Rewriting rules of the publishing industry

Founded by two engineers Naveen Valsakumar (29) and Bhargava Adepalley (28), and Jana Pillay (30), whose father owns one of the oldest book distribution and publishing companies in Chennai, it is one-point stop for aspiring authors.   

“The idea behind Notion Press was to democratise publishing. We were tired of writers having to wait because some publisher felt their writing was not good enough to be published. Then we started hearing about the rejection stories of some of the most popular writers today. This led us to question the status-quo. If publishers were so good at identifying the next big thing, how come 13 to 15 publishers had missed out on big opportunities, leading the authors to take the self-publishing route,” says Naveen, Founder and CEO of the start-up. It was just like investors who miss opportunities, publishers too missed opportunities quite often. 

“The solution was to create an ecosystem where authors could self-publish high quality books and readers could decide whether they wanted it or not. A traditional publisher can then look at sales and decide whether it wants to have the book. This seemed like a win-win for all,” he adds.

Bhargava says, “ We  offer end-to-end publishing support to writers starting from advising them on how to write, to publishing, distributing and marketing their books in both print and eBook format. We also run writing and publishing workshops across the country to enable writers.”  Notion Press was started with close to zero investment. 

Bhargava adds, “We hustled and bootstrapped our way during the first year of operations. Each of us founders had a specific skillset and we leveraged that and worked from homes to ensure we were not burning cash until we were sure that there is a substantial market for the product we offered. Our revenue comes through offering   publishing services to authors and commission on the sale of books.” Four years into business, cash-flow funded Notion Press, has a 52-member team. They have earned a revenue of Rs 40 lakh in the first year and have published 1,200 titles to date.