It’s a genre of extremely short fictional write-ups, often completed within a couple of sentences.
Probably encouraged by the fact that book sales are on the decline throughout India, a micro-story platform has come up with a unique effort.
It’s called Chota Story, or Tiny Reads, the basic idea is to democratise macro literary aspirations of common people in micro formats. And it is working well. After all, why read more when you can do it in a jiffy, right?
India’s book publishers are facing new challenges that range from increased costs due to inflation, lack of paper for publishing and a smaller readership. Let’s toss some figures here. Around 80% of books in India are published in regional Indian languages, says the Federation of Indian Publishers. And then, an average Indian spends less than Rs 500 on a single book in an Indian language. Yet, the Indian publishing industry is worth Rs 800 billion (as per 2023-24 estimates).
So the new thrust is going to be on creating something that is just small.
The user-generated micro-story platform, Chota Story, has been developed by Gark Promotions, a relatively unknown Kolkata-based company. It’s been in existence for just three years, but Chota Story has become a go-to portal for creative aspirants where their work gets promoted to a larger audience. And it is not false publicity.
The broad idea is to evoke literary creative aspirations among the masses. But then, many also ask: What exactly is a micro story? While modern fiction readers are well conversant with the concept of short stories, micro-stories are quite small in the size of their flesh. They are also popularly well-recognized as flash fiction or sudden fiction. It’s a genre of extremely short fictional write-ups, often completed within a couple of sentences, and hardly goes beyond a hundred words. But the economy of words never obstructs the richness of their soul, and the depth of their emotional impact. A successful micro story aims to elicit a complete narrative, including a plot, characters, and a conflict.
“The world is embracing short format deliveries. We recognised the trend a few years back and launched the platform. Since then Chota Story has found its niche audience, both in terms of content generation and readership”, says Animesh Goswami, the founder.
Small is in and in a minimalist world, Micro is gaining popularity The fast-paced digital age allows modern consumers an abundance of choices, opportunities, and distractions. “We now prefer content that is quicker to consume, sometimes in as short a span as 30 seconds. The same abundance has equally enriched complexities in our human interactions and social milieu. Look at the popularity of reels. If text does not follow suit, people will gradually read less and less. It is high time we bring in the ‘reels’ of text based storytelling,” adds Goswami.”
Though Chota Story started off with only text-based English stories, there was an inflow of requests to include diverse forms like poetry, graphic arts, animations, etc. Soon, the micro stories started to serve both emerging trends—satisfying the desire for fresh literary works of the creator and experience in a condensed form factor for the consumer. “We started accepting stories in English of weak grammar, vernacular and other forms. We feel when the context if of storytelling, these minor hindrances should not hold back the creator. Of course our team of editors ensured that they were polished to production quality before publishing it on our portal” says Goswami, elaborating factors that hold a creator back from publishing.
“Ripples That Last” is Chota Story’s maiden attempt towards giving a physical structure to the micro-story movement. It is an anthology of a few chosen micro stories published in Chota Story. “Why not create something that ceases them from fading away?” says Goswami.
Even in today’s world of PDFs and e-books galore, getting one’s literary work published as a physical book remains the highest level of appreciation for every writer. Chota Story writers (many writing for the first time) now have their names etched in the published book, giving them a sense of pride and motivation to create more.