There can be no substitute for a printed book. The very feel of it, the soft touch of the paper gives you the kind of pleasure which an ebook simply can’t.

The prophets of doom who claim that book stores in the US are slowly closing down fail to realise that it is simply due to increasing online sales of books. Things may not be that bad for bookshops in Pakistan but the fact remains that the trend of ordering books online is gradually growing.

Publish or perish

As someone whose name has appeared on the jackets of four fast selling books, I am often asked by aspiring writers how does one get one’s book published.

I tell them that normally publishing houses commission writers; alternately writers, aspiring or established, approach publishers. The prestigious among them are more often than not flooded with manuscripts, a good number of which don’t deserve reading beyond the first four or five pages.

Even scripts which seem to have a lot of meat have to be evaluated by more than one professional in the publishing house, apart from someone from the marketing department to give the green signal.

Some of those writers who get rejection slips are not ready to be bogged down. They would invest their own money, by handing over their scripts to people who can do the publishing as long as they are paid. There are others who decide to indulge in what is called ‘vanity publishing’. In other words, they would handle everything themselves.

As a result they would quite often be loaded with a lot of unsold copies. They would then present copies to their friends, relatives, colleagues and even neighbours to release the precious space occupied by the stocks.

Once a professionally run publishing house accepts a script, the contents are vetted and edited by one and sometimes more than one expert. Not all writers feel that their work needs to be examined thoroughly. Many indulge in what can be called self-deceit.

A certain Karachi businessman, who will remain unnamed, sank his money in writing and publishing a coffee-table size book on his travels. When some ‘silly mistakes’, if I may use the common expression, were brought to his notice, he said ‘What do I do, I had shown the script to so many people, all of them are educated, but no one brought up these points”.

“Quite clearly because you didn’t show it to a professional editor,” he was told.

Editing itself can be a problem because a good number of scripts have convoluted sentences. You don’t know what the writer is trying to say so you spend a lot of time phoning him and enquiring what does he want to convey.

Another point worth mentioning is that competent editors have become an extinct breed, which is why you spot mistakes even in the books published by multinationals in the subcontinent. An editor has got to be knowledgeable, skilled and alert, in addition to having a command over the language he or she is expected to specialise in.

Proofreading is the next stage. Since now contents are handed over to the publishing houses as soft copies and edited on computers, it is a blessing to have the spellcheck facility. The newer word processing programs also point out simple errors, such as grammatical mistakes, punctuation lapses and poorly constructed sentences.

While on computers one may say that they have made the life of writers quite easy too. You can make changes easily. Entire paragraphs can be shifted and the construction of sentences be improved. Also you can keep a record and backup of your manuscripts.

One heart-breaking story that this writer can never forget is that once the well known Urdu novelist, Khadeeja Mastoor, forgot to pick up the script of her widely acclaimed novel Angan from a tonga in Lahore, as she stopped for a while at her friend’s house, on her way to her publisher’s office.

Much to her horror, on her return she found the tonga missing. Gone with it was the script. She had no choice but to rewrite the novel. Later, when the novel won an award, she told the reporters that the original material was many a shade better.

The print runs of our books are abysmally low. Surprisingly enough, even Urdu books, barring textbooks, are seldom printed more than 500 copies, unless the writer happens to be someone of the stature of Faiz Ahmed Faiz or Mushtaq Yusufi.

However, Pakistanis who write in English have one advantage. They can have their books published in India, where there is a larger readership. There are many multinationals on the other side of the Great Divide, who don’t cheat the writers, when it comes to paying royalties. But a couple of well-known local publishers are quite notorious on this count.

With the weakening of Pakistani currency vis-a-vis the US dollar and the increasing cost of printing paper and ink, fixing of cover price poses a major problem for a publisher.

In conclusion, one can say that the future of book publishing in Pakistan is by no means bleak but it’s not smooth sailing either. But then, what business in the country traverses on a path devoid of hindrances?

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, February 7th, 2016