What’ that?

Most of the startups want to be the first movers in the Web 2.0 space, fill in and consolidate areas like travel & tourism, digital downloads, search [ web, mobile, local ], social-networking, real estate & property, job market and web 2.0 services. It’ quite nice to see a startup trying to make in roads in a niche segment, or let’ say muzzle and create a new arena by itself, although there may be other players. Here’s one in the area of self-publishing or print-on-demand [ POD]! In traditional publishing, once the writer submits the content, the publishers were totally in control of publishing material, the prices set, the profit gained with some upfront payment made to the authors. There was a large turn-around time for the book to be published, before reaching the stores and needed marketing campaigns for the launch and publicity. For print-on-demand or self-publishing which makes use of digital printing, the author wields greater responsibility as far as design and layout of the book is concerned, and also in the marketing of the book. Probably, blogs, social media and word-of-mouth is the way to go for digital printing.

Pothi.com is all about books, our books, your books. Although, not sure what pothi means and in which language. This is a brand new startup venturing into an unique space, with a distinguishing plan in the lineup of Indian startups. So what do they do? They are into bringing you an experience of low-cost, hassle-free, self publishing end-to-end platform. The evocative theme seems to be to open up an era of endless personal publishing and spread the ambiance of knowledge, entertainment, edutainment and wisdom. Pothi intends to fill the gap for people with insatiable desire for writing and publishing hard copies of their engagements, their reveries, their experiences, their memoirs, their poems, their dreams, their projections, their ideas, their thoughts, their predictions, their views, all in words on reams of paper bound as books.

So how does Pothi work?

Anybody with good written material deemed to be bought at a nominal price by consumers, can test their hands at publishing. All they have to do is place an order with Pothi.com. However there are some caveats for publishing the book, nothing preventive or a catch so to say. First things first, the price and margins that the book fetches the writer can be determined at the outset through a simple calculation, in short, the writer can fix the price of the book and control the profits he/she makes on each copy sold. A rough guide to the price estimator can be reached here. The production cost depends on the binding type [ soft cover binding, hard cover binding, saddle-stitched binding ], the number of pages [ 50, 100, 200, 250+ ], and colors used on the cover and interiors during printing. It seems 50-100 pages will get stapled binding, 50-200 pages gets soft cover binding, and 100+ pages can secure hard cover binding. Secondly, the author is in charge of formatting the content, choosing colors and designing the covers, which was taken care of by the publishers in traditional publishing model.

The Business model

The final cost of the book includes production cost, the author’ margin and Pothi’s margin calculated as per the following formula:
Price = Production Cost + Author’s Margin + Pothi Margin

The author can control the profit he/she wants to earn on the book. Then there is a small margin garnered by Pothi.com which stands at minimum 30% of the production cost for costs upto Rs 100, with a cut-off upper limit of Rs 30. That means, if the production cost is Rs 100, minimum margin for Pothi is Rs. 30. If the production cost is Rs 300, the minimum Pothi cut would be Rs 30 and if it’s say Rs 80, the minimum margin would be Rs 24. The shipping and packaging costs are extra.

In future paid services towards help with preparing the book for publishing like formatting, design, and covers is planned. Also, paid promotional activities are also in the pipeline.

Pothi.com is also a marketplace to buy the published books online. The books can be chosen from amongst categories. The final cost would include shipping and packaging costs, and they would be shipped to the address given.

The content copyright

The author has a non-binding relation with the portal, in the sense, the published content is free of any copyright from the Pothi publishing. The author is free to reproduce the same content as (s)he wishes on blogs or any other medium. However the books would be sold based on the buying orders, as long as the book is listed on their site. The book can be yanked off their site anytime without any binding, with a limit of atleast two days towards removing the book listing.

A presentation about the details of Pothi.com can be availed here.

To summarize the options available with Pothi:
(1) Non-exclusive, non-binding contract. Remove the books at anytime or publish elsewhere simultaneously
(2) Support for many languages
(3) Paid services in future for help with book preparation
(4) Paid services available for book promotion
(5) Support for books prepared in formats like MS Word, Openoffice.org, Staroffice. More details for the writers here.

The people behind this publishing portal are Mudranik Technologies Pvt Ltd. They won the won i2I, the business plan competition by IIM Calcutta recently. The founders of Pothi have a sound business plan and are filling up a niche market gap. Kudos and all the best to the team at Pothi.com We look forward to see how self-publishing evolves, especially for the Indian market. It’ to be seen if such a model would succeed in India and if at all the same can be extended overseas. They have already rolled out the first set of books published via the site. Before we bid adieu here’ a list of the books:
(1) On the Contrary by Mahesh Murthy
(2) Do Shabd Tumhare Liye by Anonymous
(3) Kuchh Pal by Jaya Jha
(4) Four Briefs and Six Vests by Dilip T K

More updates later.