Guest AuthorPratilipi, India’s largest digital literature platform announced that The Viral Fever (TVF), a leading web and digital content producer, has acquired the rights to a mega-hit Hindi short story on the Pratilipi platform.
The story is written by Seema Jain, a 51-year-old homemaker who has been writing on Pratilipi since 2017. The story revolves around a smart, city girl, who is married to a slow, small-town boy who runs a Beauty Shop. She tries and fails miserably to adjust as a bahu but with a twist of fate, gets an opportunity to revamp the dwindling family business and prove her worth to her family and herself.
Starting as an online literature platform six years ago, Pratilipi has been fuelling the passion for writing for over 4 lakh writers across 12 Indian languages by providing them a platform for their creative expression. With over 67 lakh stories to date, Pratilipi has one of the largest repositories of short stories/novels across genres such as romance, horror, mystery, thriller, sci-fi, women-centric, social dramas, etc. to name a few.
With 30 million monthly active users reading these stories on Pratilipi’s app and website, the quantitative and qualitative response from the audience helps identify star writers and potentially the next hit web series or the next bestselling book.
The Indian content ecosystem is evolving at a rapid pace, but still, the way producers have been sourcing and evaluating stories hasn’t changed much. After Pratilipi’s co-production deal with Yali Dreamworks and the story licensing deal with Studio 2021, this partnership with TVF, signals the belief that new-age content producers are putting in this audience-led approach of sourcing and evaluating new stories.
Shreyansh Pandey, Head of TVF Originals commented, “At TVF, we strive to bring alive real stories from all parts of India. Seema Jain’s story documents the journey of a very endearing female protagonist and we are very excited to bring this alive. This marks the beginning of many more stories headlined by female protagonists for us and we are very excited to collaborate with Pratilipi on the same”.
Commenting on the deal with TVF, Shubham Sharma, Head of IP Development, Pratilipi said, “At Pratilipi, we have always strived to democratize the access to an audience, for writers and storytellers. We believe there is immense writing talent in India, yet to be discovered. We try our best to find an audience, for every story possible. Observing the response and applause from the audience, helps us discover stories with potential. We believe this is a much more democratic process for a storyteller, to be discovered. With TVF putting its faith in such a story, written by a 51-year-old homemaker from Delhi, opens up a completely new way of discovering fresh and powerful stories.”
Pratilipi also recently raised $48 million (Rs. 357 crores) in a funding round led by gaming giant Krafton Inc which will assist Pratilipi to strengthen its IP acquisition and development across various formats including audiobooks, podcasts, comics, web series, movies, and games, etc. The long and expensive process to create IP in fiction and these investments and acquisitions is a testament to Pratilipi’s vision to democratize story-telling across languages and explore newer formats to reach new audiences.
Aravind Sundaram
Guest Author
