Chiki Sarkar, the former publisher of Penguin Random House India, launched her own publishing house on April 22. Called Juggernaut and headquartered in Delhi, this young company is all set to fun up the Indian book biz with its new ideas. t2 caught up with the bookpreneur over FaceTime.
Congratulations! Tell us a bit about your publishing house…
Thank you very much. We have a range of literary and commercial writers. We’ll publish Arundhati Roy, William Dalrymple, Rajat Gupta, Prashant Kishor… academics like Shyam Saran and Nalini Sundar, then a range of commercial writers. We’ll do both English and Hindi.
But I think what makes Juggernaut stand out is that alongside the physical list, which would be about 50 books (a year), it also has a strong mobile-first platform. We have created an app to produce books… think of it as a kind of Netflix for books. The idea is to create a really fun and pleasurable experience.
Yes, the app is a first for an Indian publishing house...
See, my premise is very simple: we live on our phones, whether we are a younger generation or an older generation. No publisher in this country has really grappled with this space. We don’t have enough bookshops, the ones we have are more often in distress, there are more chains closing down than opening up... the physical infrastructure of bookselling has never really been strong in India and now is in a particularly fragile place.
At the same time you have this other world that is growing and leaping and mushrooming and as a publisher, my question was simple: how can I find a way to get these smartphone users to come to me, to read my books and discover my writers on their phones?
The thing that all publishers ask all around the world is how can I get my authors and readers to meet? How do I learn about who my readers are? How can I find new readers? Those are the three questions a publisher will ask today. It seems to me that the way to answer those questions is through some kind of digital means, especially in India, where we have a massive young population and they are all buying phones.
So we created this app, which in many ways looks very simple. My question was, can I give you a really smooth, effortless, elegant experience of reading?
What the app does is, it’s so smooth, once it’s on your phone you click and it’s extremely visual, jackets pop up beautifully, the text is perfectly designed. The app makes reading so easy. You don’t have to go to the Kindle store. We have an integration with Paytm. We had a wonderful design company that looked into how type was going to be set so that reading was a pleasure.
Alongside it, there’s a whole bunch of fun stuff. If you are going to read on the phone, are you going to read different things? Are you naturally going to read War and Peace or something different? So we thought about length. There is a lot of material on the phone that’ll be at the 18,000-25,000-word length. A shorter book. Then serialised books, then the short story. Also, we’ve done a huge range of genres — crime, fantasy, love, sex, romance. With it, smart politics, history, cookery, health, motivation, self-help….
The other thing is, we’ve made the app very simple but social. One of the things people like doing is if they like a quote they take a picture of the page and they put it on Twitter and Facebook. Here, highlighting and sharing is absolutely easy. You can gift the book at the press of a gift button. You can gift it anonymously as well, which we think is gonna go a bit crazy (laughs). Or not. We’ll see.
You can write to your authors and they will write back. We will send authors regular information about their sales on a fortnightly basis.
We are intrigued by the name ‘Juggernaut’. Wasn’t this the title Rajdeep Sardesai wanted for his book that later became 2014?
I know! So ‘Juggernaut’ came up because my husband Alex (Travelli of The Economist) came up with it. And I love it (smiles). You are absolutely right, I asked Rajdeep not to put it on his book and then I put it in my company! I changed my mind. May be because, you know, I love my husband and my husband gave me this idea... I see it as a present from him!
But I think for the company why I felt it was right was because I felt it has two things… it has a bit of India and it has a bit of the world. And that was interesting for me, a word that the world knew but its roots were from India. The other thing was that there was something kind of naughty, mischievous… you’re a new, young company, you give yourself this name, there was a kind of tongue-in-cheek quality to it, a sense of fun.
We’ve had lots of people who HATE the name. Like Ram Guha, the historian, hated the name. And there’s a world that loves it. It’s like Marmite, you either love it or hate it. That to me is a successful name. There’s no way you won’t remember it. It’s a bit of a punch in your face. Really, 50 per cent of people I meet hate it. They think it’s arrogant, it’s gimmicky… and I’m like, no it’s fun, and it’s out there and it has a bit of insouciance and I love it.
You will release chapters every night at 10pm, just like a TV series?
We play with different kinds of formats. In the launch list we have Sunny Leone’s stories, which comes to your phone every night at 10pm for a week. We also have Rujuta Diwekar, who is India’s top nutritionist. Umera Ahmed, who is Pakistan’s Danielle Steele, she’s written Zindagi Gulzar Hai and all that. We have her book, Nowhere Girl. In Urdu it has sold a lakh copies. All these are sort of 30,000-word books, what we call one-shot books, you download it, you read it at a go.
We have short story collections where you can either buy a single story or the whole collection, we have crime novels that are serialised over five to eight days. We have stand-alone short stories. And we have a huge range of free classics, particularly looking at university curriculum, so that if students like being on the app, they have a bunch of their reading material right there.
You’re always going to get variety and I’ll be intrigued to see what stuff catches on. We’re not sure. We might see serialisation doesn’t work at all, people like the one-shots. You know, I’ve set up Juggernaut with more questions than answers. I wish I could tell you that I know exactly how it’s going to pan out… but I really don’t.
John Makinson (chairman, Penguin Random House) told us during a t2 chat that he doesn’t think readers will take to chapters. ‘They want the whole book’, he said....
The only place of disagreement with John I would have is that I don’t know, nor does John. I’m guessing, but boy, we should play! Everyone should be playing at this. I mean, no one should be saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ for sure. Go for it, see what happens (smiles). We ALL have to be in this space.
Our world is going to be on a screen. And the world of books has to meet and talk to this world. You have to experiment. And none of us knows how it’s gonna turn out.
For me it’s very simple. I want to give people a range. I want to find out what the Indian reader wants… none of us know. Because none of us have tried it. And then, we can come back to this in six months’ time and say ‘ya you are right’ or ‘ya this didn’t work’.
What will be really interesting is that in a year’s time if we revisit this conversation, I will be able to give you hard facts. I’ll be able to tell you what the Indian reader likes or doesn’t like.
You have an intriguing line-up… how are you picking your authors?
Like I’ve always done. One is, every publisher wants to have new voices. And you aren’t a good publisher if you aren’t committed to finding and discovering new voices.
Then, everyone wants to have bestseller, in India in particular, but across the world too, to find the voices that people want to hear. So everyone wants to know about Prashant Kishor, about Rajat Gupta — these are no-brainer commissions. I would have commissioned these books anywhere, had I sat in Random House, or Penguin or Rupa or Westland or wherever.
When I buy celebrity, I tend not to do it blindly. I tend to think quite hard about who the celebrity is, and what’s the story.
The list is as varied as any publisher but I think the one difference in Juggernaut is that I want to get exactly the names I want. So you go like, oh my god Prashant Kishor, oh my god Rajat Gupta, oh my god Sunny Leone, really?! Wow! I don’t want you to feel anything but real curiosity because I never want you to feel indifferent. And I want to find the person whose voice is of that moment.
Having celebrities is going to be a feature in Juggernaut because I think digital amplifies celebrity. When you look at Sunny’s digital following, it’s five million-plus, if you add her Twitter, her Instagram and her Facebook. The modern-day celebrity is more famous than ever. One of the hunches I have is that whatever I would have sold physically for a celebrity will get amplified on the app.
Samhita Chakraborty
Who is the one celebrity whose story you’d like to read on Juggernaut? Tell t2@abp.in
