'Rising Stars' A platform for new authors

In some good news to new authors, online store Amazon will promote the newbies under a fresh initiative by merchandising and providing them visibility.
Called 'Rising Stars', the first group of writers selected for the programme include Bilal Tanweer ("The Scatter Here is Too Great"), Zia Haider Rahman ("In the Light of What We Know"), Raghu Srinivasan ("The Avatari"), Deepti Kapoor ("A Bad Character") and Phil Klay ("Redeployment").
A formal announcement of the programme is set to be made at the Jaipur Literature Festival beginning tomorrow. Amazon India is the official books partner at the festival.
"This year we are doing something called 'Rising Stars'. They are new authors who have published their first or second books and are getting good reviews. We are going to merchandise them and make sure they get visibility on our website and help them to become even bigger," says Samir Kumar, director of category management at Amazon India.

Authors will be picked every month based on certain criteria and they will be promoted on its website besides being featured on its Twitter and Facebook pages.
This is among the initiatives that the retailer is planning in its books category. It also plans to expand its regional books collection.

"There is a lot of latent demand for regional books. For that we need to have the catalogue ready and make sure we have a good collection. We already have launched Hindi, Kannada and Tamil selections on our website. We will continue to launch new regional languages besides increasing the selections of those already there," Kumar told PTI here.

Last year on the occasion of Kannada Rajyotsava Diwas, Amazon announced launch of Kannada books, movies and music store.
"Children's books are also very important for us. We will continue to invest in these books. Last year on the occasion of 50th anniversary of Roald Dahl's 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory', we had a contest among kids in which the winners went on a 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory tour' to London."
He, however, says there are some challenges in bringing regional titles online.
"The biggest challenge is lack of good catalogues in terms of book description, unique identifiers and pictures. Again some books which were quite popular when published are out of print but there is not much demand to go for a reprint," he says.

Our goal is to make every book published in the country available online and also digitally.