- By Bound Team
Rahul Soni is the Associate Publisher at HarperCollins, India. He has spotted and honed some of India’s finest literary talent. From encouraging Amrita Mahale to give her book a second chance, to publishing several award-winning authors like Avni Doshi, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Arshia Sattar, and Madhuri Vijay, he has launched some of the most talented authors in India.
Previously, he has been associated with the literary agency Writer’s Side, the international writer’s residency at Sangam House, the international journal of translation Asymptote, and Almost Island, a journal of avant-garde writing. As a translator, his publications include Pankaj Kapur’s novella, Dopehri, Shrikant Verma’s Sahitya Akademi Award-winning poetry collection, Magadh, and International Booker Prize-winner Geetanjali Shree’s novel The Roof Beneath Their Feet.
In this interview, we unpack his journey, what he learned as a translator, and his current role at HarperCollins.
1. How did you get into editing books?
Rahul Soni: I’ve always been interested in writing. I spent half my childhood wanting to be a writer and trying to get the hang of the medium and the craft. For my generation, if you were remotely good at studies in school, you would be going into engineering and medicine. There was no question about it. I spent some time in medical school and then I spent some time in law school. I dropped out and squandered about 10 years of my life, figuring out what I wanted to do career-wise, while also reading and working on my craft.
At some point, I met a like-minded individual– a writer in Hindi who was going through the same trajectory as I was. We had this bright idea and we started a magazine called Pratilipi in 2008. It was one of the very few multilingual literary magazines around at that point. That is also where I did my first translation. We tried to publish everything in at least two languages and I was the only person available to translate.
We earned nothing out of it but it did establish our reputation in the industry. At the same time, I joined the agency Writer’s Side. I spent about 10 years freelancing in various capacities and doing things like running the writing residency and working with other journals, translating, and ghostwriting. And then six years ago a friend recommended me to HarperCollins because they were looking for a literary editor.
2. You’ve worked as a freelancer, and are now a part of HarperCollins, which one did you prefer?
Rahul Soni: As a freelancer, your time is your own, you have the freedom to choose the projects you want and the freedom to decide how engaged you will be with a project. However, there is also the uncertainty of where the next project will come from, when it will come, and no steady paycheck.
Being at a publishing house is completely consuming. A book never really leaves your desk. Once you have taken it on, you’re responsible for it until the end of time, or until you leave the job. It is very time consuming, and I have not been able to keep up with my own creative pursuits while at Harper. It is a pretty significant downside.
3. How do you decide what will get picked up from the slush pile at HarperCollins?
Rahul Soni: Earlier when there was a physical slush pile, we had the whole editorial team meet and go through it together, but it is done differently by each editor and each company. I am an associate publisher, so I handle literary publishing at Harper. What that means is that everything that falls to the literary division, I read myself.
The percentage of what gets through the slush pile is minimal. There’s at least one unsolicited submission everyday that merits a serious look, by that I mean you need to go beyond the first few lines of the email or the pitch. You have to actually read the work, whether it’s 20 pages or sometimes even the full manuscript. This is apart from the stuff sent in by agents, authors you’ve worked with, or authors who have been referred to you by people you trust. I publish around 20-24 books per year, and there are over 100 serious contenders for those slots, and maybe even more, so sometimes you just have to say this will not work for our list.
4. How has your experience as a freelancer helped you deal with the slush pile?
Rahul Soni: It’s kept me more open-minded about it. There have been some significant successes that have come through what would have been called a slush pile. These are emails that just come out of the blue, it’s possible that these authors would have approached multiple publishers, but their emails were not even read.
For instance, Jayasree Kalathil, the translator, approached us with The Diary of a Malayali Mad Man, a translation of five novellas by the Malyali writer N. Prabhakaran. That could have been lost very easily but that book went on to win the Crossword Award for Best Translated Fiction that year. Jayasree herself has become one of the most reputed translators in the country, and we have been consistently publishing her since that first book.
Another example would be Ankukrti Upadhya, who has done a number of books with us as well. Kintsugi won the Susheela Devi award and was long listed and shortlisted for a few others. Two slim novellas, Daura and Bhaunri, also got a lot of love from readers. Those two are my favourite from the “slush pile”.
5. How do you decide whether to invest in a debut author or an unsolicited manuscript?
Rahul Soni: There has been a theme throughout my career, even outside of publishing and mainstream publishing, and that has been discovering new voices. To acquire and market a really well known author like an Arudhati Roy or an Amitav Ghosh becomes more a matter of logistics than anything else.
Discovering new voices is what literary publishing is all about, and that is where my heart is.
I have taken an unconventional route into mainstream publishing, and my ideas might be different or skewed in terms of my experiences and what I like to do. If I’m employed as the literary publisher, and I have the responsibility to create the literary lists, I need to bring my subjectivity into this process. I trust my instincts because I have been employed for my taste.
