Making children’s ‘dream’ come true

As the name suggests, Dreamland Publications take children to a dream world, where they can learn things through beautiful and colourful pictures in a book. The company recently launched jumbo sized books for pre-schoolers, which have been well received by the market.

dreamNew Delhi based Dreamland Publications caters to children’s literature. Their books are beautifully designed and printed on 4-colour printing machines which use state-of-the-art technology, and the paper used in these books comes from top-of-the-line paper mills. For them, books are the toys which children use to learn. Little wonder then that they have more than 1000 titles in their kitty.

The company recently launched five titles in jumbo size – My Jumbo book of Animals, Birds, Numbers, ABC and Words. “This is the first time that books in this series are published in this size. The response has been good, especially from overseas buyers, and we are planning to bring out more titles in this series,” told Aman Chawla, director of Dreamland, who looks after the exports.

“We take great efforts in making our books world-class. We buy the rights of the pictures from US and UK. Sometimes, we also get the photo shoot done for the images ourselves,” he told.

“Dreamland Publications is the brain-child of my father Ved Chawla. He started with children’s books and then added textbooks to the portfolio. Right now, we are just focusing on the children’s books,” he told.

The reach of the books from their stable is also nation-wide through well-known retail chains like Wal Mart, Reliance, Big Bazar, Landmark, More, etc. “We also have distributors who directly deal with the schools, etc,” he added. And their policy is simple; they give limited number of copies to the retailers, which ensure that the returnable is miniscule.

Besides, these good-quality books have good market in gulf countries, South-East Asia, Philippines, etc. “The content of our books is universal, hence can be used anywhere in the world. We export our books through distributors,” told Aman. “Almost sixty to seventy percent of our production is for exports. We even export books in Arabic, Malay and Sinhalese languages. While the translation of these is done in respective countries, printing is done in India itself,” he added.

On asking about the rights for children books from foreign publishers, Aman replied that they have two series from Russia for the Indian sub-continent. They also publish laminated charts for exports. “And we may come up with educational CDs next year,” he told.

Aman feels that the biggest challenges in the book publishing industry are competition from China and local publishers who deliver low quality books obviously at low rates. “Our books are quality-oriented and hence are priced accordingly. In India, only five percent schools go for quality books, rest compromise on cheaper variants and it is this five percent which is our target audience,” he said. “We have 5-6 quality printers on our panel and they are delivering real quality products.”

Aman, however, felt that this year the New Delhi World Book Fair was dull as compared to the previous one as the overseas buyers were few. Nevertheless, he was glad to be a part of the fair and was glad to bag some new overseas buyers at the show.

–Varsha Verma