Q. Congratulations for completing 75 years. While it calls for celebration, does it also coincide with a new plan to reinvigorate the house?
A. Thank you. Stepping into the 75th year in the world of books is a wonderful feeling. It feels great to have had the opportunity to serve the lovers of books for this period of time. We look forward to serving them for the next 75.
The theme of our 75th year celebration is “75 years young, celebrating the future”. We have been trying to work on our product lines in terms of the type of books we publish, the content, the quality of production, the pricing and the distribution over the last five years. We have, during the course of this time, developed a very clear model of publishing that we have been following successfully. Currently, we happen to be one of the largest mass market publishers in the country.
In keeping with the above, we constantly try to analyse changes in reading trends and innovate accordingly. Of late, we have developed an in-depth publishing plan wherein we try to position the manuscript accepted for publication from the day it is accepted. The content, the designing, the pricing and the marketing around it are worked on throughout its journey in the publishing house. This gives the final book a much greater push in the market, leading it on to become a possible success. We have also further deepened our reach into the market. We have begun covering all A, B, C and D towns of India. Hence, from Jaipur to Jabalapur, Mumbai to Bhopal, Delhi to Dibrugarh, we try to cover all the four corners of the country.

Q. What strategies do you have for Rupa’s continuing growth and expansion?
A. We plan to focus more on developing the publishing and distribution business by improving on our core competence in both the areas. In the publishing business, we hope to be able to develop new bestselling authors, create new and successful sub-genres of writing and develop a wider mass market list. In short, we would try to cater to the tastes of a vast majority of the population by expanding into new categories and deepening our depth of our established genres. We plan to focus on young fiction writing, self-help books, biographies and books for teenagers over the next three to five years.
On the distribution business, we hope to develop a better and more effective model wherein we are able to achieve shorter turnaround times than today. Currently, our stock turnaround time stands at 24 hours for local supplies and 48 hours for outstation supplies. We wish to work further on this to take it to 12 and 24 hours respectively. We also plan to work more closely with our retail partners to be able to effectively promote our books to their respective reader base. This marketing effort will span all across the country. Internationally, we have a distribution network which spans from the US to Australia. We wish to improve on this further and develop a comprehensive network which can cater to all major locations across the globe.

Q. In the rapidly changing publishing environment, who do you see as your major competitors?
A. Competition is an integral part of any business. We welcome healthy competition as it helps any organisation to improve itself. However, the kind of publishing programme we follow makes our position very unique.
Q. Some of the decisions you took were quite crucial. Pricing, for example. Has that helped you in your better positioning?
A. Pricing of a book, as per our model, is based on a simple fundamental of making any book published by us affordable to the public at large. However, while doing so, we take extra care to maintain high quality standards. As we are able to price our books cheaper than most of the other books available, it is not a deterrent for us.
During the journey of a business, some decisions certainly change the course of the journey. We forayed into sports publishing with Sunny Days by Sunil Gavaskar. At a time when sports books were unheard of, we happened to be the only ones doing so at full steam. We went on to publish all the four books by Sunil Gavaskar and other books by Vinoo Mankad, Vijay Hazare and Mustaq Ali. Much before young fiction writing was talked about, we published The Inscrutable Americans by Anurag Mathur. We also published the autobiography of Maharani Gayatri Devi when the possibility of a book on this legendary queen was still being discussed. Over the last couple of years, we had the opportunity to publish Chetan Bhagat’s works in the fiction category. The kind of sales Chetan has been able to generate has rewritten the dynamics of publishing.

Q. You have published many first-time authors. Do you think that sometimes there is a risk involved?
A. The quality of the manuscript, the positioning of the work in the market, and the distribution of the same make the book a success. If we are able to find promise in the manuscript, we go ahead an publish the same. We feel good quality writing needs to be presented to the market and hope that we can continue on this with full steam. If worked on properly, with a host of successes by various first-time authors, we don’t think of it as a risk.

Q. Many poetry and short stories writers complain that it is quite a task for them to find a publisher. What is Rupa’s policy vis-à-vis poetry books and short stories’ collections?
A. It is true that poetry and short stories don’t sell in the same number as regular books do. Hence, all publishers are a little conservative about publishing these books. However, we still keep on publishing such books off and on.

Q. Digitalisation is emerging to be a huge challenge. How do you see this in India’s context?
A. We feel the digital platform would offer another forum for garnering sales for the content produced by us. We do not see it to be a challenge. We feel that both would have separate audiences and would cater to different segments of the book reading public. Currently, we are in discussion with some partners to work on the digital platform as well.

Q. The quantum of books you publish every year remains almost unparalleled. Some would say that quality often takes a beating when you focus on the volume. How would you respond to that?
A. The quality of a book is determined on two accounts: the quality of production and the quality of content.
With the improvement in the infrastructural facilities in India, we have been able to fix the first problem successfully. Over 1,600 titles of ours are exported to the developed market in varying quantities.
The acceptance of such a large number of books in a global market testifies that today the production quality is at par with works published internationally. On the content front, we have developed a three-tier evaluation system followed by two levels of editing and subsequently two or three rounds of proof reading. This has helped us to improve on the quality of the content. Also, the quality of writing in India has improved considerably over the last five to seven years and that is visible in the books we publish.