Kaveri Lalchand, director, Blaft Publications, India

Frankfurt Book Fair: What drew you to launching your publishing house, Blaft Publications?

Kaveri Lalchand: We - myself and Rakesh Khanna and Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, the other two directors - had been griping for a while about how the Indian writing available in English was all in a pretty narrow vein, and how we wanted to see different sorts of books on the shelves. But the idea for launching Blaft really grew out of an idea for a single book, "The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction". Here in Chennai, where we live, the lurid covers of ten-rupee Tamil pulp novels scream at you every time you go to the tea shop, but since we all read English much better than Indian languages, we didn't know what was in them, and wanted to find out. We got translator Pritham Chakravarthy on board, and as we started work on that book we realized there was lots of other very interesting Indian writing that English readers had no idea about.

Blaft Publications releases fiction in English, some of them are translated from Indian languages. How have the books you have brought out been received in India? What would you say is unique about the Indian book market?

We've been really lucky to get fabulous press in India and have lots of people blog about our books. As new publishers, that buzz was really important in helping us take off. Reviewers were saying things like "most significant piece of Indian writing in 2008" and "best-produced book in the history of Indian publishing". One of the most widely distributed weekly magazines in the country, Outlook, printed an excerpt from our Tamil Pulp Fiction Anthology and distributed 100,000 copies of it! It was beyond our wildest dreams, really.

The thing which sets India apart is the sheer number of different languages, different types of bookstores and different distribution channels - and the sheer number of readers. There are big urban chain bookstores which are pretty much like any international bookstore, but then there are also lots of independent neighbourhood shops, tiny book stalls on railway platforms, and kids selling pirated books at traffic signals. A lot of people outside India don't realize that it's perfectly common for a book written in Hindi, or even Tamil or Telugu or Gujarati, to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

So far, we have only brought out books in English, though several are translations from Tamil or Hindi. But we do plan to publish bilingual editions in the future.

What do you expect to gain from the Invitation Programme?

A free stand, a free plane ticket, free food (we hear Frankfurt has good sausages) and a chance to come to the fair! Thanks Buchmesse!

No, but more seriously, it's just a wonderful opportunity which would have not been possible so soon for a new, small independent publishing house.

You have never been to the Frankfurt Book Fair before. What are your expectations in coming to the Fair and what are you looking forward to the most?

Since we are all brand new to it, we want to learn some more about how the publishing industry works! We hope we can build relationships with independent publishers from other countries, spread the word about our books, and ideally sell some foreign rights. We're especially interested in meeting publishers from Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, countries whose books seem to rarely make it into Indian bookstores.

Blaft Publications was launched in May 2008. It is an independent publishing house based in Chennai, India. The list includes bestselling Indian crime novels, experimental fiction, pulp art, and graphic novels. In the future, Blaft Publications plans to branch out into encyclopaedias, kitchen appliances and designer underwear.