In a first-of-its-kind venture, Notion Press, a Chennai-based publishing house, has come out with their new and innovative DIY publishing platform,Xpress Publishing. Aimed at aspiring writers, the platform will help them create their book from the scratch, "Xpress Publishing is a great option for both professional and amateur authors to publish their books within 30 minutes," says Naveen Valsakumar, co-founder and CEO of Notion Press.
The platform is designed in a way that the writers have a larger say in terms of how they want their book to be, "It is designed in such a way that writers will have a larger control over their books be it in terms of its content, design or even the quality of the paper. The platform is equipped with pre-set templates for everything related to a book and they can decide and preview it," explains Naveen, who co-founded Notion Press with his childhood friends, Bhargava Adepalley and Jana Pillay.
Prior to the launching of Xpress Publishing, Notion Press was following the traditional path of publishing, "We started with guided publishing, that is we give writers freedom to publish and we merge their work with experts to get it published. But with Express Publishing we are disrupting the model of self-publishing by making the author the sole creator of a book. Earlier it used to take us days to get a book published, now with Xpress Publishing it is possible to do so within few hours," Naveen explains.
On the question of ensuring the credibility of work, Naveen says that content goes through three-layers of checking before publishing, "Any time a content is being uploaded, an automated check for the book's images and layout is run. Once this is done, it goes through another check for its content and finally, a manual check is done to look-out for plagiarism. Apart from this, we have a strong pool of illustrators, editors and designers who are getting the work done real-time. We have had several moments where the writers would be writing and our team of editors and illustrators would be accessing the online content simultaneously and doing their work," he says.
With a market presence in over 150 countries, the platform also helps the authors to sell and publicise their book while retaining 70% of the profit, "The author owns 100% of the book's rights and 70% of the profit. Using their login credentials they can even track and monitor the book's sale and the money would directly go to their bank account," Naveen points out.
