DesiTech is starting with an Interview series: We’ll talk to founders about their companies and motivations and publish it in an interview format. I met Leonard at Headstart 2009 in Bangalore recently, where he was showcasing Cinnamonteal – a Publish-on-Demand (POD) service. We had a chat over the phone:
Q: Could you give a brief account of your history prior to starting Dogears etc. and CinnamonTeal?
I did my engineering from Goa and joined Tata Infotech back in 1999-2000. I worked there for a while and then moved to Ohio State University to do an MBA. I worked for a while in the financial sector and in 2004, I came back to India with my wife Queenie to start Dogears etc. Concurrently with our company, I teach at the Sri Sri Institute of Management Studies.
Q: From what I understand through your website, Dogears etc. is an online book store and CinnamonTeal is a Publish-on-Demand service. Is that correct? Can you also tell us about some aspects which make these businesses unique in their respective domains.
We started Dogears etc. when we moved to India. The idea behind Dogears was to have a web portal to facilitate trade of books, especially used ones. At that time, there were some online book retailers/stores but all of them were B2C; we saw an opportunity to do a C2C model in India. But this didn’t get the penetration required; basically people were reluctant to trade books online. So we came up with CinnamonTeal, which is as you said a Publish-on-Demand service with a lot of useful pre and post publishing services available to the author.
Q: Lets now talk about CinnamonTeal in a little more detail. What market are you trying to cater to with it? I feel POD is strongly biased towards regional/local books published in small or medium volumes.
We are targeting 2 broad sectors: Corporates/Companies wanting to publish brochures and manuals, and amateurs. We also have the capability to print in many regional languages and are aggressively looking to help authors publish in these languages. Some regional languages are dying due to lack of readership. Some have only 1 active author writing in the language. POD makes for a great model to help such people publish and sustain the language and it’s literature.
Q: What services can a potential author avail?
What CinnamonTeal offers is the option to publish a book without knowing any details of publishing. An author can just come to us with an idea of a book and we will help him take his idea to a marketable book and even market it. The services an author can avail are broadly in 2 categories: Pre-publishing and post-publishing. Pre-publishing covers stuff like editing, cover design, manuscript design, formatting etc. Post publishing covers getting the copyright, marketing the book through our partners, putting up a webpage and blog for the book, print-on-demand etc. We also get the book an ISBN number, and the book will be listed as published by CinnamonTeal. Though the author has the alternate option to acquire the ISBN number himself if he wants to be listed as the publisher.
Q: Marketing is a big part in ensuring success of a book. How do you compare against other POD services like Amazon's BookSurge, which obviously has a huge marketing advantage.
We have tie-ups with big Indian online retailers like Flipcart and Indiaplaza to sell our books on their properties. We are also looking at getting into the offline retail marketing space and are exploring partnerships in that domain.
Q: Also, there is some domestic competition in Pothi and also Lulu, which has a very strong team. How do you differ from these offerings?
We offer a comprehensive set of services, both pre and post publishing. We also have a vendor network all over the country so we have a very short turnaround time for publishing books. Our backend is entirely vendor driven. We have freelancers, mostly professionals who help the client with his editing, design requirements. This allows us to offer a bigger portfolio of services to our clients.
Q: What controls does the author have after publishing? Does he/she retain rights? Can he/she market the book independently to online as well as retail book stores?
Unlike the traditional publishing industry, the author retains full rights of his work and can also market the book independently from our network.
Q: What is the size of your company?
It’s just me and my wife. Our entire backend is vendor driven which allows us to scale and operate efficiently at a national level.
Q: CinnamonTeal is a very interesting name. How did you come up with it?
There’s no big story behind it. We wanted a name that has a nice ring to it and felt this name suits our requirements.
Q: Have you considered moving out of Goa to some other city? Why or why not?
It doesn’t make much difference where we are situated because of our national network. We can easily travel to other hubs in the country depending on periodic requirements.
Since this was a phone chat, I reproduced the conversation using my notes and thus I will not quote Leonard on any of the answers. Those are my recollections of his responses.
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3 comments:
That was a good read, Bhavish..
The concept of Cinnamon Teal is good but success would in my opinion depend on their ability to find out strong ways of marketing the published books.
Bhavish/Leonard, Any thoughts on how large the market currently is for PoD services?
In related news, German Wikipedia seems to have started POD services too.
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