The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

With Proto dust yet to settle down, blogosphere in India remains quite charged up about startups. As a bibliophile, I was quite attracted towards Pothi.com, which is a bring-your-manuscript-take-back-books style startup by two very talented young minds.

At the heart of Pothi.com’s value proposition is delayering, which means as a prospective author with a manuscript, you do not have to grovel before prospective publishers- you become a publisher yourself. Upload the manuscript, and Pothi.com would provide printing services as well as sell it via their website, for a commission. Sounds good so far, but the concept is nascent and evolving. Pothi needs to go a little further.

Inside every book lovers heart lies an urge to be an author one day (some author, if not a best selling author!). The role of a publishing house editor has changed and now they get involved right from the time a book is conceived. They are partners who help develop the cencept, and with their scholarship arrive at the subject gap, even suggesting to the author what will sell. By delayering, Pothi is completely removing this layer with obvious risks. Pothi.com could do well to consider getting an optional loop where an editor is introduced into the cycle.

The second is promoting a new or upcoming title. Usually, books are promoted by book clubs, reading sessions, reviews in newspapers and trade magazines of repute, sites such as Shelfari and even the blogosphere. There are some reputed book reviewers , who can really swing a few hundred copies easily. What is the plan to tap them? And have you seen Amazon and how they tap reader reviews.

The third observation is on distribution. While books are one of the items that get sold off online relatively easily, significantly larger number of copies are sold via shops such as Landmark, Odyssey and so on. These large book retailers are too big a channel to be ignored or directly competed against. And what’s is your inventory management plan once you get orders of five, or ten thousand copies or more.

Excellent concept, a little rushed implementation which cannot afford to stop evolving.  In short, Jaya and Abhay would do well to spend some energies on the behavioural model of this book publishing  business- the application usually evolves once the behavioural model is in place. I am also making a slightly contestable assertion that there are more book lovers in the South Indian cities, so a name such as Pothi (Tome in Hindi) would have acceptability issues.

At a personal level, the idea looks quite  interesting and worth following the evolution of Pothi.

Be Sociable, Share!

•