New Delhi, February 10
This Valentine's Day, India has a new guilty pleasure which has wooed readers across the globe.
The days of the dark, dark and handsome man with the ever-so beautiful blonde is in the offing with Mills and Boons finally coming in the country, providing readers their very own 'Made in India' copies.
Priced at an unbelievable Rs 99, the192-page romances with graphic covers, seduction and rich-boy-meets-poor-girl tales, has been brought in by Harlequin Enterprises, owned by Canada's biggest newspaper publisher Torstar Corp, in collaboration with the India Today Group, while and Thompson Press has been looped in for printing and distribution.
The made-in-India books have received great response since hitting the newsstands.
''The idea of entering the India is to also penetrate the South Asian market where the company has been selling its pulp fare for the past 60 years,'' said Harlequin Enterprises CEO and publisher Dona Hayes.
But in a nation that is most often conservative about explicit contents, sensitivities seem to have changed along with market dynamics and Harlequin sales strategies. ''Just before the launch of the India operations we conducted a market survey which showed that we had rationalise in terms of price and content," said Harlequin Mills & Boon India (HMBI) GM (Sales) Manish Singh.
The company has sobered down the content looking at the market.
Often, literary works have met scrutiny of various groups of the society, who have not only burnt copies of the books and sometimes been brutal to the authors as well.
''We have also adopted a new marketing model. The company, at the moment, is concentrating on the magazine distribution model on an annual subscription basis. The idea is to release 10 titles every month for the subscribers, recall it at the end of the month and then release fresh ones the next month," said
Mr Singh.
M&B is also updating its database of 100 authors for India to ensure that there is an even spread of old and new authors and Indians get to read all that is published, Singh added.
The Indian market is expected to become the world's largest market for romantic fiction outside North America, believes Hayes as the country, with an estimated 300 million English readers, is a market of 'staggering' potential for titles such as Virgin for the Billionaire's Taking and Bedded for the Italian's Pleasure.
The firm has earmarked substantial investment for strengthening operations in India with a target of recording consistent sales year-on-year.
''India is one of the biggest single investment in 2008 and we working really hard to get our books out here,'' Harlequin Enterprises Vice President (Overseas) Stephen Miles said without giving investment details.
— UNI
