Shaping INDIA’s audiobooks culture!
Yogesh Dashrath, Country Manager – India at Storytel, shares how audiobooks complement print, open new opportunities for publishers and authors, and are steadily finding their place in India’s storytelling ecosystem.
An IIM-Lucknow graduate, Yogesh Dashrath comes with an experience of over 14years. His career started with working in the IT space with HCL technologies. Post which he worked with ING bank in Netherland and Prague before he had his passion calling him back to India to head Storytel. A bibliophile, he can always been seen reading a book or plotting his new story idea.
An IIM-Lucknow graduate, Yogesh Dashrath comes with an experience of over 14years. His career started with working in the IT space with HCL technologies. Post which he worked with ING bank in Netherland and Prague before he had his passion calling him back to India to head Storytel. A bibliophile, he can always been seen reading a book or plotting his new story idea.Storytel, through its subsidiary Storyside India, is one of largest audio publishers in India with over 7000 audio titles. As custodian to large number of must listen audio books from great Indian authors, Storyside is committed to take them to broadest possible audience. Storyside sees its role to support the ecosystem by distributing titles widely and continue to produce fantastic audio titles.
Why audiobooks?
“For publishers, audio is an easy decision. It will take the title to wider audience and allow them to grow revenue stream for themselves and authors. While for authors, audio adds to the storytelling opportunities. Audio first originals, audio series as well as tell stories that are more aurally oriented,” shares Yogesh Dashrath, Country Manager India,Storytel. “Audiobooks are complementing traditional publishing. Even in most developed markets, we see audiobooks as growing publishing market.After rapid growth in Covid, we see growth has now normalised.”
Collaboration with traditional publishers and independent authors…
“Storytel as platform offers publishers and authors possibility to reach millions of users. It’s revenue share model is transparent and trusted by thousands of publishers worldwide,” he shares.
On curating content for the Indian market…
“As we have over 700,000 titles in Indian service, we use AI based curation to ensure that discovery is tailored to each individual,” shares Yogesh.
On choosing narrators…
“We try to realize the voice of the book through narration. Each book has a voice (or voices) and we see our job to realize it in best possible manner,” he adds. “Vibrant theatre industry in India means it has lot of great voice artists. We also experiment with AI.”
Reader demographic…
“The young population (25-45 years) is most active user group. And listening while commuting is most common. We see English non fiction and regional languages fiction working well. That has remained constant,” he shares.
On promoting regional literature and local authors…
“We always want to be closer to hearts of listeners. That can be seen by large percentage of regional titles that we have done in audio. We see us continuing with that in our publishing.
Key challenges and growth opportunities…
“Key opportunity is the huge population that likes stories and is getting increasing disposable income. Key challenge is to get technical fit correct for India,” shares Yogesh.
What next?
“We have recently launched synchronised reading and listening. That will be great for anyone learning language. There will be more such exciting features in future,” shares Yogesh. “I think print, digital, and audio will complement each other. Print as well as audio have a dedicated audience. Maybe digital will grow in the short term but I hope that will only help more people come to long stories in print and audio.”
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