It was in April 2022 that digital storytelling community Pratilipi announced bringing Westland Books under its wings. Gautam Padmanabhan, former CEO of Westland Books, became the business head of the publishing division at Pratilipi, and since then, there has been no turning back. The platform, founded in 2014 by Ranjeet Pratap Singh, who is also the CEO of Pratilipi, has now stepped into the world of filmmaking. It recently announced a major deal with Newcomers Initiative (a platform for new talent, including actors, singers, writers, and technicians across the country, led by leading filmmakers) and Collective Artists Network (talent management agency) to create content in various formats and multiple languages and offer content from their treasure of literary best-sellers to filmmakers across the country.
Pratilipi now has books, online literature, comics, podcasts, audiobooks, and stories waiting to be told onscreen, under its umbrella.
In an exclusive interview with THE WEEK, Ranjeet Pratap shares his expansion plans:
How did the partnership with the Newcomers Initiative come through? Do you now plan to branch into a production house as well with this?
We have always worked towards bringing stories out to people in multiple formats without any barrier of medium, language or geography. Last year we started having conversations with multiple production houses, writers and directors to bring out such stories together. That is when we met producer Mahaveer Jain (who is behind the Newcomers Initiative). After a few conversations, we realised that both of us had a similar vision of sharing the best Indian stories with our audience and decided to work together as a part of the Newcomers initiative.
As of now, we are focusing more on partnerships with production houses which have already created a mark in the industry. We want to leverage our IPs and their skills to produce some great works.
How will content sharing work between the two of you? Will you be also looking at cracking books to screen deals as well as providing scripts to filmmakers through NI?
Mahaveer Jain Films and Pratilipi are working together to shortlist the best stories from Pratilipi’s vast catalogue of over 10 million stories in multiple languages. These stories include those published on Pratilipi’s literature, comics and audio platforms as well as books published by Westland Books. We will further develop these shortlisted stories and then look to produce them into audio-visual shows.
How will new and emerging artists benefit from this?
The idea behind the Newcomers Initiative is to democratise our entertainment industry for different professions, including actors, directors and writers. From Pratilipi’s perspective, this will provide our creators a larger audience as well as better monetisation and career opportunities.
You recently tied up with Juggernaut Productions to churn out OTT shows. Has any script been finalised? What are your plans under the partnership?
We have already shortlisted one story working with Juggernaut productions and are actively looking at shortlisting more stories in the near future. Our hope is that Pratilipi and Juggernaut Productions will together develop and produce many great web shows in the coming years.
What genre of content are you interested in bringing out through the two initiatives? Are you open to collaborating with more productions to churn out cinematic, web shows content?
Pratilipi has perhaps the largest IP catalogue in India with over 10 million stories published across 12 languages and hundreds of genres. We are fairly flexible and open minded in terms of the genres and will pick the stories that are most likely to appeal to a broader audience. We are already collaborating with different partners across different formats, including web shows, and are looking forward to collaborating with many more over the coming years.
What kind of investment are you pouring into for developing content?
Pratilipi’s vision is to build the world’s largest integrated storytelling platform. While we can’t comment on the amount of the investment in content development, we can share that we have already invested in developing hundreds of comics, thousands of audio-books and podcasts and over a dozen audio-visual shows.
Is it likely that you will set up your own production as well in the near future? Apart from books, content is what do you think can be branched into at Pratilipi?
We have always said Pratilipi is not a publishing company or a book company. Rather we are an IP ecosystem company. Pratilipi’s entire strategy can be summed up as: build platforms or products where anyone can share their stories with the rest of the world in any format, language or geography. Build tools to identify the best of these stories. Leverage these stories into all the formats, languages and geographies. We expect to participate in all the formats where IP is at the core of the business model including games, animation, merchandising etc.
What kind of expansion are you eyeing? In a short time, Pratilipi has branched into several different categories of content. What next?
We believe that we have just started working towards our vision of democratising storytelling, starting from India for the whole world. Over the coming years, we intend to go deeper into the formats and languages that we already have a presence in as well as expand into newer formats as technologies including generative AI evolve. Some of the more obvious formats will include animated motion comics, interactive games etc. We have also started expanding to other countries and will double on global expansion over the next 5 to 10 years.
