New Delhi (India), May 4: ‘Shabd.in’, an e-platform based dedicated tool for the writer community through for publishing their books and promote them online and earn money, has now introduced the listing facility of books for sale across the country. Any writer, who has got their book published from any publication, will now be able to list it on shabd.in for sale. In addition to it, the brand is preparing to make available all the books in nearly all Indian languages on their website for readers to purchase from. Shabd.in used to be a Hindi based website, and recently has added English language, making it a one of the very few bi-lingual literature websites in India.
Shabd.in was soft-launched in late 2021 and re-launched in March 2022, with additional features and various revenue models. The platform aims at serving as a means to bridge the gap of the absence of local language platforms in India where people could write freely and get their books published.
Shabd.in came into existence as Shabdanagari.com in 2015, where it was merely a social networking site in Hindi, founded by Amitesh Misra and Nikhil Tiwari. In September 2021, the social networking site was re-branded as Shabd.in with an expanded range of services targeted towards the writers in Indian languages. The platform was joined by another founding member, Santosh Verma, to further strengthen the functionality and vision. For its interactive model, the platform got approved by the IIT Kanpur incubation center and received seed funding to proceed. The platform is headquartered in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh and has its branch office in Noida.
Shabd.in has different revenue and publishing models.
- Writers can publish their e-book on the platform for free and the users can enjoy reading their work without shelling a dime.
- Writers can publish their e-book and set a price on their work to earn 80% royalty on each sale, claimed highest compared to the competing publishers in the industry.
- Writers can also get their books published in paperback, promote them on the platform and get them listed on other platforms like Amazon or Flipkart as well.
For publishing the paperback edition, the writer is required to pay a one-time fee of INR 5100. An additional package available at INR 11,000 is made available with added benefits for the printing of the book like the addition of ISBN and listing on 3rd party platforms. For listing a book published by other publishers, 65% commission is paid to the writer.
Discussing the platform, MD & CEO – Shabd.in, Amitesh Misra said, “We are continuously adding more and more convenient features and options for the userbase and writer community of India so that no piece of creativity is lost due to the lack of resources or opportunities. With our new additions of listing facility, adding English to our website and further working on adding 20+ Indian languages in the coming months will certainly serve to the pressing requirements of the community.”
Shabd.in aims to become the biggest multilingual content platform in the vernacular space in India in the next 5 years, while keeping the exploitation of writers at bay. While the platform offers the highest royalty percentage for the sellers, it looks ahead to become every writer’s first choice to publish their work in their native language.
Vaishnavi Prakash
