During this lockdown, our focus at Roli Books continues to be to keep our community of readers engaged with quality content. While new books are neither getting published nor physical copies sold, we have seen fresh interest from readers in e-books. It’s really a world shutdown and the pandemic has affected everyone across age, region, class, race and borders. And yet we are all in this together, connected digitally.
We are trying to contribute and build digital-reader communities via all our social media platforms. People are writing in to us every day with great support and enthusiasm. Through these live conversations, people are getting to pick up a new skill, learn together, get the latest updates, feel entertained and engaged. Authors are also getting a renewed opportunity to connect via tha Roli Books platform with each other as well as with readers directly.
Everyday starting noon, our editors go live taking readers’ questions, recommending books, checking in on how people are feeling, facilitating quizzes among many other things. We share a tip every day for staying healthy, calm and boost immunity. There is a virtual reading club, live cooking sessions, storytelling hour, live readings, and authors in live conversation. The global health crisis has also allowed us to slow down in many ways and reaffirmed our belief in books more than ever before.
This coupled with encouraging new writers through our short story contest on ‘Life in the Time of Corona’ towards the publication of a book have made digital marketers and community engagement persons from all of us. This unprecedented time that we are all in needs to be captured and what better way than to do it in the form of a book. Once we are all out of this mayhem, books will be needed more than ever before. Stories will be needed and our hope is that Roli Books would have come out of it more resilient and savvy.
{{/usCountry}}This coupled with encouraging new writers through our short story contest on ‘Life in the Time of Corona’ towards the publication of a book have made digital marketers and community engagement persons from all of us. This unprecedented time that we are all in needs to be captured and what better way than to do it in the form of a book. Once we are all out of this mayhem, books will be needed more than ever before. Stories will be needed and our hope is that Roli Books would have come out of it more resilient and savvy.
{{/usCountry}}Priya Kapoor is Editorial Director, Roli Books.