Book makers

Publisher Rupa & Co completes 75 years of cracking the mass-market formula

At a busy Big Bazaar in Gurgaon, recently, there was more than the usual clanging of shopping trolleys. In one young man’s purchases, you could see toothpaste, a ketchup bottle and, right on top of it all, a copy of Chetan Bhagat’s The 3 Mistakes of My Life and Kishore Biyani’s It Happened In India . Kapish Mehra, Managing Director of Rupa & Co, smiles as he narrates this incident, which comes as no surprise to the publishing house which has an alliterative tagline: “Reach, Range and Reading pleasure”.

As it celebrates 75 years of publishing books, Rupa also has an enviable mass market appeal. “Books now are an impulse buy. We have titles in fiction, non-fiction, biographies, self-help, sports, religion and business management, and these are at a price that people are comfortable with. You have to be happy to pick up a book, and that works for us,” says Mehra, of the company’s pricing mantra for the last seven-and-a-half decades.

The story of Rupa has a humble beginning — Mehra’s late grandfather Daudayal Mehra started the business in 1936 by publishing two volumes of Bengali poetry and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Today, of course, with a Chetan Bhagat Five Point Someone available across the globe, the publishing house has some of the highest figures in the Indian publishing industry.

Full report here Indian Express