Samrat on the stands

Published>Sun, Sep 26 10 02:52 AM

The approach road is lined with trucks and is full of potholes holding stagnant monsoon water. A distant grinding sound of generators hangs heavy in the background. Small factories are lined up on one side of the road, as one tries to locate the office of Dewan Publications, the publishers of monthly Hindi cricket magazine Cricket Samrat, in Delhi's Mayapuri area, which incidentally shares its name with another Hindi Bollywood gossip magazine. Cricket Samrat's claim to fame is the top position it has achieved among sports magazines in any language in the country, with a readership of more than one million, according to the latest Indian Readership Survey (IRS) figures. In the second quarter of 2010, the magazine had a staggering average issue readership (AIR) of 10,87,000 (yes, over a million readers), while other sports magazines like Diamond Cricket Today and The Sportstar stood at 3,34,000 and 2,49,000, respectively. Amongst magazines across all genres and all languages, it ranks an impressive 13.

"At the time of the 1976 Montreal Olympics, we started a magazine called Khel Samrat priced at Rs 2. In those days, cricket used to be played in a four-five month season in India. While the sales were very high during the season, they used to be slashed by almost half during the non-cricketing season," says Anand Dewan, managing director, Dewan Publications, and the founder of Cricket Samrat. Son of a magazine agency owner, Dewan grew up looking at the glossy Hindi magazines his father was the dealer for. Continuing with his story of the origins of his magazine, he says, "We continued with Khel Samrat for two years, but at the back of my mind it was playing that the real thing that the readers were looking for was cricket. So in 1978, we converted the magazine into a cricket magazine and changed its name to Cricket Samrat, at a price of just Rs 3. And we never looked back.

Readership soared, of course, helped greatly by India's explosive success in cricket in the early '80s."

Dewan's office is humble with hardly any staff visible, just a couple of employees handling clerical work and two office boys engrossed in sealing envelopes. The ground floor houses the printing section, with reams of paper stacked from floor to ceiling. The publication house has a total staff of just 30, who are responsible for Cricket Samrat, a children's magazine called Nanhe Samrat and other printing assignments that they get on contract from publishers. "We have around ten stringers and only one main reporter with us. Five to six people handle the dispatch section, five handle clerical work, we just make do with one designer and one proof reader. We source photographs from news agencies. A small staff again helps us in keeping the costs low," says Dewan.

The magazine that comes with a cover price of Rs 40 per issue boasts of fine printing on glossy paper and is packed with 138 fully coloured pages of cricketing content. It includes everything from detailed monthly cricket calendars to in-depth articles and from interesting cricket tit-bits to retrospectives looking back at yesteryears. And, of course, that trademark sports magazine pullout poster, but hardly any ads. "We really would like to have more ads, but we hardly get any. Maybe advertisers have hang ups with it being a Hindi magazine and that too a sports magazine. So we actually have to depend largely on subscription and sales revenue as we hardly get any ad revenue," says Dewan. The magazine has a strong presence in the Hindi belt and the maximum readership is in UP and Bihar. The success of the magazine over the years also prompted the publication of an English version. However, it was stopped after three years, as readership failed to pick up and follow the success story of its Hindi sibling. "We experimented with an English version in 1998, but stopped it after three years as it was clearly evident that except for the metros, the English version was incompetent in making inroads anywhere else, especially in our strongholds," says Dewan.

Without many ads, the publishers have to find other ways of cutting costs. Dewan does it by printing Cricket Samrat in-house and taking advance payment for issues and not operating on credit and the standard sale-or-return model, wherein the dealers pay the publishers for the copies sold while returning the unsold stock. "It might affect our sales figures a little as dealers would not risk taking too many copies, but we also can't take the risk of printing large number of copies and then bearing the loss if they remain unsold and are returned to us," says Dewan.

But he concedes that while his magazine is still at the top, the golden era for magazines is now over in India. And that has prompted the Dewans to now search for other avenues, which include taking print orders on contract and a foray into educational books publication. "We decided to diversify looking at the negative trends in the magazine business, with sales and readership of magazines across the board and across genres going down. There is a clear decline because of the television explosion, which is helped along the way with the growing popularity of Internet as an information and news source," says Dewan. The readership figures substantiate this decline, with most magazines losing readership as compared to the last quarter. Cricket Samrat itself has witnessed an 8.91% decline in readership as compared to the last quarter. But Dewan asserts that he will never even think of doing away with the magazine. "We have worked hard on it with our sweat and blood. We will always make sure that we deliver the quality we are known for," he says.

With a spark in his eyes he recalls, "When we started, I used to travel throughout the day in DTC buses carrying the negatives with me to deliver them to printers. It used to be exhausting and I couldn't even afford a scooter back then. It used to be a one-man show. I was doing everything, from managing content to even packing dispatch bundles." But things have changed now, except for the grit, determination and devotion that was behind Cricket Samrat. Quite literally, the king of cricket and sports magazines in India.

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