Another reason for the disquiet is that Westland has tremendous heritage. It started life as Affiliated East West Press —a distributor of books—back in 1962. It has since been a distributor of books, a publisher and a book store operator. The long years in the trade means tremendous goodwill across the publishing ecosystem. It was acquired by the Tatas in 2013 and by Amazon in 2017, but is still led by Gautam Padmanabhan, son of the founder, KS Padmanabhan, an icon of Indian publishing. So it was one of India’s oldest independent publisher and retained elements of that spirit even as it came under the ownership of larger corporations. Its editor V.K. Karthika is well regarded in the industry and inspired loyalty among staff as well as authors. With Amazon’s backing, in recent years, the publisher could also afford to be aggressive with advances.

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