At the end of last year Notion Press, one of India’s major self-publishing platforms introduced a short story competition, where anyone aged 13 years upwards could submit a short story of 1500 -2000 words in English. The first place winner would receive Rs. 1000, with those coming in at 2nd to 6th place would receive Rs. 1000.
The best 15 stories and 5 special editor selections would be published in an anthology entitled ‘21 Tales to Tell’ and made available through stores including Flipkart and Bookadda. Well, the competition has now been completed successfully and the winners announced, which include writers ranging from kids at schools to professional people.
Through the competition, it seems Notion Press, has identified a particular genre popular with young people in India – short stories. In an interview with The New Indian Express (17/03/14), Naveen V, who is co-founder of Notion Express emphasised how younger people across India do not read full novels, and short stories are a better approach to reach the youngsters.
In the wake of the success of the recent competition, Notion Express is now moving full steam ahead with their ‘social short story publishing platform’ to help budding writers and authors to publish their stories, get feedback from readers, and harness the power of social connections to make their work go viral.
These insights seem to indicate that the market for short stories across India is big, and perhaps self-published writers need to get into short story writing, to increase the reach of their brands.
Image credit: HPUPhotogStuden on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[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]