A legacy of vision, growth, and editorial integrity!

Hachette India has recently announced that its founding Managing Director, Thomas Abraham, who has been instrumental in shaping the company and strengthening its philosophy, market presence and profitable growth for eighteen years has chosen to retire at the company’s retirement age. Headhunted from his role as CEO & President of Penguin India, Abraham joined Hachette India as MD in 2007. Here, Thomas Abraham shares more about his journey at Hachette India.

AABP: You’ve been with Hachette India since its inception. What are the defining moments that shaped its journey from an INR 8 crore to a 100 crore plus company?

Thomas: I’ve been with Hachette since the day it was incorporated in 2007 through when it began business in May 2008; and it will be just over 18 years when I formally retire at the end of this year. There were many defining moments starting from having to run around 11 different ministries for permission under the FIPB route in those days. It was literally having to start from the ground up—first re-incorporation, getting the required permissions, hiring the initial team (there were 7 of us when we opened for business), and then actually going live. We had two No. 1’s in the opening month – Cold Steel and The Last Lecture, so that was a great start. There were many other memorable moments –from the first ever high security printing of JK Rowling in India, to the incredible national launch of Sachin Tendulkar’s Playing It My Way, to the release of Harry Potter 8 in record terms, but there were also the great books signed up from year 1 onwards—Anuradha Roy, Manjula Padmanabhan, Roopa Pai, Viswanathan Anand, Indra Nooyi, Subroto Bagchi, super chefs Ritu Dalmia and Manish Mehrotra, space hero Rakesh Sharma, bibliophiles Pradeep Sebastian & VR Ferose, cool sassy voices in Swati Kaushal, Ritu Singh, Prajwal Hegde and many more across every genre. But the other stated aim was to build debut voices and introduce new writers both from overseas and on our local lists.

AABP: How did your experience at Penguin prepare you for building Hachette India from the ground up?

Thomas: Nothing can quite prepare you for building a start-up from ground zero. That’s at once the pain and pleasure of being a founding MD. It’s a constant learning curve. I was also quite clear that we would strike a different path here in local publishing. That I wouldn’t go down the poaching-for-higher-advance route. We’ve stuck to that philosophy for all of my 18 years (the couple of exceptions were people who came over to us on their own).

So when we began I wanted to strike out very differently from Penguin – though that also had gone from 30-odd crores to 100 cr… so that marker was sort of there, but here the focus is much more centred on profit performance. The Hachette companies were past masters of commercial and mass market fiction. When we began we’d started with the intention of developing commercial fiction as our dominant strand and looking for new voices. I believed at the time there was a clear opportunity for a new segment between the mass market fiction that had begun a few years earlier and the literary & general fiction market that had been the mainstay of Indian publishing. Despite some great books, that didn’t quite work out in terms of scale. In India ironically there seemed to be not much difference between commercial fiction and narrative or literary fiction. That was a brutal learning experience with inventory built up as we discovered that flat starter runs of 5000 and 7000 copies were not a given for commercial fiction. We were lucky that the imported titles from being a deep range were so successful. I still remember that when we began in 2008 – the market was going through a really tough time on the back of a general market decline with the sub-prime crisis etc. But we didn’t even notice because the Twilight phenomenon had just exploded. So though we were budgeted for being loss making in our first 3 year plan, we were already profitable. That was a bit of luck, that offset the tough times but also left us a bit complacent—but in trade there are always happy surprises and as many rude awakenings. It’s always a swings and roundabouts game and one just has to plan to come out on top.

AABP: Trade publishing in India has been tough to scale profitably. How did you manage to maintain a consistent 15%+ bottom line?

Thomas: I’d say three key things stand out as differentiators—Product management, Production Management, and a systems run organization.

And we learnt the hard way, Though the bad years of 2008-09 didn’t impact us, there were a couple of very tough years further down the line when a key distributor went down and no less than 3-4 retail chains shut shop, and there were both a deluge of returns and dues settlements to be done over years. Those years really looked bleak but then along came Steve Jobs which became a bestseller, and the year after was JK Rowling’s casual vacancy and things really turned around. From then on it was a steady ship with Sachin Tendulkar’s Playing It My Way in 2014 and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in 2016 setting national records. These were the aberrant sellers that actually just turbo-charged those years. But we’d also learnt to treat these blockbusters as aberrant and developed our budgeting process to work without these.

