Hello Everybody..
This is my first post at Rodinhood.
We have started a literature platform called as “Half Baked Beans” which is in initial stage , we are starting with a publishing house aimed at giving a platform for debut writers as getting that is very difficult for them . The objective is to make authors as brands. We have done creative writing workshops and have a blog as well as we do not want to be just publishers.
The publishing industry is very dis-organized in India . No timely payments , wrong count of books sold given to authors by publishers etc.
The biggest problem is distribution , no distributor wants to take a new publisher or author because they dont guarantee good money and even if they do they charge 55-60% of MRP and no timely payment also.
After giving royalty and input expenses the publisher gets 20% of MRP which is actually not very much.
So most of the publishing houses end up taking money from the author to lessen their expenses.
Now we want to change that , we are willing to put our money and publish the author but the scenario of distribution scares us.Moreover not many distributors have shown interest . Even to upload on sites you need a distributor as they are the ones who supply books to them.
Now my question is how can we minimize the role of distributors? We are looking at models where we can directly sell the books to the customers because that would increase our profits but that requires big marketing budget and innovative techniques.
So we are looking at suggestions : how can we bring a change…
