About five months ago, Nielsen Bookscan, the international data-tracking service for book sales, arrived in India. This is of course, good news for us Indian publishers (particularly trade publishing in the English language) – Bookscan will provide the first properly audited sales figures for Indian titles, something that is much needed. But it is also a sign that the industry is mature enough for English-language general books, and has sales that are significant enough, for Bookscan to enter.
India is currently the third-largest publisher of English language books in the world after the US and the UK in terms of volume. There are over 17,000 publishers in India who either publish trade (ie, books for the general audience) or academic books. It is estimated that over half of these publishers are in English-language publishing. The entry of Bookscan will help this industry to mature further by providing proper data about the books published in India – although I should mention that Bookscan at the moment only covers the major book chains, circumventing the small bookshops across the country out of which you get a vast amount of sales.
Now each Monday morning, I pore over the Bookscan charts to gauge what the trends in book sales are. The results are fascinating. Over the last six months, the top ten books in this market have largely come from Rupa, one of the oldest Indian publishing companies and one of its largest book distributors. Rupa's golden goose is Chetan Bhagat, India's bestselling novelist; his many books, about young, middle-class Indians, are scattered across the top ten, month after month. Till March (when this article was written), no multinational publishing company was in the top ten, apart from Puffin's Diary of a Wimpy Kid (an international sensation) and Random House India's two health titles, Rujuta Diwekar's Don't Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight and Payal Gidwani Tiwari From XL to XS. Rujuta's second book, published by another Indian publishing company, Westland Books, was also in the top ten.
To see Chetan Bhagat on the top ten wouldn't surprise most of us publishers but Bookscan also confirms other trends. First, it shows that the companies creating the real bestsellers are not necessarily the big multinationals. Indian publishers such as Rupa, Westland and Roli are in robust health, and Rupa in particular remains an amazingly successful publishing company creating hit after hit. Second, the books that are really selling, on the whole, are the homegrown commercial titles, whether fiction or non-fiction. According to the publisher, the last Chetan Bhagat title, 2 States, the Story of My Marriage, sold about 500,000 copies in its first year; Rujuta Diwekar's first diet book, Don't Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight has sold about 200,000 copies in total, and the new one too is flying off the shelves. Payal Gidwani Tiwari's yoga book has sold more than 40,000 copies in four months.