The Publishing Horizon

A conversational history of Landmark and book retailing in India

A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Hemu Ramaiah, the founder of the Landmark Bookstore Chain, about her entrepreneurial journey with Landmark. This was part of the Entrevista series of Entrepreneur Podcasts by Venture Intelligence. The interview seemed almost like a history of the last 30 years of bookselling in India. Download / listen to the interview (77 minutes, 35 MB, mp3). 

During the conversation, Hemu Ramaiah talks at length about

• how the idea for Landmark came to her sometime in her 5th year of her eight a half year term as the manager of a chain of hotel bookstores in Chennai and was developed (all in her head) over a 2-3 year period before launch.
• her thinking in breaking away from a 250 square feet hotel bookstore format to the first Landmark store which was a 5,000 square feet sprawling store
• her belief in computerised inventory and billing from day one and how she went about the process of developing the software.
• dealing with a supplier (IBD, the book distribution house) who turned competitor by setting up Fountainhead, a bookstore in Chennai and began to short change Landmark by offering preferential pricing and supplies to Fountainhead compared to Landmark. This is was the spark for her to backward integrate into book distribution by setting up Westland.
• her struggles with foreign publishers who refused to deal with a small player like Westland, how she persuaded, one of them (Random House) to help her out. This required her to take one of the biggest decisions of her life overnight at New York - deciding to supply books to all her competitors, thereby growing the book market in India and her business as well, without worrying about the growth of her competitors.
• how she took a huge gamble during the foreign exchange crisis in 1991 and turned what was seen by everyone in the book retail trade as a showstopper into an opportunity and ended up building the Landmark brand across India and growing sales by leaps and bounds.
• the experience of expanding the Landmark brand through franchising (in Coimbatore) and a joint venture (in Calcutta) - which didn't work out well
• the thinking in setting up the second Landmark store at Spencer Plaza in Chennai and how she went about negotiating the lease, doing up the store and ended up buying the place.
• her bad experience with a private equity investor, why she became dead set against private equity investors and ended up looking only for a strategic investor
• her thinking on when to sell out - which was led by more by timing rather than how much she would make by selling her stake.
• how she got completely new readers into the store and turned them into regular customers. When she learns that her daughter’s schoolmate has never visited a bookshop in her life, she decides to turn the problem (of parents not exposing their children to books), by “taking the bookstore to the school”. Listen to this bit which is not part of the main podcast.
• her views on the future of online retailing versus physical retailing - physical book retailing has been taken over by accountants
• balancing home and work, and,
• opportunities for entrepreneurs today.

Download / listen to the podcast interview.

Sales of DK Atlas, Feluda Comics and a few other Penguin titles

From The Bird (Penguin Group News) Volume 7 | December 2009

The incredible success of DK's Concise Atlas of the World has us all smiling. With over 223,000 copies sold in India through October and with orders for another 100,000 copies, we fully expect to sell 300,000 copies in 2009 — a brilliant way to finish the year.

The Allen Lane imprint was launched in India in November 2008 with the publication of Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India. Since its launch, the imprint has gone from strength to strength with each Allen Lane title being a bestseller, from Imagining India (55,000 copies) to A Better India: A Better World by N.R. Narayana Murthy (40,000 copies, published April 2009) to The Difficulty of Being Good by Gurcharan Das, (18,000 copies, published September 2009). Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice, published in India in July, has also notched over 20,000 copies in sales.

Satyajit Ray's evergreen adventure stories of the professional detective Feluda enjoyed renewed attention and interest with Puffin India's The Feluda Mysteries Comic Book Series. The series enjoys many firsts: it is the first time Puffin India has launched a comic-book series, it is the first time the iconic character of Feluda has been available in the comic book format and it is the first time a major publisher in India has published such comics. Illustrated by the renowned artist Tapas Guha and scripted by Subhadra Sen Gupta, the first two titles in the series, A Bagful of Mystery and Beware in the Graveyard, were published in July 2009 and have sold over 12,600 copies each. By mid-2010 there will be six titles in the series.

Sales figures of Gita Press, Gorakhpur

From Business Standard (July 22, 2009)

Sales in Gita Press grew from Rs 29.5 crore in 2007-08 to Rs 32 crore in 2008-09.

"Even the global economic slowdown hasn't been able to hit the demand for Gita Press books," Gita Press trustee Vaijnath Agarwal said.

The two-hundred-employee strong Gita Press is known for publishing and distributing books mainly in Hindi and Sanskrit, in addition to other Indian languages.

Since its inception in 1923, Gita Press has published more than 45.45 crore copies of various books, including 8.10 crore copies of the Bhagwad Gita and 7.5 crore copies of Ram Charit Manas - the rendition of the Ramayan by 16th century poet Tulsidas.

However, Ram Charita Manas has become the best-selling title of the Press with a surge in demand, especially from Non-Resident Indians. It accounts for 35% of total sales, while the Bhagwad Gita 20-25%.

Every year, Ram Charit Manas copies worth Rs 3-4 lakh are sent to the US as there is strong demand for them from NRIs, Agarwal said.

"We sell more than 50,000 copies everyday. No publishing house in the world sells these many books even today," Gita Press Production Manager Lalmani Tiwari said.

The popular magazine 'Kalyan' by Gita Press sells 2.30 lakh copies a month. "This figure is exclusive of the sales figures that we have mentioned," Agarwal added.