DK Agencies, a well-known entity in the publishing business with a considerable variety of academy-oriented works to its credit, has operated across the globe for nearly 50 years. In a discussion with Indian Printer & Publisher, Ramesh K Mittal, director of DK Agencies, chairman of Capexil and honorary general secretary of the Federation of Indian Publishers, elucidated DK’s journey into the field of publishing, “In 1968 my father Khazanchand Mittal started the business which involved exports of books and journals. We ventured into the cataloguing of Indian books in English in 1973 and went on to catalog books in Indian languages like Sanskrit, Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Oriya, Bengali, Assamese, Nepali, Tamil, Nevadi and Kashmiri. We ensure that our cataloguing is done from the primary source of data.”
Speaking about DK’s state-of-theart bibliographic services which are offered via a variety of media in the Indian sub-continent, Mittal said, “In 1991 we decided to process the information contained in books and pass it on to our readers through computers. Our next initiative was to send a team to the US in 1992 to learn the art of cataloguing. In fact we were the only publishing house in India to come up with the MARC 21 records in 1996. These records in Machine-Readable Catalogue (MARC) format are used by libraries worldwide. The figure 21 in MARC 21 denotes records for the 21st century. Today our quality of cataloguing is compatible with international standards of bibliographic description.”
LiFi for Literary Fiction
Not one to rest on past laurels DK came up with an independent venture, LiFi Publications, in 2012. The name LiFi signifies Literary Fiction and the publishing house brings out fiction of almost every genre including adventure, mystery, fantasy, horror, humour, romance, occult and supernatural, crime and war. LiFi also publishes historical, political, social, religious books as well as short stories, biographies and inspirational titles.
LiFi’s objectives are to achieve literary excellence in whatever it publishes, and to promote its authors and their works through book releases. LiFi is soon becoming a sought-after platform for both debutants and well-established authors writing fiction in English or offering English translations of novels or stories originally published in any Indian or foreign language. To date LiFi has published about 70 books and plans to launch ten books at the upcoming World Book Fair in New Delhi to be held from 9 to 17 January 2016. Mittal, who is also the director of LiFi, said, “We strive to popularize the works of our authors by way of book reviews, book launch functions, book readings at the Author’s Corner in book fairs and Facebook. However, more often than not, authors who are proactive when it comes to promoting their books benefit a lot in terms of product visibility in the market. For example, we brought out Fly On The Wall by Suba Sarma in 2013 and The Last Disciple of Nalanda by Suresh Nair in 2015. Sales-wise both books have done good business by virtue of their authors taking an active interest in promoting them.”
Currently 30% of LiFi’s books are sold through eRetailers and 70% are marketed through traditional channels. Mulling on LiFi plans for online content, Mittal said, “We do intend to publish eBooks in the future.”
