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Decoding GST at the GST Expert Table at JUMPSTART, Friday 4th August 2017

GST has been implemented as of 1 July 2017. It is early days as yet but GBO is organising a roundtable on the topic. I will be moderating it. Here are the details.

Dear Friends,

Greetings from the German Book Office!

In the view of the current GST regime, publishers and printers have many questions about the taxation purview. German Book Office cordially invites you to participate in the Round Table on GST at JUMPSTART 2017. This is an open round-table especially designed for clarifications on the matter of GST, to be held at India International Centre, New Wing. It will be moderated by Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, International Publishing Consultant.

Expert:
1. Mr. Sujit Ghosh, Partner at ADVAITA Legal
2. Mr. Sanjay Garg, Partner- Indirect Tax, KPMG India

Agenda: Book publishing and printing – GST Do’s & Don’ts

Who should attend?
– Printers
– Publishers
– Authors
– Publishing professionals

The Publishing & Print Industry is in a state of dilemma with the new tax structure affecting the business. Come join us in this open house discussion while we decode GST.

Date
4 August 2016
Time
4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Venue
India International Centre, New Wing, New Delhi

To confirm your availability please contact the following number: 011 49120951. By invitation only.

Prashasti Rastogi | DIRECTOR

GERMAN BOOK OFFICE NEW DELHI

www.newdelhi.gbo.org

The German Book Office New Delhi is a joint venture between the Frankfurt Book Fair And the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin.

_________________________________________
FRANKFURT BOOK FAIR: 11 – 15 OCTOBER 2017

GUEST OF HONOR: FRANCE

Jumpstart, 28-29 Aug 2013

11 09 , 2013 1 Comment

Jumpstart this year was focused on talking, discussing, tackling issues in children’s literature in a range of languages. The discussions were not necessarily confined to the domain of English-language publishing. The presentations, panel discussions and conversations on the side were representative of the enthusiasm, involvement and engagement that the various stakeholders in children’s literature hold. For Subir Shukla, the definition of children’s literature, was inclusive of textbooks that were being created for children in all languages across all states. It was not necessarily confined to the domain of trade literature ( picture books, chapter books, fiction and non-fiction) but that which was being created and used on a daily basis in classrooms across states. According to Subir Shukla textbooks such as the ones he was discussing had phenomenal print runs of 700,000 + as opposed to 5,000+ of trade literature, so it was a definition hard to dispute. Though there will always be quibbles about what constitutes “children’s literature”.

Anita Roy, Sampurna Chattarji and Anushka Ravishankar, Jumpstart 2013

The first day sessions were attended very well. There were an estimated 175 people who had registered, apart from the invitees, speakers, panelists etc. But there was even better constructive engagement to be experienced on the sidelines, during the coffee and lunch breaks, the reception ( by invitation only) in the evening etc. The second day was quieter with a hum of activity in the various sessions. These were primarily masterclasses focussed on writing and illustrating, followed by the book souk — a form of B2B speed-dating between authors and publishers.

Jumpstart 2013

This is the fourth edition of Jumpstart. Every year there has been something new on offer. In terms of content, formats and organisation. For instance, this year participants could register on separate days, depending upon what sessions were of interest to them rather than sign up for the two-day conference. It made a marked difference to the level of engagement between the audience and speakers. There were (mostly) focussed questions from the floor instead of too many rambling observations. The proposed format of inviting speakers to make presentations like the TED lectures was a good idea, since these are highly experienced professionals, but without a rehearsal the day before there was palpable nervousness amongst the speakers. So very soon the TED-like talks fizzled out into simple presentations from the podium followed by a panel discussion.

