Trade book marketing

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We keep hearing from publishing professionals that the industry is going to boom in India. These are exciting times for the industry, they say. We have recently written about text books, first NCERT and then private player Pearson Education. Here Aakriti Agarwal explores the marketing side of trade books. It is not very common to have a marketing department in a publishing house, but Harper Collins India, one of the biggest publishers of trade books in the country, has the luxury of having one. NS Krishna, Director of Sales and Operations at Harper Collins explained trade book marketing and some of the tools to us. With an average y-o-y growth of 15 per cent, Harper Collins India publishes approximately 120 new local titles every year — mostly fiction, dictionaries and a small list of children’s books. Mainly an English-language publisher the company has recently brought out some Hindi books too. Krishna says, “It’s like launching ten different products every month with different marketing budgets and strategy.” Harper Collins currently has 7,000-8,000 active titles across segments. Other than printing books by international authors in India, the company imports high cover price books. Harper Collins has 10 to 12 distributors whose networks distribute its books across the country.

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