PUBLISHING BOOKS
Ranjeet Pratap Singh - Since its inception , the self-publishing community has encouraged both new and established writers from a variety of backgrounds to pursue their passion for storytelling , providing users with access to a large and engaged audience .
For any first time writer seeing their work published in print is a huge milestone and something we hope to support writers achieve . Pratilipi , as a platform , enables us to spot talented writers and engaging content , and if we can streamline the process from identifying content to publishing it that can only be a good thing .
The acquisition of the Write Order is a significant step toward Pratilipi ' s vision of democratizing story-telling across languages , experimenting with new formats , and reaching new audiences . The acquisition will also help Pratilipi broaden its reach across a variety of categories alongside our in-house web series and audiobooks , Pratili now has a fully functional publishing arm that will assist their writers in having their work published in print .
Indian Printer and Publisher – How are Pratilipi and The Write Order gearing up for the road ahead ?
Niket Raj Dwivedi - We are focused on publishing and bringing out the hidden gems of India in print book format . You never know if the next Harry Potter or Game of Thrones might be hidden inside the diaries / laptops of young India just waiting for an opportunity to get out there and build a whole new ripple in the literary circle .
Indian Printer and Publisher – What genres of writing does The Write Order cater to ? How many books have you published till now ?
Niket Raj Dwivedi - We have published close to 200 + solo books from writers all over India and some abroad . The Write Order has explored multiple genres and categories ranging from Fiction , Non-Fiction , a lot of poetry collections , autobiographies , and educational books .
Indian Printer and Publisher – Tell us more about the kind of books readers can look forward to in the upcoming months .
Niket Raj Dwivedi - Our readers can keep expecting a lot of poetry and fiction alongside some of the best works on Pratilipi being converted into print books .
Indian Printer and Publisher – What hurdles did Pratilipi face in its five year journey as a digital literature platform ? How did you overcome these challenges ?
Ranjeet Pratap Singh - Like many other user-generated content platforms , for years , we had to tackle the classic chicken-egg problem . To acquire a large reader base , it needed to onboard good writers and good writers would only join if the audience was large and relevant . Also , educating potential team members , investors , and the broader market on the problem we are solving - especially considering there weren ' t many large user-generated content platforms in India back in 2015 was an early challenge we faced .
Two major challenges that we are continuously working towards are on building the personalization engine since different people have different tastes and preferences and ways to solve content that shouldn ' t be on the platform such as copyright violation , and hate speech .
Indian Printer and Publisher – How did The Write Order cope with the setback caused to the book publishing industry due to the Covid-19 pandemic ?
Niket Raj Dwivedi - The pandemic brought to us a boom . Writers got the time to write , amateurs got the time to explore and hone their skills and everyone was looking for a platform to boost their morale . The Write Order has been growing significantly since then .
Indian Printer and Publisher – How has storytelling evolved in the last hundred years ? Do you think the Covid-19 pandemic has had an impact on the development of reading as a habit in today ' s day and age ?
Ranjeet Pratap Singh - The purpose of establishing Pratilipi was to democratize storytelling . We believed that everyone should have access to content without any language barrier . Definitely , there has been a major shift and today we have stories across so many regional languages and we are happy to say that we were able to play a major role here . With increasing smartphone penetration , people have access to content now and they are consuming content more than ever now . Authors are exploring more genres to write on and readers are looking forward to reading newer things . Now , storytelling has evolved into newer formats and visual storytelling is on the rise . Even at Pratilipi , we are experimenting with newer formats with Pratilipi Comics , web series , and motion graphics .
We hope Pratilipi has been a helpful source of creative rest with bite from lockdown , for both readers and writers . This seems to be supported by the numbers and there has been a large increase in time users spent on the app , going up from 43 minutes a day to 54 minutes a day .
Indian Printer and Publisher – There has been an unprecedented rise in demand for content in vernacular languages in India . Please share your views on the same .
Ranjeet Pratap Singh - Both in our experience with Pratilipi and in our conversation with other authors and publishers , we believe that both reading and writing in Indian languages is growing much faster than English . In Pratilipi , languages like Tamil , Malayalam , Marathi and Telugu are growing over 2X faster than English . On Pratilipi all 10 of the top 10 highest earning as well as most followed writers write in Indian languages .
Thank you for speaking with the Indian Printer and Publisher . n
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Indian Printer & Publisher | 1 November 2021