This time it was evident that the first day of the conference was meant for intensive networking. People were obviously engaged in serious conversations, business cards were being exchanged and the immense (business) possibilities of bringing so many stakeholders in children’s literature together was apparent. If only it were possible to know beforehand who were all the registered participants at Jumpstart, maybe the networking could have been more effective, since there is a limit to how many conversations one can have in a few hours. Energies do get spent. Maybe upon registering Jumpstart visitors could visit a restricted access section of the official website and view the names of expected people and their email ids, reach out to them, fix appointments, and do a bit of homework before attending the conference so the interactions could be far more constructive. Otherwise too much time was being spent in exchanging pleasantries, especially for Jumpstart virgins. Veterans, of course, knew how to mingle and move swiftly from one huddle to the next, glean information, exchange cards and initiate conversations, many to be completed days later. Over the years, I hear, many business engagements have emerged from or facilitated by Jumpstart. This year one of the immediate ones was award-winning illustrator Julia Kaergel’s visit to Kumaon University, facilitated by Arundhati Desothali.

(C) Julia Kaergel

The “practical” aspect of the conference – the masterclasses and the Book Souk – are feature that continue to enchant a number of participants. Illustrators and writers have the opportunity have face-to-face interactions with publishing professionals, experts and of course authors can meet editors of publishing firms to show them their manuscripts. Maybe next year a session on learning how to cost one’s labour and/or the costs involved in producing children’s literature could also be factored in. It would certainly help many of the conversations to be a tad sharper and focused. People have dreams and it is up to the publishers to make them come alive through a partnership, but many of those dreams need to be realistic, only possible if economics and money are discussed.

Translation panel, Jumpstart 2013

Rohini Chowdhury, translator and writer, says it well about children’s literature, something that German Book Office is constantly working at and facilitating through such platforms like Jumpstart – “Children are demanding readers, they absorb and observe, criticize and comment with a great deal more engagement and involvement than do most adults. They are also our future, and therefore, whether it is an original novel or story, or a translated work, children deserve the best that I can give.” (http://bit.ly/18OytEa )

11 Sept 2013

Guest post: Paro Anand, storytelling in multiple tongues to children

26 08 , 2013 No Comments

In Nov 2003, Paro Anand and I were invited by the French Government to attend the salon de livre jeunesse. It was a wonderful trip. While there Paro was invited to tell stories in a French bookstore. I was fortunate to attend the session with Paro. It is nearly a decade ago and I have some wonderful pictures from that particular evening, including one of a child sitting under a table listening to Paro with his mouth open. Subsequently Paro has narrated stories on various platforms, to multi-lingual audiences. In the post below she shares some of these experiences.

I decided to ask Paro Anand to write this note after realising that Jumpstart 2013 would focus on “Speaking in Tongues”.( http://www.jumpstartfest.com/home) It is a platform meant to discuss children’s literature across languages and address the idea of bibliodiversity. What better way to do it than hear from a practitioner of the trade, who has done exactly this…told stories in multiple languages to various audiences around the world. Unfortunately Paro Anand will not be attending Jumpstart this year.

Paro Anand telling stories in English, Hindi and Punjabi to a French-speaking audience in a Parisian Bookstore, Nov 2003.

Storytelling is all about language, about words – right? I thought so too. And if someone told me that it was possible to tell stories to an audience who did not understand a word of what you were saying, well, that would be absurd. I thought so too.

Except that I have been put into this situation on several occasions – four times, in fact. The first time was early in my storytelling career where I was faced with an audience of Telugu-speaking children to whom i was a ‘firangi’. I flung my body into service and mimed and acted out every word. They got it. Well, most of it.

The next time was in a bookstore in Paris. I had a few animal stories prepared, but the young, French-speaking audience was totally unfamiliar with English. So i told the story in Hindi – and Punjabi. I peppered it with a handful of French words and the kids were singing Punjabi songs by the end of the session! Armed with that success, I repeated the experiment in Geneva, Switzerland, this time along with an Indian storyteller who also spoke German and French. I performed in Hindi and Punjabi and she answered my questions in German and French. It’s not as if the kids only understood half the session. They had a grip on the story as a whole and many said they’d enjoyed hearing a story in another language. I asked which part they liked best and they said the lion’s part. Not the French part, just the lion’s part!

