Giving wings to native literature!

Matrubharti is a vernacular platform to read books and stories for free and writers can publish their books and stories to reach to millions of readers. MatruBharti fosters not only love for reading but writing too. “We have now 18000+ writers publishing on MatruBharti from over 12 countries,” tells Mahendra A Sharma, Founder & CEO, Matrubharti.

The genesis…

“I started writing at the age of 11. My first poem was about my teacher and that experience was wonderful. I kept writing since then whenever I got a chance. It also kept me connected with novice writers. We all wanted to get published and we had our challenges to find a publisher. That challenges were the inspiration behind the idea of self publishing platform Matrubharti,” tells Mahendra. “We started Matrubharti in 2015 from India and now we have writers from 6 countries.”

“The first 10 stories published on Matrubharti brought 10,000+ readers in a week and we had 100 writers ready to publish in first month of launch. This was the spark to go deeper and get more authors and stories on board,” he adds proudly.

On Matrubharti…

“We have different sections on the website to engage the user with different formats of content.

Bites is our short content sharing platform where poems to hikus and quotes can be shared, mostly self created. In addition, they can post videos and decorate quotes with background graphics.

Books section is most used area because it exists since beginning; it has episodic novels, stories, articles and all that is considered as modern literature. While, Vishesh is our newly released section where we have different engagement levels for different formats of literature like Theatrical Plays, Poetry recitation performances, Monologues, Standup comedy, Short films and web series, all in video format. Here again the vernacular video content is our priority. We source this content through production and event partners,” tells Mahendra. “For now, everything on our platform is free, we earn by advertisements on our platform.”

Readers’ demographics…

“We have 18-35 years age at the highest usage level from India mostly. Most of the people are from tier 2 & 3 cities, those who want to read fiction daily. They mostly like genres like love, horror, motivation, biography, etc,” he tells.

On asking about the trendsetters on their website, Mahendra replied that in Gujarati, Satya Asatya by Kaajal Oza Vaidya and Doctor Ni Dairy by Dr. Sharad Thaker are trending. While, in Hindi, Vo Kaun Thi by Sabir Khan, Purani Haveli Ka Raaz by Abhishek Hada and Chandrakanta by Devkinandan Khatri are mostly trending. In Marathi, Adolf Hitler by Prashan Salunke, You Ani Me by Dipti Methe and Premachi Goshth by Vrishali Gothindikar are the trendsetters while in English, Indian Hypocrisy – Love, Sex and Ego by Hiren Kavad, Mythology Articles by Devdutt Pattanaik and The Vikramaditya Secrets by Rahul Thaker are most preferred.

The challenges…

“Since our platform is not for masses, so it would never be like Facebook or Twitter, but I am sure that it would be deep in roots for class users,” tells Mahendra. Another challenge he points put is that reading is not as popular as video watching and that challenge would continue.

On Digital India…

There is a rise in smart phones and with data cost being low, India is smartly moving towards digital India. Talking about Digital India, he said, “It helps to penetrate markets when the circumstances are friendlier. We are taking full advantage of it. We have grown 200% every year in user and content base since inception.”

“It is believed that by 2022, we will have 500 million new internet users, those all users will have their first content consumption choice in their own native languages, so we see this would grow and would be huge in times to come.We are excited to be the vernacular content player in languages like Hindi, Bengali, Gujrati and Marathi, besides English,” tells Mahendra.

On ebooks…

“ebooks would attract new users with new and relevant content.It is hard to say whether physical book readers would ever shift to ebooks or not but youngsters starting to read first time by ebooks, that generation would be the core consumer. We see this industry would grow 3-5 times in next 5 years,” he shares.

Trends in the next 5 years…

“The trends would be set by the users but here I see clear indication that reading would be digital dominated and vernacular would be on higher side compared to English. Storytelling would see a bold trend and social issues would take the centrestage by young writers. The growing trend of Stories to Scripts, from Books to Bollywood would be increasing all the more,” he shares.

On future of vernacular content…

“The content is the king here, we see there is a tremendous demand of vernacular content. We have to build and nurture content creation in Indian languages, that would bring quality users towards the content without much efforts. We see over 10 crores users are joining internet with only intention of consuming content in their own language,” concludes Mahendra optimistically.