Exclusive | ThinkWhyNot and Sangram Surve say it's Possible!

They say to keep abuzz in the minds of the audience; you have to constantly do the new. The new factor is a challenge which everyone has to keep up to. Thus when Amish Tripathi’s third book in the Shiva trilogy Oath of the Vayuputras was to be launched we sat with abated breath to know what new. Indeed they turned up with something new that has never been done before-the first ever launch of a music album of a book series-Vayuputras. The music album was launched on 11th February, 2013 and present on the occasion were Amish Tripathi, Bickram Ghosh, Taufiq Qureshi, Rajeev Sharma,Sonu Nigam &  Sangram Surve.

Adgully was present at the music launch and decided to have a conversation with Sangram Surve CEO and Founder of ThinkWhyNot and the man behind the entire marketing strategy of the book.

We wanted to know what Sangram’s expectations from the book were. He was confident as the initial print run of the Vayuputras was largest ever in the publishing history. The first pint run itself is around 500,000 copies which make it the largest ever print run in the Indian publishing history. The pre-orders have crossed close to a lakh which is more than the copies of Meluha sold in the entire one year. This has already made the book into a monster seller. So we know it is indeed going to do very well.

How did the concept of bringing out a music album for a book series came about and Sangram told us that last year they had come up with trailers which remained exclusive to the audiences of social media. It could not reach to the masses so this time the challenge was not only to make a trailer but also come up with something which will reach the masses. Thus I came up with the idea of a music video which will run on channels and therefore reach out to a larger audience.

When we started with the album it struck us why should we be limited, why can’t we come up with an original sound track so Rajeev Sharma came up with the idea to create a sound track which will pick up from the important situations from the book and then we had Times Music entering the scene, so things got better and better from there. Everything that you would see works on the brilliant marketing concept. We said what will ensure that the readers will pick up the album from the shelf; Sangram had to say the following that the originality of the music tracks and the fact that people have loved the book will bring them to buy the music album. Moreover this album is based on the franchisee which has a very high emotion associated with the fan so unlike the typical cases where people buy the music because they love the music, in this case people will buy the music because they love the book.

We enquired about the other marketing strategies devised and the challenges faced, he added that they did a 360 degree survey for Cox & Kings to ensure their connection with the audience in the regional market. So they did not stop at the idea of the music video and went ahead to go on and create the first ever international travel show in Marathi where the customers of Cox & Kings got a chance to become the anchor of the show. The result of this initiative was several packages were sold.

We were interested to know the upcoming projects of ThinkWhyNot and if there were any more books in the pipeline. Sangram catered to our curiosity with the answer that they were the marketers for the best sellers in the country. They have worked with Rupa,& Westland, among the recent books that they have marketed are The Secret of the Nagas by Amish Tripathi, Ravi Subramanian’s Bankster, Ashwin Sanghvi’s Krishna Key, so on and so forth. We have worked with Amish, almost three to four books in the top ten best sellers in India are marketed by us.

On ThinkWHyNot’s expansion plans Sangram said the following, they had started with advertising and slowly they are moving on to events, film production, digital and many more. They are adding more services to cater to large landscape of media today. “We plan to get deeper into publishing as we have found our passion for books and content and the way I look at content is that it can inspire movies, music. Also there are applications that we plan to release and develop them on android; we have plans for games so there is a lot on the table. So while you are tapping a completely untapped industry, we can play with content through slice and dice and ultimately bring about more interesting products.

When asked about the role that the agency played in this campaign and the guidelines if any from the publishers or author, Sangrram said that the agency conceptualized the entire idea about the music video. Amish’s brief was to plan things on a grand scale, anything that has never happened before. He wanted it to be like a big Bollywood movie. So the challenge was how to make it bigger even with the budget constraints imposed by the publishers.

The music launch and the release of the book are definitely on a large scale. It is nothing less than a big budget Bollywood movie. The verdict will be given by Amish’s readers and music fans till then we wish both Sangram and Amish all the best in the journey ahead.