Why we have readers but no books
Omer Imran Malik
Arsal* is tired after a long day of work, he sighs as the doorbell begins to ring less frequently, pretty soon the shop will be empty; even Lahori shoppers have to sleep at some time. He quietly goes through some notes as a customer goes through some recent releases which are stacked up on the front for promotion. When all the customers have left, Arsal calls up his supplier, ‘We need more units of Catching Fire,’ he tells him, he asks for a carton of each book of the trilogy. With the release of the second book’s movie right around the corner, the interest in this widely acclaimed English science fiction novel has recently peaked. This meant more profits for the shop, this had happened before with the Harry Potter series and Mohsin Hamid’s politically charged novelette, The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Arsal works at Readings; one of the most popular and posh bookstores in Lahore, also responsible as a distributor for foreign publishing companies and having in-house publishing, it is a well-known landmark in Lahore. Readings hosts different types of books for every type of reader: not just according to genre but also according to wallet size. Hosting a nice collection of second hand English fiction novels which can be bought at very low rates as well as original novels which are new releases, Readings likes to boast itself as the one stop shop for fiction readers in Lahore.
From Mohsin Hamid to Mohammad Hanif, all Pakistani stalwart authors are currently being published by International Publishers rather than any Pakistan based publisher.
“A lot of our customers are interested in buying English novels written by local authors. We are contacted many times by Indian Publishers to promote and distribute the novels written by authors from Pakistan!” Arsal tells me as I leave his shop after we’ve shared a cup of coffee in the attached cafe. He has to close up the shop now; the new shipments of English novels will be coming in early tomorrow morning.
As I proceed to leave, I stop by the English section dedicated to local authors: I can’t help myself and end up quickly looking at the title page of every novel I pick up, so far Arsal has turned out to be true, from Mohsin Hamid to Fatima Bhutto, all have been published by India. In fact the scary part was that not one book on that shelf had been printed locally.
Do we have readers?
Arsal has been on the counter there for several years, he tells us, ‘English fiction novels are very popular here. We make the most sales from selling those. One would think the margins are really low but we actually have a lot of readers. We even have competition from Liberty Books, Ferozens and Last Word, we constantly have to update our stock and make sure we aren’t left behind in terms of new releases.’
According to EuroMonitor, a privately owned, London-based market intelligence firm, in a 2009 report titled: ‘The benefits of the English language for individuals and societies’, reported estimates that around 49% of the total population spoke English to intermediate level in 2009 and that this is expected to rise to 58% by 2015.
Even with this overwhelming evidence, one can hardly find any locally published English fiction novels in any book shop in this country.
Why India?
Bilal Tanweer, a writer and well known translator who has done an MFA from Columbia University USA and currently teaches fiction writing and literature courses at Lahore University of Management Sciences explains to us why he is currently publishing his debut novel ‘The Scatter Here Is Too Great’ from an Indian publishing industry.
“There are no ‘English fiction publishers’ in Pakistan by the international sense of the term. It’s not a developed industry at all: there are no set of procedures, no editorial workforce and literally no publishing infrastructure. People here do not even know how to produce a copy edit that could comply with International standards. There is no distribution network, no support structure and the marketing of the books is almost non-existent. The problem truly however lies with production: the quality of books produced is subpar. A lack of editors is really a problem: spell checking and proof reading is only half the job there is no standardization or referencing at all.”
Is it because we don’t have writers?
I sit down with arguably one of the youngest authors of fiction this country has to offer, Asad Shabbir, currently studying Business Management from a university in Lahore, Asad published his first novel, a fantasy epic called Leo Solay, at the age of sixteen in the year 2011. He is currently in talks of launching a second novel which is focused on the predicaments faced by the Pakistani youth nowadays. Leo Solay was launched in Berlin by Scandinavia based Egmont Publishers.
“In Europe, my manuscript was handled with great professional care: I had four copy editors who went over my story over and over again, recommending changes and highlighting the smallest grammatical inconsistency. My book did extremely well for what it was, which was mostly a debut experiment. It mostly sold in the form of e-books. Even though it was picked by the media here and I was hailed, no publishing or distributing company approached me for the rights to distribute my novel in Pakistan. The sad fact is that my biggest fan base is here in Pakistan more than anywhere else.”
Asad Shabbir says all of this as we sit down to meet and talk in the university he studies in.
“The writing culture in Pakistan is really strong. A lot of people aspire to be writers, write short stories but they can’t find two things: a platform to promote their works and improve them and advice from others.”
Shabbir goes on to point out how a nascent publishing industry in Pakistan would improve things in the country, “Pakistan has a lot of talent in terms of writers who can write good fiction in English. But it has no platforms which help them develop. No platform through which they can publish and be critiqued. We have no real book reviews here and when a writer has to approach an international publisher, they have to compete on an international level to be published. Also books centered in Pakistan are harder to sell to foreign publishers. The visa restrictions between Pakistan and India are also a big problem for these writers! One has to be fairly established to contemplate making a career out of writing.”