The structure we put in place was also slightly different. The way we did product management was the real game changer. Before I was CEO of Penguin, I was the marketing head there with the additional role of being the Agencies product manager (which meant I had to manage the third party lists that Penguin represented—Faber, Little Brown, Bloomsbury etc). That was a transformative experience that actually informed a key decision I would take in structuring Hachette from day one. Which was putting a full-fledged Product department at the heart of the business.. It wasn’t as though we’d created the product management role, but what we did was reinvent it completely—moving it from a purchase function to something altogether different. To me it was clear that trade publishing worked because of passion and hunches with the books itself being at the heart of the business. So, in an imports dominated market (statistically India is still an imports driven market even though local publishing is thriving) I believed books still needed to be picked, produced and pushed the same way an editor would. So our Product dept has people who have business savvy but also have a clear editorial sensibility—they read and pick books and decide what will be a lead, and superlead; and what margin mix the books will deliver. The ability to read and pick comes first with an underpinning of hard business—viz. margins, stock management and the profit deliverable. And the results were clear within a few years. It’s no surprise therefore that my successor Riti Jagoorie (a co-founding member) comes from the Product dept and has worked her way up. Riti’s own Product Head role similarly will be done by Medha Bose who’s been a Sr manager in the dept for the past seven years. The product managers alongside their dept jobs also have an indie retail account each to manage so that they are in touch with the market.

The other key strategic shift (and this did take some time due to Hachette’s federal nature) was to move all our imported books (unless actually impractical to do so) to local reprints. This ensured better margins, faster time to market and tighter inventory control. Today over 75% of our revenue is from reprinted books, and we’re able to maintain a sub 3.5 month stockholding with a balanced print programme that encompasses both offset and digital. Priya Singh our Sr. VP-Production digital resources and Press logistics is a near superwoman – she manages all of it single-handedly and has turned Production around from a cost center to a profit center, well deservedly bagging Printweek’s Business leader of the year award last year.

The above three prongs of strategic planning ensure that we’re a lean company that minimizes costs and maximizes margin and with the needed flow down to profit. We’re also hugely into analytics, and Nielsen alongside our own MIS has been a key factor.

And I cannot overstate the importance of having a stable team that also builds to a common or shared objective. All our top management and senior managers have been with us over 10 years and five have completed over 15 years.. and we’re just 17 years old. Somu and Raghu have managed sales brilliantly, Puniesh, our FD, has ensured systems and compliance. Vatsala, our children’s Publisher (incidentally also retiring this year along with me) is the best in the business. And Rakesh who handles all of IT& order processing with our MIS has been the lynchpin for our systems based approach, and my critical support in planning any year.

AABP: What’s your philosophy when it comes to choosing which books to publish?

Thomas: Barring the last 3 years when I’ve been ‘acting Publisher’, local publishing acquisition is left to editors. Yes there are P&L norms and approvals as process but it’s a very clear church and state separation. They are free to commission or acquire whatever they think satisfies their brief. Of course, there are occasional vetoes from the sales and Product teams or me in commissioning meetings but I’ve been very clear—if an editor really badly wants a book and puts up his or her hand saying they still want the book despite the objection, that trumps everyone else. And that could be a book they see as commercial pick or a poetry book they see as outstanding. Their list is theirs to build –within the broad objectives of the organization’s philosophy and financial guidelines.

In terms of philosophy like any trade publisher we go for everything and look to have a broad range. What we don’t do perhaps is excessively low priced books (not a segment we can enter with our overhead), we have avoided therefore the guru type of inspirational books too, and we tend to be centrist or left leaning if one can call it that.

AABP: How does Hachette India maintain a balance between import and local publishing?

Thomas: We don’t—as in I’ve never looked for a certain quota balance. Another thing I learnt early – and I often quote that old adage “turnover is vanity and profit sanity”. So, it’s clearly a case of prioritize what works best for our market.

Each book gets its due in the pick. So Roopa Pai and Stephen King or John Grisham will get the same megalead treatment. Yes Hachette has a huge range (that comes with being the oldest trade publisher in the world) but we also know we don’t have the first mover’s advantage in India for local publishing and without a deep backlist in local publishing, imports will be the dominant strand for years to come. Imports have also shot up with some meteoric growth we’ve seen in our journey to the 100 cr. Local publishing has been stable and profitable for the past few years—both at list and divisional levels. It’s now ready for its next phase—Riti and our editorial divisions will need to plan the next 5-year plan for that.

AABP: You personally curated the revival of the Yellowbacks series. What drew you to that project, and what do these classics mean to you?

