Inside the free fall of Westland Books: From disappointment to rage, how authors are reacting to Amazon's decision

Multinational giant Amazon’s decision to saw off its Indian publishing arm, Westland Books, has brought forth a mindboggling amount of rage and solidarity. As the news began to spread on social media earlier this week, Westland’s team of editors, designers, and publicists was inundated with love from authors who have worked with them, and readers who swear by their titles. The anger was directed – no points for guessing – at Amazon. In a post on Instagram, The Bookshop in Jorbagh, Delhi, wrote, “For a company to acquire an independent, local publisher of books – some of which will in future certainly prove to be foundational texts of Indian literature – and then to arbitrarily shut it with no forewarning is a highly reprehensible act that the entire community of booksellers condemns.” What does the impending closure mean for authors – emotionally, politically, and financially? How do they look back at the process of working with Westland? What steps would they take to ensure that people who want to read their books will continue to have access to them?   Arundhathi Subramaniam, who has written over a dozen books of poetry and prose, says, “The loss is primarily emotional.” Westland had published her book of poems  Love Without a Story  in 2019. She adds, “It is disheartening when one’s most recent work is no longer available to readers. And yet, this is business as usual for poets!” Her first two books –  On Cleaning Bookshelves  [2001] and  Where I Live  [2005] – have been out of print for years.   According to her, this is not an isolated instance; this is the case with “almost every Anglophone Indian poet” that she knows. Financially speaking, the loss is not significant. She says, “I was fortunate because  Love Without a Story  was published before the COVID-19 pandemic. The sales were not inconsiderable, and a reprint happened in a few months.” At the moment, she is not sure about how Indian readers will continue to access the book. “I do have an international publisher but I always enter into a separate contract for the Indian subcontinent. That makes one’s work available here at a much more reasonable price. It’s ironic that, as an Indian poet, one cannot have one’s most recent work available here,” she says. Taking a broader view beyond her own book, she views the closure of Westland as a blow to the literary world. She believes that the worst hit are “poets who have been just published.” They have had little time to find readers. “Their books are left in the lurch in their infancy.” Publishing poetry is not considered profitable, so few Indian publishers invest in it. Working with Karthika VK, her editor at Westland, was enjoyable because VK has “always curated her poetry line with attentiveness and passion.” VK was her editor at HarperCollins, and Subramaniam moved to Westland only because VK moved there. “I felt an allegiance to Karthika since my earlier experience with her during the making of  When God is a Traveller  was so pleasurable. Her level of involvement, the keenness of her gaze, and her personal excitement are contagious, and that infuses her team with a very real enthusiasm.” Manu S Pillai, author of the book  The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History  [2019], says, “Emotionally, it feels very tragic.” VK  was also the editor of his first book  The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore  [2016] when she worked with HarperCollins. Pillai values his personal relationship with VK and her team. He says, “I am still on a WhatsApp group with my editor and her colleagues from the time the book came out in 2019, which should give a sense of the warmth there is.” Jyotirmaya Sharma, a professor of political science at the University of Hyderabad, has published four books with Westland –  Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism  [2019],  A Restatement of Religion: Swami Vivekananda and Hindu Nationalism  [2019],  MS Golwalkar, the RSS and India  [2019], and  Elusive Nonviolence: The Making and Unmaking of Gandhi’s Religion of Ahimsa  [2021]. The closure is “devastating” for him. The shutting down of Westland makes him angry. To him, this development signals “the loss of a balanced but fiercely courageous publisher” in India.  Sharma says, “While we give lip-service to knowledge and to conveniently designer nationalism, we cannot support a publishing house that has genuine domestic roots, irrespective of the current ownership.”   He adds, “It is alright to endlessly talk about the shrinking public space but it is another matter to put one’s money where one’s sanctimonious mouth is, and come forward to save Westland.” Financially speaking, he believes that the closure “means nothing for a modest non-fiction writer like me.” What bothers him is “the incalculable loss of a voice and space.” Arvind Narrain, who was part of legal team that challenged Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code right from the Delhi High Court in 2009 to the Supreme Court in 2018, is shocked by Amazon’s decision to wind up Westland. His book,  India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance, was published by them in January 2022.   Recalling the editorial inputs that contributed to his book, he says, “A bit of space which we had to articulate alternative viewpoints has been shut down. That is bad for a broad and vibrant democratic culture.” He hopes that other publishers “will take heart from the kind of lists which Westland did, and emulate their constitutional commitment to the right to dissent!” Apart from Indians, Westland has published authors and translators from other countries including Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, France, and the US. Christophe Jaffrelot, director of research at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS in Paris, and a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had the Indian edition of his book  Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy  [2019] published by Westland.   Emotionally and politically speaking, the closure of Westland “means a lot” to him. In financial terms, it means “nothing.” He wrote “this book – more than any other of my previous books – for the Indian public.” Recalling the process of creating this book with VK’s team, he says, “The demise of a publisher always makes me sad. This one was different: incredibly brave and professional in each and every domain, from copy editing to distribution and publicity.” Classical singer and public intellectual TM Krishna feels that the editor-author relationship is “serious” and “precious” even if it is not talked about as much as it should be. His previous book  A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story  [2016] was published by HarperCollins. Back then, his editor was Ajitha GS. When she moved to Westland, he moved along with her.   He thinks that the closure of the publishing house is “dreadful news” because Westland published fiction and non-fiction that “contested a homogenous discourse.” This includes his own book  Sebastian and Sons: A Brief History of Mrdangam Makers  [2020]. He says, “Diversity in publishing is important but some big corporations do not understand this.”  