Is it the publishers?
Given all of these reasons, I set out to find out why Pakistani publishers did not invest in all of these aspects of publishing. This journey leads me to Mr.Yousaf who works as a manager with Ferozsons Publishers, perhaps the biggest publishing company in Pakistan after Oxford University Press.
“English books do sell well actually. In terms of novels written by our authors here; Bapsi Sidhwa and Muhammad Hanif are best-selling authors. But apart from that we have a hard time trying to sell books written by local authors. This is because nobody knows about these writers: they have little or no reputation in the market and advertising is a very expensive option for us as it increases risk.”
Risk is the main element behind the problem mainly; publishers can’t risk printing a book by an unknown author in a niche market they hardly understand about. Thus they rely on the practice of selling academic books which they publish locally and by re-selling Indian printed copies of English fiction written by Pakistani authors.
The other problem, according to Mr. Yousaf at Ferozsons has to do with piracy.
“Publishers in India can take such a risk to publish any author and market their books because the market there is much bigger, thus piracy doesn’t have as much of a detrimental effect on their profit margins there as it does here for us. Marketing budgets, distribution costs and royalty payments are all recovered through sales, the piracy markets cuts the total number of sales down as it provides readers with a cheaper alternative. In Pakistan, there is no real idea of intellectual copyright protection and no court of law in the country enforces anti-piracy rulings here strictly.”
Yousaf does seem to have a point but a further -rather clandestine- interview with an employee of the company, under the promise of anonymity, reveals a much darker secret.
“The truth is many of the publishing companies in Pakistan are also printing presses as well for all of the pirated material one can find on the market. The owners and managers pocket the profit we make by selling these popular books cheap at whole sale rates. Why publish some unknown author from here and spend on marketing their book when we can allow Indian publishers to do it and can easily print pirated copies and earn of their hard work?”
This writer approached the Ferozsons Management in regards to these claims but they have yet to respond.
“The process of royalty payments to writers from publishing companies in Pakistan is a really opaque one. This is because the industry is really unregulated. Any international publishing house has external and internal audits, they can’t pocket the profits that the writer deserves, same can’t happen here in Pakistan because we don’t have culture of accountability.” Says Bilal Tanweer, explaining how these practices go about un-noticed.
Why piracy?
Pirated books are a very real problem for the publishing industry of Pakistan. Pirated books can be found everywhere, they are regarded as a necessity in a nation where original copyrighted protected book units imported from publishing houses abroad are priced way too high for the average Pakistani consumer.
“We keep no pirated books, if we did though, our sales would really go up! But we believe in protecting the author’s and publisher’s copyright,” tells me Arsal at Readings, “People often complain to us that the books are really expensive to buy and that is why they resort to buying pirated copies, it’s all about affordability. We’ve started keeping old books just so a customer who can’t afford to buy the original untouched copy of a book has a cheaper option but these are hard to maintain.”
“Books on the pirated market are cheaper but in terms of bulk quantity, it is a very profitable business. The cost really becomes minimal, with the printing presses just churning out books by the thousands and a huge distribution network, you can literally sell by the kilo and still make money! This is why these publishers do not publish any book here; it will put the onus on them to ensure its quality and sales. They let the author or foreign publishing house put in all the investment and then after a simple process of copying and printing, earn millions of rupees.” elaborates our anonymous source in Ferozsons.
One only needs to go to Urdu Bazaar in Lahore to confirm this.
“We don’t know where these books come printed from because the distribution network is way too large to know where things are coming from but in terms of money, these English novels sell a lot in the country,” says Murad, a shopkeeper who owns a shop which deals in pirated novels near the Urdu Bazaar in Lahore.
He does not know or care about why we have no local publishing industry for English fiction novels.
Why even ask?
There are those of course who believe that Pakistan does not need a local publishing industry for English fiction. “The entire concept is really stupid really. There are no prodigy writers; writers write from experience, so this idea that we have ‘talented writers in Pakistan’ is just bullshit. Our writers are as talented as anybody on the planet, meaning from the virtue of the way they interpret their experiences rather than if they are born in Pakistan or not,” protests Bilal Tanweer, “A talented writer from Pakistan can get published in India really easily, the only reason why I’d even want to see a publishing industry here is because I’d like to have a Pakistani artist from Karachi do the cover art for my novel, apart from that, with problems such as piracy, lack of talent (in terms of volume) and the fact the market here really is too small, who can really ask the question: Why do we have readers but no writers?”
We leave the importance of asking this question, to be decided by the many English readers in Pakistan who are reading this piece. Do we really need a nascent English Fiction publishing industry?