BackHarperCollins India makes a new beginning at 21
HarperCollins launches e-book imprint called Harper21 that comprise ?21 e-singles? in various genres
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New Delhi: HarperCollins India, the second-largest English-language trade publisher in the country after Penguin Random House, turned 21 this year with the launch of a brand new e-book imprint called Harper21.
“It includes a fairly nimble collection of titles," says V.K. Karthika, publisher of HarperCollins Publishers India. “We wanted to test the waters before venturing out with an e-book imprint, and felt this was a suitable occasion to do so."
Harper21 is loosely based on HarperCollins UK’s Impulse imprint, which focuses mostly on romance, but its agenda is more diverse. Comprised of “21 e-singles" it is a list that features a range of genres—from poetry to graphic novel to crime to romance to sports to fitness to business and cinema. The titles are easily downloadable from Amazon India as Kindle e-readers for ₹ 21 (https://bit.ly/16nrDJV).
Mostly running for less than 20 pages, these can also be read quickly, and on the go, quite the kind of thing that tech-savvy young readers might fancy. From an essay on the making of Anurag Kashyap’s movie The Gangs of Wasseypur by Jigna Kothari and Supriya Madangarli, to the Neera poems of Sunil Gangopadhyay, translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha, it’s quite a catholic fare.
“Most of the content is new," says Karthika, “except, about 15% of it has been either reworked from existing material or tweaked from titles that are forthcoming." Around election time, politically relevant titles, especially long-form essays and excerpts, are going to be added to the list to generate buzz.
More than two decades ago, HarperCollins was just an imprint of Rupa, before it became part of Living Media (the India Today Group) in 2003. Currently, it has a prestigious literary fiction list featuring authors such as the Booker-winning Aravind Adiga, Aatish Taseer, Rana Dasgupta, Tarun Tejpal, Anita Nair, Manu Joseph and Radhika Jha. HarperCollins India is also perhaps the only mainstream English-language publisher to have a robust contemporary poetry list and keeps adding at least three new titles to it every year.
In 2012, HarperCollins India became a wholly owned subsidiary of HarperCollins Worldwide, a move that facilitated the expansion of the HarperCollins 360 programme. Conceived by Brian Murray, CEO of HarperCollins Worldwide, this programme allows HarperCollins to make its authors available in multiple territories without being restricted to their primary market—depending, of course, on the places where HarperCollins has the right to sell these authors.
“As a global publisher, my goal is to make sure that our books are available in every market we operate in and put them up for sale on as many platforms as possible," says Murray, who is visiting India this week. “The retail prices for these books are different for each of these markets and are fixed by sales teams specific to each region."
This project enables authors published in the UK, the US, Australia, Canada and now India to be available in all these markets, without being limited by technology or geography.
The coming of the e-book has also enabled HarperCollins to come up with innovative publishing strategies. The Impulse programme, for instance, which has between 400-500 titles, is dedicated to books that have a digital-first but not digital-only life.
“When editors cannot fit a title into their traditional list, even though the author has potential, they put it under the Impulse imprint," Murray explains. Depending on the response, some of these titles—almost 60% of them—go on to have print lives. The print run, which is sometimes print-on-demand, can range anything between 300-3,000 copies. “A couple of these titles have been turned into traditional physical books and have done very well," adds Murray.
The Harper21 imprint will also be curated in a similar fashion, says Karthika. “We will only feature authors we believe in. The e-format will help us avoid expenses on paper, binding and distribution. We will be doing print-on-demand for some of the titles but at our discretion only."
To drive growth in the Indian publishing market which, Murray says, is growing faster than all other markets they operate in, the local list has been expanded to include educational titles. There is also going to be a sharper focus on children’s and YA titles in future and more concentration on creating e-content and selling it at the right price points.
“In India, we’ve seen growth rates between 12-20% in the last five years," says Murray, “which is very healthy compared to other local and international programmes."
With full control over the company, and more titles coming into the country from the US list, the revenues are expected to go higher in the next few years.
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