TM Krishna attributes the free fall of Westland to Amazon’s “unsustainable economic model” and “a culture of discrimination."

While Westland’s employees have been instructed to refrain from making statements about what went wrong, Roshni P Nair’s report for   The Signal   calls the publishing house “a bubble waiting to burst.”  It reported  a loss of Rs 2.3 crore in 2017, Rs 14.7 crore in 2018, Rs 46.3 crore in 2019, Rs 33.8 crore in 2020, and Rs 19.2 crore in 2021.   In her recent blog post titled “Westland/Wasteland,” author and critic Deepanjana Pal writes, “You’ve got to wonder how much longer Westland may have survived if it hadn’t been dishing out crores of rupees that it couldn’t realistically hope to recover.” To back up her point, she notes that Westland gave author Amish Tripathi an advance of Rs 5 crore in 2013. Author Anuja Chauhan got “a six-figure dollar figure” in 2015, and author Chetan Bhagat “signed a multi-million dollar, multi-book deal” with the same publisher in 2018. Krishna does not mince words. He says, “This seems very similar to Bollywood. Only few people at the top can benefit; at some point of time, it had to break down. There is no legitimate reason for such huge sums of money. This is not equitable.” He adds, “Publishing should not be driven by the market alone. This incident is a warning for the whole industry. We should pause and think about new models, perhaps a co-op of writers, artists, and editors.” For Payal Dhar, author of the novel  It Has No Name  [2021], the decision to publish with Westland was “always about the people,” and not about the fact that “it was owned by a behemoth like Amazon.” She was glad to have another opportunity to work with editor Karthika VK. They had worked together on another novel titled  Satin: A Stitch in Time  [2011], which was published by VK’s previous employer HarperCollins.   Dhar felt deeply involved in the process, right from editorial inputs to cover design to publicity. She enjoyed working with Westland because they were prompt and responsive. Dhar says, “I won’t deny that the financial aspect didn’t work in my favour, or that I went into it without knowing that Amazon is a company not exactly known for its ethical standards.” She is partly relieved that she can now let herself “off the hook” for supposedly “selling out." She says, “Unless I decide to self-publish or Westland gets acquired by someone else, for the time being, 28 February will be the end of the road for  It Has No Name. That’s sad — it sold 1,200-odd copies in the first three months, so I was actually hopeful of earning out my advance for the first time.” It is a bit early to think about next steps but she wonders if another publisher might be interested since the book got nominated for a literary award. In the Instagram post, The Bookshop in Jorbagh, Delhi, notes, “We don’t know if the books will be pulped and when the rights will be sold anew. We do know that the entire backlist, as of now, is available till the end of February. And the front list, till the end of March.” Sharma does not want to give up on the possibility that Westland might still survive. He hopes that “good sense will prevail.” If it does not, his books “will have a life elsewhere.” He has not given this scenario much thought but he feels pained by the fact that “India – a country of more than a billion people – does not have enough independent publishers.” When the news about Westland’s closure began to circulate online, publisher Naveen Kishore – the founder of Seagull Books – had tweeted, “Hum hai na. [We are there no] The publishing community will come together and help.” How do they plan to help? He  says, “Neither Seagull Books nor any other independent publisher anywhere has the fire power to take on Amazon! Seagull Books is doing what it has always done — reached out and expressed concern and solidarity, and offered to help. The help is not aimed at Amazon but at Karthika and her stellar team. It is up to them to use that help depending on what their own plans are for the future.” Some of the Westland authors this journalist reached out to said that they have received offers from other Indian publishing houses but did not want to be named because they think that it would be insensitive to flaunt their privilege when other authors are struggling.   Kishore adds, “The publishing community, if rumour has it right, is already reaching out to help some of the authors. I’m sure they have reached out to Karthika too. The publishing community also includes readers. Those excellent books are available so I hope they will be sold out between readers, and of course libraries, who should have copies for posterity.” Jaffrelot says, “I will ask the original publisher of the English version, Princeton University Press, whether we can look for another Indian publisher. The book is selling well, but who will have the courage?” He believes that few publishers are prepared “to take risks to cultivate the kind of critical mind that social sciences require.” He adds, “Many academics are falling in line too and do not cross the new red lines. Indian studies will probably rely more and more on foreign publishers, whose books will not be easily available in India.”   Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist, and book reviewer.