New Delhi, July 7 (Inditop.com) Imagine picking up a cookbook along with your vegetables for the day from your nearest department store. Over the next two years, India will see publishers thronging retail stores to sell their books, said a senior official of Parragon Publishing India that has pioneered this form of marketing.
Parragon Publishing pioneered the concept in its home base, Britain, 20 years ago and has since been doing so across Europe and the US.
“Retail spaces offer great opportunities where a buyer picks up a title on impulse, while shopping for consumer or utility goods. In modern retail outlets, books are treated like any other consumer goods on the shelves,” Vineet Sharma, managing director of Parragon Publishing India, the Indian arm of a Britain-based global publishing house, told IANS.
Parragon, which celebrated three years in India recently, is the first publishing house in the country to tie up with mega-retail chains Walmart, Reliance and Pantaloons, which sell all Parragon titles.
“Soon after foraying into the Indian market three years ago, we decided to tie up with the retail chains. No one else had done it earlier. I think it sort of revolutionised the way books were being sold here over the years,” Sharma said.
He explained the dynamics of selling books from consumer goods retail chains. “For example, books for kids and gift books become separate consumer product ranges for outlets like Archies. Cookery books may form a part of the offering for groceries like Heritage in Bangalore or even the Spencers.”
Sharma said Parragon decides on the tie-ups with consumer retail outlets based on their “footfalls and the store format”.
“In India, for a publisher or distributor to succeed in pushing titles through the non-conventional marketing sectors, books have to offer great value for money. Attempts by several distributors have failed because the books are not competitively priced and are inconsistently supplied.
“The retail space – especially consumer goods retail – is extremely sensitive to the worth that the consumer gets for every rupee, almost like the household goods and groceries that he purchases,” Sharma said.
Parragon, which specialises in coffee table volumes, cookbooks, lifestyle books, children’s learning aids, hobby and fitness books, popular young adult titles and encyclopaedias for children, keeps its prices at least 40 percent below the prices of books in conventional bookstores, he claimed.
“Our primary focus is children and family books. We offer titles like ‘Winnie the Pooh’, ‘Mickey Mouse’, ‘Princess’, ‘Fairies’, ‘Power Rangers’, ‘Hannah Montana’, ‘High School Musical’, ‘Camp Rock’ and ‘Jonas Brothers’ from Rs.99 to Rs.150. Our children’s encyclopaedias are priced at Rs.995. It is possible because of the bulk print runs. Our initial print runs are no less than 25,000 for India and globally we print around 200,000 first copies of new titles.”
Parragon, which collaborates with Disney Production for the Disney titles, claims its sales have increased by 50 percent despite the downturn over the last three years since it entered the non-conventional book retail space in India.
“The children’s book market in the country is growing and will continue to do so over the next five years,” Sharma predicted.
The publishing house brings out 650 children’s titles annually, most of them sold through the non-conventional retail space.