But the crowning glory in multi-language crown was doing a session with a Zulu South African performance teller called Gcina. We met for the first time on stage with the audience already assembled. I had no idea which stories she was going to tell, I did not know her work and she did not know mine. But the kids were Hindi speaking so she needed a ‘go-between’. We were both game, though and that’s all that mattered. She launched into her story using English with a bit of Swahili where it would be apparent what the words were and I mirrored her action for action, word for word. It was magical, for me most of all. By the end, the audience was shouting out the Zulu words and Gcina was answering in Hindi!

Which only goes to show that it’s the heart and soul of a story that we absorb, the words are only a vehicle. I have personally enjoyed hitching a ride on an unknown vehicle and discovering where that journey will land me.

27 Aug 2013

(C) Paro Anand

Guest post: Arundhati Deosthale writes about her collaboration with Julia Kaergel

22 08 , 2013 2 Comments

Arundhati Deosthale, co-founder A&A Book Trust, writes about her experience in translating the Mimi series into Hindi and her collaboration with award-winning German illustrator Julia Kaergel.

A & A Book Trust feels privileged to have had this opportunity to introduce two extraordinarily talented women in children’s literature. In 2009, I met Doris Dorrie in Munich. All those who know German cinema know her as a maker of off-beat film maker, a novelist and a teacher in film institute. It was a pleasure to discover that she writes books for children too. She presented me copies of her Mimi picture books series illustrated by Julia Kaergel, and the rest is history. I had till then seen Julia’s work in children’s libraries and had heard about the various prizes she had been honoured with…

Mimi series just couldn’t have gone to any other illustrator other than Julia, her insights into child-psychology, her uncanny skills to go beyond the text, and sense of fun have contributed brilliantly to the success of the series in Germany, Switzerland and also in India. Mimi came in to Hindi directly from German, as a part of the ‘Girl- child’ special picture books project and went on straight to the villages through Room to Read libraries in 8 Indian states, including Uttaranchal. The acceptance of Mimi across the cultures; especially the interiors of India, among the first generation to see the picture books speaks of the vividness and universal appeal of Julia’s art. We did have to make two minor changes though, namely deleting the two references to pork and beef, when Mimi shops with her mother. But Julia accepted these willingly, appreciating the sensitivities of two communities in India. Chirag, an NGO working for education and rural development, runs a primary school in Shitala, a cluster of villages in the Nainital district of Uttaranchal. The Chirag school kids picked up Mimi for play-acting. It was such a pleasure watching the children draw and make paper pyjamas and a la Mimi to wear these upside down on their heads. They raised some really interesting questions for Julia and Doris, the makers of this series like Mimi who keeps things from parents for quite some time, is that OK?

How come that her parents don’t seem to be minding her being such a menace?

And

Is she a ‘good’ girl or a ‘naughty’ one?

These were the questions which made the teachers and parents think aloud on the difference in parenting and schooling between our two respective cultures. One could say that the children were a bit envious of Mimi whose imagination runs amok in both the books, and parents surely did some learning playfully. And this surely is an amazing response to a picture book!!

Arundhati Deosthale and Julia Kaergel will be in conversation on 29 August 2013 @ Jumpstart. Julia Kaergel will also be conducting an illustrator’s masterclass on 30 Aug 2013. Details available at http://www.jumpstartfest.com/home

(C) Arundhati Deosthale

23 Aug 2013

Guest post: Arunava Sinha on translating for children and adults

22 08 , 2013 No Comments

When I heard that Arunava Sinha would be attending JumpStart as a panelist. I wrote him immediately. I was curious to know if he changed his methodology when translating for different kinds of readers or did the story remain a story for him. So he sent me this short note about his experiences at translating for children/YA as opposed to translating for adults.

Arunava has published with many publishers. He has also translated stories from Bengali for children ( Puffin) and written an introduction to a translation (Hachette India).

This is what Arunava had to say:

I do not translate children’s or young adult’s literature differently from adult literature. As a translator, my mission is still to be true to the original text and uphold the intention of the writer (at least, my perception of the intent). I trust the writer to have taken care of the factors involved in writing for children – directness, choice of words and phrases, subject, voice, and so on. I do not tailor the text in any way for the readership. If the writer makes certain demands of the young reader, or has certain assumptions about what they know already, so do I. I do not intervene to make things more easily digestible for the reader of the translation because she or he happens to be young.

