Publishing Assembly Line

I Continue to be amazed by Futures Group, India's Retail Giant, owned by the Retail King, Kishore Biyani. Now we all know that Depot is a future's group retail foray into books, music, stationary and gifts. But what you didn't probably know (atleast I didn't!) is that it is also involved in something known as "Self Publishing"

Now Self-Publishing means that Depot provides end to end solutions in publishing for a price. So Basically if you've always harboured notions of becoming an author but thought that you were prolly not the prize catch of the big publishing houses, then depot comes to your rescue by charging a small fee for publishing your book!! whoah! So if you decide you want to write a 200 page book with roughly 40,000 words in it, depot charges you for the cover design, proofing, editing, lay-outing, and printing. It calculated that it would cost me 2.5 lakhs to publish my book if I took all their services. Now the best part is that they also promise you a snazzy "book launch" through their retail platform and if it has a potential to be a hit, they'll even retail it for you!

Wow, so now writing a book is like a business investment. I invest 2.5 lakhs, price it competitively and if it sells like hot cakes, I rake in the moolah? and all this without the disappointment of rejection letters from publishing house and without agency cut and tiresome editors. Sounds too good to be true, but I wonder if this will work. There's too much of an aspiration element here, but considering it is coming from Biyani, I'm sure he's thought this true.

What do you think? would you invest to publish your book? I don't know actually. The old fashioned way of being cherry picked by publishing houses has more credibility to it. But this new method has to it the very agressive retail arm backing it. So if your book has potential you can be sure Depot will aggressively market it in their stores.

Read more at http://www.depotindia.in/self_publish.php