In Indian publishing, a single book can be almost as big as a company. Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography Playing It My Way has, according to this report, notched up sales of 150,289 copies. At a cover price of Rs 899, that would have amounted to sales worth Rs 13.5 crore if the book had been sold without discounts – which, of course, was not the case. Nor were those sales achieved in one financial year.

Still, to get a perspective on that figure, consider the 2014-15 revenues reported by the publishing firm Westland, which was Rs 15.19 crore. Why pick Westland? For one thing, because Amazon has just announced it is acquiring a 26 per cent equity stake in the company, for Rs 9.4 crore – which puts the valuation of Westland at Rs 36.15 crore.

But, perhaps more important, Westland also boasts of India’s second-most successful English fiction author (Chetan Bhagat is No. 1), Amish. Despite a formidable portfolio comprising Amish’s hugely successful Shiva series and, now, the first of the Ramchandra series, despite having a lineup of several other popular writers – Ashwin Sanghi and Anuja Chauhan, for instance – the company hasn’t been able to achieve collectively what Tendulkar has on behalf of his Indian publisher Hachette.

The real story, of course, is how small the revenue pie is from sales of Indian English language fiction. Multinational publishers like Hachette, Penguin Random House or HarperCollins make most of their revenues from imported titles, which is why they are much larger than the Westlands and Rupas, who work largely with Indian titles only.