Gautam Padmanabhan and Ranjeet  Pratap Singh

The new partnership won’t mean a major shift, says Singh. Editorial freedom will be given utmost priority. “Our thought process at Pratilipi is to let teams operate independently. I don’t know when I last pinged Gautam or Karthika about something. What we do is to find the best way for a story to travel to as many people as possible. So if we have a great story on hand, we will try and leverage that in as many formats as possible. So that instead of just 10,000 people reading a book, we can get three million to. That’s the only thing that will really change.” Would that mean that Pratilipi writers also get right of entry into Westland? “Essentially, if a story seems to be doing very well on Pratilipi, we will share that work with the editor concerned at Westland.” But the decision will be theirs alone, he says. “The same applies for Westland. If they think a book can have a life as an audio book, they can approach Pratilipi FM or the IVM team.”

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Karthika calls the learnings from the transition incredible. “There were so many writers, booksellers and readers, who came out in support... we discovered that the work we did was important, at least to some people beyond our circle. And to be able to continue and extend that was a really 
good feeling.”   
 
Several writers, says Karthika, will continue to work with Westland. Barring a few, including leading names like Chetan Bhagat, Ashwin Sanghi and Amish Tripathi, who made up their most popular roster and formed the cream of bestseller lists. “I think we didn’t even hope or anticipate that as many authors, who stayed would stay with us. Because, it was clearly a time of confusion... they had no real way of knowing that we would have a future,” says Karthika. “We had the solidly supportive writers of course, who said they were not going anywhere, and waiting to see what would happen. Some waited till the rights reverted to them [on March 31]. There were many who immediately got swarmed by offers from other publishing houses, and got deals that were too good to refuse. I guess each one responded to the situation as they saw best.”

The team is still in the process of signing fresh contracts with the authors. The plan, he says, is to retain all the imprints, which include Tranquebar, Context, Eka, Red Panda, Westland Non-Fiction, Westland Sport and Westland Business. The backlist, says Karthika, should be out by July end. “We’ve literally started sending books to press in the last few days. We will continue to bring out titles that are running short in stores, and need quick resupplying. So, we will start with those.” The new catalogue will be announced in August, and out in September. “Most of them are already in print or editing stage.” Karthika says that the space Westland finds itself in is really interesting. “We are having very exciting and challenging conversations, which we feel we could have had before, with people producing content in other forms. I remember Gautam and I would constantly talk about how we should be pitching book rights for audio and video, or podcast or so on. It was a little dream in our heads. But we didn’t have the energy or access. Now, we have all these colleagues around us, who have the experience, and know how to do it. We know how to publish books, but now we are learning what more we can do with them, and how we can reinvent them.”