Reading children’s literature in translation is, arguably, no different from reading adult literature in translation. Unfortunately, not enough literature for children or even young adults seems to be available in translation. As readers in two, maybe three, Indian languages, most of us are deprived of the variety of writing for children in India and elsewhere in the world. And so are our children.

Arunava Sinha will be on the panel discussion “Speaking in Tongues”, 29 Aug 2013 @ 16:30 pm. The other panellists will be Urvashi Butalia, Rubin D’Cruz, Sampurna Chattarji and Shobha Vishwanath. Some of the issues that they will be addressing: “Translation is tricky. Dialogue is difficult. How can we know that a book that works in one language will work in another? Which stories travel? Which ones ‘stick’? Why are there so few children’s books translated from one Indian language to another? Are illustrations just as culture-bound as words?”

For more information about Jumpstart, registeration details etc: http://www.jumpstartfest.com/home

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose is an international publishing consultant and columnist.

Twitter: @JBhattacharji

22 Aug 2013

Translations, children’s literature, Jumpstart 2013

21 08 , 2013 2 Comments

During my childhood I was fortunate to have read many stories published in the former Soviet Union. Some of my favourites were and continue to be the folk tale Vasilisa the Beautiful collected by Alexander Afanasyev (1930s); Alexander Pushkin’s verse fairy tale The Tale of Tsar Saltan, of His Son the Renowned and Mighty Bogatyr Prince Gvidon Saltanovich, and of the Beautiful Princess-Swan (1831) and Nikolay Nosov’s The Adventures of Dunno and his Friends (1954). These were written in Russian and the English translations were made available by People’s Publishing House (PPH). The translations were a delight to read, all the books were richly illustrated, the printing was done on very good quality paper, usually the books were hardbacks and the price points were incredibly low. These books establish for me a high benchmark in terms of what can be achieved in children’s literature. Years later I still possess my copies of these books and now my daughter is beginning to enjoy flipping through the books. (The other day she very grandly announced to me that these are my books. Not yours!)

The translations were usually done by a wide variety of people around the globe. Inevitably the language used is perfect in the destination language without carrying over any awkward phrases or sentence structures from the source language. ( “Awkward” only if it is impossible to translate a phrase or a sentence accurately in to destination language.) But by focusing on the perfect use of English without compromising on its quality did not take away anything from the original story. There is no doubt that the stories originated in the former Soviet Union as all the details remain the same. Even the illustrations are not adapted, reduced or modified for publication in the destination language. They were reproduced as is. Even if they were unfamiliar and at times challenging for children since they were so far removed from their own culture, it really did not matter. The illustrations accompanying the story were sumptuous and complemented the story well. Even their placement on the page was always done correctly. The text matched the illustration laid on the page. So a young reader would not get unduly perturbed.

At the annual JumpStart event ( 29-30 Aug 2013) translating children’s literature or “Speaking in Tongues” is going to be the theme. The speakers are a wide variety of publishing professionals from India and abroad. They consist of publishers, designers, translators, educators, authors and illustrators. They will be sharing their experiences and discussing the significance of words, illustrations, languages and cultures and how they help shape/influence young minds. Also addressing issues such as “building a healthy and sustainable ‘bibliodiversity’ for the next generation? Or are we creating a whole generation of linguistic exiles, neither ‘at home’ in their mother tongue nor in English?” These are sessions I would like to attend. Hear what are the challenges of producing children’s literature across cultures, the successful experiments/collaborations that have happened recently etc. For more details http://www.jumpstartfest.com/home

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose is an International Publishing Consultant and columnist.

Twitter: @JBhattacharji

20 Aug 2013

My lead article on children and YA literature in German Book Office Tuesday newsletter, 17 July 2012

17 07 , 2012 No Comments

Greetings

Today, we want to further introduce you to the world of children’s books. Our GBO friend Jaya Bhattacharji Rose who is an international publishing consultant will tell us more about Children’s and Young adult fiction. How do these genres work in India, what are the challenges the publisher faces?

