The tech fix: Indian publishing’s self-help
Some exciting new faces in the Indian publishing industry are radically changing the rules for how a story should be told. And they’re doing it with technology
In The Ken, I did an extensive story on various tech startups that are radically changing Indian publishing. The story is available behind a paywall here, but the broad points I argued were as following:
Indian publishing faces several issues, the least of them being distribution. Here, books are invariably ‘distributed’ to various territories by layers of distributors, sub-distributors, retailers, as with any FMCG product. Bookstores are far and few in between; retail chains have collapsed under the weight of rentals; the deep discounting at e-commerce sites like Amazon has pressured the remaining physical stores, and the reading population is a small fraction of the literate population.
But if you’re an Indian writer today, you have several more options: you can self-publish on Indian language platforms like Pratilipi, Matrubharti, or for English and Hindi, on Juggernaut. Pratilipi supports eight major Indian languages, while Matrubharti supports six, besides Hindi. Also, you can sell your ebook via the Amazon Kindle store. And if you’re a children’s author, you can distribute your work for free, or modify or translate existing ones without any worries, via the StoryWeaver platform.
In short, Indian publishing is no longer restricted to the conventional bifurcation of physical books and ebooks.
The self-publishing website has been radically successful in China. Any talk of self-publishing platforms must begin with the massive $1.1 billion IPO of China Literature, Tencent Holding’s online literature platform, on 31 October. In China, online literature is accessible via websites like QQ.com (China Literature’s primary site), Qidian.com, Hongxiu.com, and Douban.com, where authors upload their works directly on the sites in installments, where readers can read them for free, and as the works and the authors become more popular, the sites may charge readers for the next chapter, or the next 1,000 characters. China had 333.2 million online readers as of 2016. Of these, ‘303.8 million read on mobile devices’. This number is projected to grow to above 400 million by 2020.
Although authors on KDP can sell their ebooks via the Amazon Kindle store, readers don’t pay for the self-published content on the three publishing platforms. These platforms are now toying with the idea of a subscription model — Juggernaut announced they would be looking at one after mobile company Airtel picked up a stake in it recently.
The other way for these sites or their writers to make money is via sale of licensing rights — an increasing trend for traditional publishers too, who are cashing in on the rise of OTT platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime.
And although India doesn’t yet have a self-published star like EL James, all it takes is one monster hit for the platforms to become more popular.
Most interestingly, children’s publishing has seen several tech disruptions, such as the StoryWeaver program, or the PhoneStories program.
Essentially, Indian publishing is now looking beyond traditional publishing models, and introducing new disruptions with the help of technology. For writers, this is a great sign. For traditional publishers, they will need to look beyond the existing model to see how they fit in. But for the newer publishers, it’s a whole new world of exciting prospects, and by not slotting themselves in the traditional model, they can experiment and expand until they find the right touch.
