If there is one platform synonymous with local language news in India, it is the award-winning NewsHunt app. NewsHunt currently has over 75 million downloads and makes available regional digital content in more than 12 languages. Recently, NewsHunt has moved into another area; namely ebooks and looks set to be a market leader in this space, placing particular emphasis in making available ebooks in local languages. This has opened up huge opportunities for authors looking to self-publish their work through NewsHunt. We carried out an exclusive interview with the CEO & Founder of NewsHunt, Virendra Gupta to find out more. Read on to learn what Virendra had to say.
Welcome to eBooks India, Virendra! We’re very excited to have you join us for this interview. Can you please tell us about a role at NewsHunt and what types of activities you get involved in?
I am the Founder & CEO of Newshunt.
NewsHunt of course is renowned across the country and beyond, as a leading app where people can read news and magazines. In recent years, NewsHunt has also been making massive strides in the eBooks space. Can you please tell us bit more about recent NewsHunt developments in the area of eBooks?
It’s been just 14 months since our launch of ebooks and yes we believe we have made significant strides. We have partnerships with 300+ publishers and have published 30,000 books in this short period. As we speak we have crossed 11 million downloads to date.
In your opinion, what do you think makes NewsHunt unique in the area of eBooks compared to other platforms?
We have been unique in the way we have addressed the problem of Indian language books from two sides of the spectrum: for the users (content consumers) we made eBooks accessible (courtesy of our reach) and affordable (microbilling through our iPayy platform). For the publishers/authors we solved the problem of Digitisation and Distribution. We could take their content to virtually impossible places.
The NewsHunt platform also enables authors to self-publish their eBooks and list them for sale on the NewsHunt eBook store. Can you please tell us a bit about the process involved, and what authors need to do to self-publish with NewsHunt?
We are currently in the process of building a seamless and robust self-publishing platform which should go live very soon. Having said that, we currently do reach out to authors to self-publish and we handhold them in the publishing process.
Can you please give us any indication of the royalties that authors can expect to receive when they sell their eBooks through NewsHunt?
We currently offer the authors the best in market commercials and what’s more important is the immediate access to more than 250 Million Mobile customers.
Could you please share some views about how you think the eBooks industry is shaping across India?
We are expecting a rapid growth in demand for eBooks in India. As more users get online through mobile – and get exposure to never before available language books, we see significant growth in both download and sales of eBooks. We also believe that content in short formats would drive the growth in this business
How can authors who are interested in self-publishing with NewsHunt find out more details?
Anyone interested in self-publishing could reach out to us on publisher@newshunt.com, while we roll-out our self-publishing platform.
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/hv1.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Hiten Vyas is the Founder and Managing Editor of eBooks India. He is also a prolific eBook writer with over 25 titles to his name.[/author_info] [/author]