2016 was an exciting year for book lovers with the publishers rolling out an array of titles across genres, pushing the envelope and setting trends.
Autobiographies and biographies, titles on business, commercial and mass market fiction, literary fiction, self help, chik-lit and culinary, the list went on.
According to Hemali Sodhi, Vice President (Marketing) of Penguin Random House India, 2016 has been a stellar year for the publishing house.
“We’ve had an extraordinary publishing list with an almost unprecedented number of bestsellers as well as award winning and critically acclaimed books, across Fiction, non-fiction, business and children’s, and books have topped the bestselling charts on a very regular basis,” she said.
HarperCollins India CEO Ananth Padmanabhan describes 2016 as “our best year yet”.
“We grew sales across both divisions, trade and education, increased our market share, executed imaginative publicity campaigns, launched Harper Broadcast, the first of its kind in Indian publishing, and were awarded Publisher of the Year at TATA Lit Live,” he says.
Palimpsest completed five years in 2016. For its CEO Bhaskar Roy, 2016 was a smalltown year for the publishing industry.
“The focus moved away from the metros with the smaller cities surging up as major book markets. Among the Palimpsest titles during the year, Ashok Pandey’s ‘From Inside the Steel Frame: The Memoirs of an Administrator’ impacted the public discourse deeply. ‘Tied in Knots’, Tehzeeb Doctor’s novel about contemporary Mumbai, has evoked a good response,” he says.
For Juggernaut Books, which is aiming to create a world-class Indian publishing company that redefines reading and writing for the digital age, 2016 was a year “full of excitement”.
Says its Executive Editor R Sivapriya, “We are beginning to see the contours of those who live in digital India and what drives them. We’ve been constantly adapting to and anticipating their demands. We’ve therefore had to be extremely nimble. Not something that is even possible in traditional publishing.
“We’ve published some exceptional books since we started this April. Our authors range from a hugely popular adult film star to a gifted Adivasi artist. We are closing the year with a bang with two successful books: Twinkle Khanna’s wonderful short stories and William Dalrymple and Anita Anand’s riveting history of the Kohinoor.”
Gautam Padmanabhan, CEO, Westland Ltd finds 2016 as a year of steady growth at Westland.
“Ashwin Sanghi continued to prove his versatility with two blockbusters – ‘The Sialkot Saga’ and ’13 Steps to Bloody Good Wealth’; Preeti Shenoy consolidated her position as India’s number one women fiction writer with ‘It’s All in the Planets’, and Savi Sharma, a 23-year-old girl from Surat, stunned the publishing world with her record-breaking debut novel ‘Everyone Has A Story’.
“Our other successes included ‘Deedara aka Dara Singh’ by Seema Sonik Alimchand, Christopher C Doyle’s ‘The Secret of the Druids: Book 2’ in ‘The Mahabharata Quest’ series, ‘The Tamil Story: Through the times, through the tides’, edited by Dilip Kumar and Subashree Krishnaswamy, ‘The Secret Diary’ of Kasturba by Neelima Dalmia Adhar, ‘Invincible Arjuna’ by Debashis Chatterjee, and ‘Ashoka: Lion of Maurya’ by Ashok K Banker.”
According to Thomas Abraham, Managing Director at Hachette India, it had a “rather spectacular year frontlined of course by the record-setting performance of ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ (HPATCC) which offset the generally tough conditions prevailing right now.
“HPATCC apart there was a great roundup ranging from a blockbuster children’s hit in ‘The Gita for Children’, to some edgy thrillers like Patang and Sultan of Delhi from new voices, ‘Akhada’ – the autobiography of Phogat on whom ‘Dangal’ is based, some fabulous food books like Crumbs and Mrs LC’s table, and of course the scriptbook of Fantastic Beasts plus it was nice to have a bunch of awards too from Booker longlisting to the DSC to the Raymond Crossword awards.”
Diya Kar Hazra, Publisher of Pan Macmillan India, says 2016 was a fulfilling year for the publishing house.
“We revived some of the stars of our backlist and celebrated some iconic books (the 15th anniversary edition of ‘The Picador Book of Modern Indian Writing’ edited by Amit Chaudhuri and the first-ever collection of VS Naipaul’s India books in one volume, ‘The Indian Trilogy’).
“We had excellently timed paperback publications (Sunjeev Sahota’s Booker-shortlisted ‘The Year of the Runaways’ and Kunal Basu’s ‘Kalkattta’) and some outstanding fiction,” she says.
“We also launched the exquisitely produced, accessible Macmillan Popular Classics and acquired some very exciting books across a range of genres and ended the year with two big acquisitions that we’ll announce in the new year.
“We began the year with Jeffrey Archer’s ‘Cometh the Hour’ and ended it with the final installment of his spellbinding ‘Clifton Chronicles’, ‘There Was a Man’. It’s been a huge success and he’s had the most spectacular multi-city tour.”
The year began with the annual Jaipur Literature Festival in which over 360 authors participated in 200 sessions across 10 venues, including the Diggi Palace, Amber For and the Albert Hall.
The inaugural day saw filmmaker Karan Johar kicking up a storm with his remark that India is a “tough country” where speaking about personal life can land people behind the bars and he did not want to fight the government by talking of issues like “intolerance”.
Participating in the festival, writers Ashok Vajpeyi, Uday Prakash and K Satchidanandan too talked about lack of freedom of expression. But the debate slowly died down.
On the awards front, 26 writers were declared winners of the Sahitya Akademi awards including Mumbai-based Jerry Pinto (‘Em and the Big Hoom’), Tamil author Vannadhasan (‘Oru Sru Isai’) and Hindi writer Nasira Sharma (‘Paarijat’). Veteran Bengali poet Shankha Ghosh was selected for this year’s Jnanpith Award.
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