell more and superstars are very few and every one knows who they are. The question we need to ask is why are there so few superstars? Why isn't every writer published famous? There isn't enough attention available for these writers. So that TV time, radio time, bookstore sales, all mitigate against every writer getting in.

Two or three industries suffer from the same thing, movie and TV, and music being closest to the book industry. Think of the tens of thousands of artists who've produced CDs and nobody's heard of them, and nobody will hear of them because that is the way the system works. So what happens say if you've written a book and you approach a publisher? Well normally you approach the publishing house through a literary agent because they are the top filter, and a top agent comes to me and says this is a wonderful book...I'll say I'll read it. But if you approach me directly you probably won't get through many of the sieves...there are assistants, there are people in the mailroom, and there are book manuscripts at the back because of overflow...everyone thinks they can write a book!

Finding a good agent is becoming increasingly tough because they too are inundated with manuscripts as well. The agent comes to us generating interest in a book and we have special editors, one specializes in Canadian writers; she says okay or no, I like it or don't like it. The book is brought to a meeting where she says she wants to pay this kind of money. You have a price on this book say $35 dollars, so the author will get a percentage royalty on every book sold. For a 10% royalty you will get $3.5 dollars on every copy sold. So what we will do, is advance the author, through his or her agent x amount of money, say $35,000 dollars because we expect to sell 5,000 or 6,000 hardback and 10,000 copies in paperback, so we figure its worth about $35,000. So it's not an outright gift...it's an advance against royalties. Then hopefully the book is published and lives up to expectations and earns out and the response is we're happy, the author is happy, and the agent is happy...but in 90% of the cases it doesn't earn out the advance and so you're in trouble. Of the 100 books published in Canada, I expect 20 books to support the rest.

Where do you see the Canadian publishing industry heading? How does it compare with what's happening in the Indian publishing industry?

Canada has certain problems and certain advantages like many markets in the world. I'll deal with the problem first. It's a small market. It's 35 million of which 5 million are French speakers, so you can't do much with that size of market. Whereas America is 200 million plus, UK is over 60 million, Australia is really small, about 20 million. So tens of thousands of books are jostling for attention in this country. Plus you have the major superstore Indigo Chapters which controls over 50% of market, so if they don't support a book it's dead in the water. And there is immense pressure on them as well because there are so many books pouring in. So these are the problems people have to deal with including the fact that there are lots of writers, agents, lots of publishing houses, everyone competing for that elusive customer. Fortunately, Canadians read quite a lot, but they don't read enough to make everyone prosperous. It is probably very difficult for a writer to break out in a major way unless you are someone like Yan Martel, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Margaret Attwood, etc., these are people already established and are stars because they've built up over period of time. Beyond that, it's very tough to break through.

On the positive side, because of the way Canada has been encouraging immigration for the last 30 years, you have the whole world sitting here, and so Canada's stories are quite fresh; whereas writing about one's experiences living in Mississauga that's where a lot of these books get bogged down because if your domestic experience is not interesting, how will you make your book interesting? Your life is interesting to friends, family, and about a 100 people who know you. That is were most first novels fail because they are so autobiographical, instead of trying to sell a story. Why would people want to read a book unless they're interested in your life?

I was once asked at the Canada Book Expo, where I was giving a presentation, what advice can I give aspiring writers. My reply is they should always take risks. There's no point in writing a small, safe, book...it just disappears. Take risk! What do you have to lose? Stretch yourself, write a big, huge, ambitious book! And those are the books that always leave a mark because there's so few around.

The Indian publishing scene in 20 years will be the second or third largest in the world overtaking Canada and Australia...

Who are your heroes?

I started out with heroes and along the way you lose the need to have heroes. I greatly admire my mentor, Peter Mayer, former Chairman of Penguin, Sunny Mehta, who runs Knopf...I greatly admire writers like Vikram Seth, Arundathi Roy, Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry...but at some point in your life you stop having heroes. You figure everyone does their best, some people have luck on their side, some people have some advantages, but everyone's a hero.

What makes them heroes in your mind?

They are exceptionally talented, and they have arrived...You know, I was reading a poem by Rudyard Kipling which goes, "If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run, yours is the Earth and everything that's in it..." Which means you do your best every single moment you can, and if you happen to have the talent as well, then you get to a stage where you are slightly set apart from your peers because you have done things that it is not possible for them to do.

So for example, you have great artists, like the South African writer Coetzee; they've written novels that's not possible for average novelists to write because of their level of skill and level of perception. Why do you read a novel today? You have so many sources to choose from. The reason I think you read a novel today is because the greatest novels give you more truth than non-fiction. Non-fiction is information, non-fiction is argument...The Economist will give you insights, but what fiction gives you is insights into the human condition, the great fiction, not the hundred thousand novels that are published every year. There are very few books like Disgrace or A Suitable Boy or 100 Years of Solitude, my personal favorites, which raise the bar. If you can't do that, why bother? So that's why they are my heroes.

In terms of publishing, Sunny and Peter have pushed the boundaries of the publishing business and tried to innovate. Anyone who pushes the boundaries needs to be admired. Whether you are a business person, an athlete, or whatever, you need to push the boundaries instead of merely existing. Pearson, the company that owns Penguin, its vision is you need to be "Brave, Imaginative, and Decent." Which are interesting words that carry a lot of meaning, and is what I look for in people. There's lots of people that don't get opportunities, lots of people face much competition, maybe their home situation isn't so great, maybe their work situation isn't so great, so their kind of stuck...but I think people make their own destiny don't they? Yeah, I admire people, but if you ask me whether I have heroes today ? probably not.

Do you have a dream or vision that guides the course of your life?

The thing about vision is it needs to be renewed every day. Because at the end of the day, what does a person want to do? You have a set path which clarifies itself as you go along. You have a set path ? this is what I do, this is what I'm good at, and how can I use this to influence events and people within my ambit? And I think narrowly defined within my job description, my vision for Penguin India was to give India a world-class publishing company. I think that vision has been achieved. My vision of Penguin Canada is to make it the best company of its size anywhere in the world.

You only have one chance, make the best of it!