Thomas: This was a personal passion project if one can call it that and took me seven years to put together in my spare time. In fact, one of the reasons that I joined Hachette was that Hodder (the original publisher of the yellowbacks imprint) was one of our companies. I’d collected the yellowbacks for years (from my college days) and was happy to be able to not just revive them but extend them. The first batch of yellowbacks I’d put together focused on the history of crime fiction from the 17th century down to the golden age. The second batch releasing in a couple of months will extend the range to other popular genres like swashbucklers, romance, and westerns. By the end of the year we’d have done over 250 titles. And from extension we’ve brought it back to being a live imprint – publishing the very first anthology of Indian detective fiction as a yellowback. Another crime fiction anthology follows this year.

So while these classics – yes they are classics of popular and pulp fiction — mean a lot to me, I am equally aware that this is not a list that should end up saddling the company with a lot of stock. So this was primarily a digital print programme. I’m delighted that it’s got such a positive response and that it now goes back – to being sold in the UK and US.

AABP: How do you see the role of a trade publisher evolving in the age of AI, social media, and self-publishing?

Thomas: My own view as of today is that I don’t see the fundamental role changing, because in trade publishing everything’s about the curation. So AI and social media come in mainly at the operational end; and perhaps for some books or design –content creation too. It’s a fast evolving space so any predictions would very probably be inaccurate. But yes the current lawsuits we’re seeing in the west do emphasize that copyright is in danger and there will need to be legal frameworks that protect authors’ work from unlicensed exploitation.

Self-publishing is very different—that’s a different business model. To me, it is in essence the diametric opposite of what a trade publisher does at its core—ie curational publishing which means selection and investing in books that you sign up because it fits your list building philosophy. I’m not knocking self-publishing, It’s just a different business model just as generic publishing is (the other big growth area that’s emerged recently as a large chunk for certain publishers). Both have been around for some time and carry on alongside narrative/curational publishers. The great thing self-publishing offers is access—anyone can publish.

Many great trade sellers have also come out of self-publishing especially today in the Booktok age; and they have gone on to do better with mainstream publishing houses when the curational aspects have come into play. But while those could well become additional strands, I’ve believed that we were set up to do in our local markets is what the great imprints we represent (that are over 250 years old) did in theirs—find great books and build great lists. Which is why when we look at competition analysis we look at primarily a narrative framework—not self-publishing or generic publishers that are distinctly different strands.

AABP: What are the trends you see in trade publishing in India?

Thomas: The Indian trade market is in a strange place. Paradoxically the market is booming while readership seems in decline. Because while companies are growing and books (backlist and a certain kind of non-fiction) are selling more – newer experimental reading has come down. This is evident by Nielsen trends that show that frontlist (new books published in a year), today average is less than 500 copies. New books seem to take off only when there is topical buzz or in a few segments. Genres itself aren’t expanding. In any other mature market a massive hit within a genre (say crime fiction of fantasy) would see other similar books also selling well. In India it’s declining into a one-hit wonder as a general trend. So in the competition for leisure time screens seem to be winning over the page. And this isn’t good—not just for the industry but for the socio-cultural development of any nation. Engagement with long form narrative is critical and I’m hoping it comes back once again, when OTT and screen based short form text ceases to be the new thing and the only way to consume narrative forms.

But the other key trend or development rather is also the increasing professionalization of the industry –from the positioning of almost a amateur dilettante (“we love books but the business doesn’t interest us”) to that of people wanting to master all that it takes to be a publishing professional—in both book and business terms. Looking at my young colleagues, I’m very hopeful—because the talent is really great. But more importantly the drive to learn the business is as strong. Whether the staying power and the mastery over their areas will happen, only time will tell—but I’d bet on them.

But I worry about two biggest issues they have to confront—piracy that eats away at the bestsellers and the clearly evident decline in leisure reading I’d mentioned. And that is something that needs to be taken up seriously and addressed in a sustained campaign from school up.

AABP: What next after Hachette for you ?

Thomas: Actual retirement is all I have planned for now – give myself and my long suffering partner that truly relaxing break. I meant what I said in the press release—after 25 years of reading for work, and reading P&Ls, and MIS reports it’s time to read and re-read my favourite books, including my yellowbacks. Books, film and some travel should sum it up—along with a re-engagement with quizzing, something I love but have been out of touch with since my college days until this year again –because that’s something that’s seeing a huge revival right now across cities and online.