Above that, we are very excited to announce the final programme for our Jumpstart conference 2012! And we are publishing the second part of Manasi Subramaniam’s report on children’s Book publishing in South Asia.

So again come join us in learning more about the children’s Book Industry!

Enjoy the read!
Best wishes from the GBO Team

Children’s and YA literature
50% of India’s population is below twenty-five. Yet, children’s literature defined as predominantly trade literature meant for children and young adults as a distinct genre is a recent phenomenon in India. (Although non-fiction sells well too.) Traditionally, children have been brought up on a vast repertoire of storytelling based upon oral tales, folk tales and mythology. So, to have access to literature in the written form is a relatively new concept. Having said this, publishing for children and young adults is booming. It is estimated that it is worth Rs 400 crores or nearly US$ 90 million per annum.

The variety in the lists is commendable, given that India is multi-lingual though the lingua franca continues to be English. The market is not homogenous. Readers are comfortable with reading in more than one language. Publishers are competing with each other for a miniscule space, though translated into numbers it may seem attractive—the population is large and even a small percentage would mean substantial unit sales. The consumer profile varies from a family that has to survive on less than US$ 1 per day to millionaires. For most Indians, the emphasis is on education and not on reading for pleasure. Changing this mindset is taking time, but it is now perceptible. Another factor that has contributed to the growth and interest in children’s literature is the transition from joint families to nuclear families, so parents need books for their children, to fill in the vacuum of elders who would normally have told children stories. Also, more families are double-income which means that there is some disposable income available for books. Children and teenagers too have greater exposure to books through various platforms—book exhibitions and direct marketing initiatives in schools like those by Scholastic; book clubs that circulate regular newsletters; book weeks that are organised by schools where authors are invited, there are regular interactions like Q&A, storytelling sessions, dramatizations of the stories and author-in-residence programmes; and storytelling nights that are organised in all cities and towns or initiatives like Paro Anand’s Literature in Action. Within this context, it is no surprise then that the sale of children’s books in brick and mortar bookstores is estimated to be 35% of total book sales. Surprisingly, this genre contributes only 5% or less towards sales in online retail stores. Most publishers are recording annual leaps in sales. Much of this behaviour can be attributed to a fashionable trend or a bestseller, but there is no doubt that readers are creating and behaving like a community.

Online social communities like Facebook, Twitter, blogging, fan fiction sites are creating a demand as “friends”, cutting across geographical boundaries, young readers discuss and post links, join discussion groups or follow their favourite authors and engage in impulse buying. This generation wants their demands met immediately and with easy and immediate access to information, they do not have much patience. According to authors, publishers, editors, distributors and importers, reading has definitely increased in the past few years. E-books are available but nothing can beat the sensuous appeal of reading a book, touching the pages, experiencing the thrill of holding a book, turning the pages, smelling the ink on paper, caressing the illustrations, fiddling with the dust jackets or admiring the cover design. Even parents admit that their children are reading much more than they did five years ago. Last year at Bookaroo, I saw 10 and 11-year-olds showing off manuscripts that they had written. It is exactly for these reasons that a forum like Jumpstart is significant where there is a cross pollination of ideas and experiences to foster and nurture the future of this genre amongst professionals. Paro Anand sums it up well. “Networking opportunities for creators of children’s and YA literature for themselves, is what makes Jumpstart unique.”

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose is an international publishing consultant.

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose is an independent international publishing consultant. She has a column on publishing in Businessworld online and a literary column in Books & More. Associated with Indian publishing since the early 1990s, her responsibilities have included guest editing the special Children’s and YA Literature of The Book Review, and producing the first comprehensive report on the Indian Book Market for the Publisher’s Association, UK. Her articles, interviews and book reviews have also appeared in Bookbrunch, Frontline, The Book Review, DNA, Outlook, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, LOGOS, Businessworld, Brunch, and The Muse. As a Literary Director with Siyahi, she helps identify and guide the next generation of writing talent.

Email id: [email protected]
Twitter: @Jbhattacharji
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jaya-bhattacharji-rose/1/b51/a57

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