Indie publishing's India chapter
"We printed the first magazine, Shabd, in late 1950. Over the period of time, we discontinued the publication for various reasons, one of them being, the inability to sustain the costs or print production and the returns thereafter," said Ashok Shahane, the founder and managing editor of Pras Prakashan.
16 Sep 2015 | By PrintWeek India
He added, "But we continued to launch new titles, like Aso, Atharva, in spite of this."
And thus conversations about independent literature publishing continued for over an hour at the Pen@Prithvi session for September 2015, organised by the Pen-All India Centre.
The agenda was to celebrate Indie publishing, one small press, one little journal at a time. The four-member panel was an eclectic mix - Ashok Shahane of Pras Prakashan, Indira Chandrasekhar of Out of Print, Dr. Arjun Choudhuri, of The Four Quarters Magazine and Tanuj Solanki from the The Bombay Literary Magazine.
Chandrashekhar, Choudhri and Solanki, on an average, receive 50 submissions each day for their literature journals. "The online platform, says Chandrashekhar, has a wider reach, is easily accessible and demands little production cost. The idea of a literary journal, printed or online-only, is to bring to the reader the diverse subjects in different languages."
With experiences and influences from the West, the duo of Chandrashekhar and Solanki are betting the flourishing of literary journals on the online platform.
Both Choudhri and Sahane, with their tete e tete with the print world, grapple to sustain the costs of printing, the margin for the publishers, and more importantly, marketing or selling the magazine.
What turns out is a need for a indie publishing community - with writers and publishers coming together and strengthening the platform for independent publishing.
See All