The Indian publishing industry is booming. Be it the 3 mistakes of Chetan Bhagat's life, or Amitav Ghosh's linguistic voyages, things have never looked better for English authors in India.

But that's not the whole story - for every celebrated published work, there are thousands of rejections. So where do all these rejected authors go?

These budding authors can now publish their books in India, avoiding the tedious publication process and sell it online - free of cost!

IIT alumni Jaya Jha and Abhaya Agarwal have founded a self-publishing website called Pothi.com about six months back. Pothi.com works as a marketplace for self-published books allowing users to create, sell and purchase books on a print-on-demand (POD) basis.

Inspiration struck Jha when she was looking for affordable ways to publish her poetry, without going through a tedious publication process. "About a year back I wanted to bring out a volume of my poetry, but didn't want to go through the long publishing cycle. So I became a self-publisher, using a small desktop printer for printing and my blog as my marketing and sales channel. This evolved into Pothi.com," said Jha, who worked with Google before venturing into Pothi.com.

Apart from basic free services like uploading and selling, Pothi.com also offers paid pre-press services like formatting and proof reading to give books a professional look. This is soon to be followed by services such as cover design as well as free tools to enable authors to do these things on their own. Interestingly, Pothi.com offers customization and personalization of books for individual readers. For instance, an elderly person with visual disabilities can order the book with a large font size.

Though the book is uploaded on the website, all the primary and associated rights are reserved with the author. Authors are free to publish the content on blogs or publish it elsewhere. Plus they are also allowed to take down the book anytime. "Pothi.com only has the rights to fulfill the orders received while the book is listed on our store," clarifies Jha.

Currently, there are around 10 books in the Pothi.com store and 4-5 in the pipeline. The final book price consists of the production cost, the author's margin - specified by him/her while uploading the book, and the company's margin, which is on par with the author's, or 30%, whichever is more. It takes 2-3 days for the production of the book after the order has been placed, after which a copy is sent by courier or post.
Self-publishing supported by POD is widely available in US by players like Lulu and Amazon's BookSurge. In fact, self-publishing is being so widely accepted that a store in Britain is gearing up to install a device called the Espresso Book Machine, which has been nicknamed the ATM for books. This device will allow buyers to choose from more than 1million books to download, print and take them home.
"The industry in India is pretty nascent and there are no established players really. This is because of limited awareness about self-publishing, especially POD. But still we have had authors from places like Guwahati and Shimla, apart from the metros," noted Jha. Pothi.com is not the only Indian player in this market. The Goa-based company, CinnamonTeal offers similar self-publishing and printing services.

Pothi.com is an interesting development in a nascent self-publishing industry, and we'll just have to wait and see how things work out for Pothi.com and its authors.