I think about things like whether the book has lasting value, whether I would like to read it, and if I can stand to read it more than once.
The editing process makes you go through the book at least 6-10 times, and it needs to hold up through all of those readings, and continue to get better and better.
If it’s not fulfilling these criteria, then maybe the literary list is not a place for it.
6. How much of your role is editing and how much of it is actually managerial?
Rahul Soni: I don’t have a lot of people reporting to me, but it is managerial in the sense that you have to be a project manager who coordinates between various teams. You need to get a consensus behind the book, then you need to take it to the acquisitions board. There you need to get a buy in, especially from sales and marketing, who are responsible for actually selling the book. Then you have to coordinate and follow up with contracts, finance, design, and copyeditors. If copy editors are involved, then you need to coordinate with the proofreader and typesetters. There is also production, sales, and marketing. The project management side is a very large part of the role.
It is also about managing the author, people outside the publishing industry often don’t know how things work and what expectations they should have. Artistic temperaments are often rife in the creative field. A lot of the role is just managing people.
7. Could you share the best book that you have worked on which required less work, and which was a book that turned out good, but required a lot of time to work on?
Rahul Soni: That is a very difficult question to answer. I can’t possibly say which was the best book I have worked on. One of the very first books I acquired was called Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangni Swarup. I actually knew Shubhangi from Sangam House, she was a resident while I had been running the place. I had already read drafts of her work and shared feedback on it. So when it came onto my desk a few weeks after joining Harper, it was a very pleasant surprise.
The book had changed a fair bit since I last read it, and I thought that structurally there was still a lot that could be done. This was something that both of us worked really hard on. We would have video calls that would go on for 5-6 hours at a stretch in which I would go over the work line by line with Shubhangi. She even came down to Delhi, a lot of effort went into this book which benefited it immensely.
Recently, I’ve been involved with Janice Pariat for Everything the Light Touches. We started talking about this book before I joined Harper, and everything was discussed from the structure to which storylines should be integrated in the book. These are books that don’t require intense language edits, they are very good writers, but it is often harder to edit a book which is really well written. You start paying attention to the nuances of the work or the larger structure.
Whereas if it’s badly written work, and we often face that with translations, a lot of translators in India still think that they need to know the original language better than the target language. These books have to be re-written at the copy desk. The leap from a bad book to a book which can be published is not as big as the leap from a good book to a great book.
8. Do you find any scope for improvement in the end to end publishing process for bigger houses like HarperCollins? What factors influence your taste when choosing books for the literary list?
Rahul Soni: There are set practices and processes in place, but the reality of publishing in India is that it is also a very low margins industry, which means that in order to maximise profits, you have to keep yourself on the start. All departments are working all day for at least 12-16 hours just to keep up with the amount of work one needs to do. Even though there are processes in place, there are things that will inevitably slip through. Things that you think wouldn’t need chasing need to be chased, the first thing I do every morning is send out emails reminding people of things that need to be done. Then I get to proofing or editing, for which I have set aside a couple of hours. Reading manuscripts is something that you do maybe while travelling or just before going to bed on a weekend outside of the so-called ‘work hours’.
As for what influences my choices for the literary list, it comes from what has done well in the past. I’m not on social media, and I make a conscious effort to not chase trends. I think it’s a silly endeavour for a literary list, and is something that would be better suited for a non-fiction editor who needs to look at topical things that need to be written about in detail. It is also useful for commercial editors who need to publish things that people are really looking to buy. As a literary editor, it is one’s job to shape the literature of whatever region you are working in. Every now and then I try to sneak in something really experimental like Vivek Narayan’s verse re-telling of the Ramayana called After. You also have to have a sense of work that not only checks the literary boxes, but also does exciting things with structure, language, form, voice, and thematic content.
9. How stable is the publishing industry? What are some future insights for prospective employees?
Rahul Soni: We all got a shock when Amazon abruptly pulled the boards from under our feet, but I would say by and large, things have been fairly stable with the Big Five at least. What happens with a large organisation is that it has divisions all across the globe, and there are years when some are doing better, and there are years when others are doing better, so they all support each other. We’re not looking at these going under or disappearing anytime soon. The independent smaller presses are often labours of love where the profit motive is immaterial. They tend to continue as long as the founding people have the passion to continue. In cases like Zubaan, they’ve been going on for years, and still going strong, and that’s fully credited to the founding editors.
I think smaller presses are definitely a sign of a really vibrant publishing space. We need those in India, and I don’t think we’re anywhere near the amount that should be there.
I really think we need more of those and fewer big ones. Although to be fair to Harper, they have allowed me to do pretty much what I want with my corner of the list.
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