Pakistan has 1,200 publishers for 200 million people

A great-grandfather, a banned magazine, and the seed of Dastaan

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Syed Umar Ameer as a “lone warrior” in a category almost no one in Pakistan is trying to disrupt — publishing. Within minutes, the conversation has tracked back to where Umar’s interest in literature actually comes from, and the answer is older than most founder stories on the show.

Umar grew up in Wah Cantt, attended Margalla Grammar School in its pioneer batch, and arrived at UET Taxila for electronics engineering with a habit of joining every society he could find. He describes his great-grandfather, Mohammad Baseer, as the person who “invented Urdu calligraphy script in the subcontinent in the eighteen hundreds,” and notes that the family still keeps his manuscripts. Literature, in that sense, was an inheritance looking for a channel.

The actual trigger for Dastaan was a chapter Umar had written for a magazine that was banned before his piece could run. Years later he picked the manuscript back up, expanded it into a novel of his own, and went looking for someone to publish it. “I went to this Pakistan Academy of Letters,” he tells Muzamil. “I emailed them. I wasn’t expecting a response, but it came.” That email led to a meeting with the chairman, and that meeting led to a room of fifty heads of literary organisations from across the country — the conversation that, by his own account, made him realise the industry would not be saved from inside.

The head of a literary organisation who didn’t have email

The set piece in the early part of the conversation is Umar’s account of that meeting. The traditional publishing industry, he argues, missed the early-2000s internet shift entirely. “They were like, we’ve been publishing for twenty years. Nobody’s said anything to us so far. What will these tech websites do?” The arrogance, he says flatly, is what put them out of business.

The room he describes is the consequence. When the discussion turned to how to promote Pakistani literature online, one of the attendees — a head of a literary organisation — admitted he did not know how to use email. Umar’s offer was concrete and free: he would build them a newsletter, set it up, run it, charge nothing. The offer did not land. “Bro, you are the head of a literary organisation,” he remembers thinking. “How are you going to promote the industry and your people and your work if you’re not even present online?”

Muzamil sharpens the frame. The country, he suggests, is now caught between two failure modes. On one end, the incumbents who cannot use email. On the other, a generation that has grown up on what he calls “trash” — Business Insider-style success-story farms where “there’s no content in the body, it’s just clicks.” Somewhere in the middle is the gap Dastaan was built to fill.

Plan9, a freelance pivot, and the slow road to Kissa

By 2014, Umar had pitched what was then called “Digital Rakk-e-Tehreer” into Plan9, the Punjab-government incubator run out of Arfa Karim Tower. His team made it through 1,500 applicants and won from the North region. Once inside Plan9, the original book-publishing model did not survive contact with reality — the cofounders dropped out, the runway shrank, and a Rs. 10,000 internship stipend was not enough to hold a team together.

The pivot was pragmatic. “The short hack,” Umar explains, “was that instead of book publishing, we’d run it as a freelance writers’ marketplace. It was easier to get companies to write blogs, and easier to get writers.” That model — a small Facebook group generating 10,000 words a day for clients — paid the bills for six months and funded the eventual return to the original idea. In 2016, he relaunched the publishing platform under the name Kissa, which today runs at merakissa.com.

Kissa, in Umar’s words, is the Amazon model translated into Pakistani publishing. Authors pay a membership to submit their work for review, then move through four stages: composition (a print-ready PDF with editing, design and proofing), registration (ISBN, barcodes, copyright), printing (calibrated to whether the author is publishing for personal or commercial reasons), and marketing and distribution. He is explicit that the model is neither traditional nor pure self-publishing — it is a hybrid, and the author retains content rights throughout.

Why the bookstore monopoly forced Dastaan online

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks whether Dastaan has partnered with the obvious physical players — Readings, Liberty Books, the established distribution chains. The answer is one of the sharpest passages in the conversation. The biggest monopoly in Pakistani publishing, Umar says, is not a publisher. It is the bookstores.

He breaks the economics down. On a book printed at a hundred rupees, bookstores will take “fifty percent or more,” set their own stocking policies, and — for a new publisher — sometimes ask for a five-thousand-rupee rack fee with no guarantee of sales. “It doesn’t make any sense for us to use that physical channel,” he says. “The sixty percent we’d give them, why don’t I just give forty percent of it to Pakistan Post instead?”

That single decision shapes the rest of the business. Dastaan distributes through merakissa.com, sells via cash on delivery inside Pakistan, and ships internationally to the US, UK, Canada, and Saudi Arabia, collecting payments through PayPal. The minimum print run is twenty-four books, bound on demand, with authors carrying the upfront print cost and receiving both the per-unit cost back and a fifty-percent profit share once books sell.

What Dastaan actually is — three verticals, twelve people, above break-even

Asked to lay out the structure, Umar splits Dastaan into three verticals. The first is book publishing, operated through Kissa. The second is content solutions — blog writing, content packages, and translation work for small businesses and corporates that, in his framing, “don’t have the luxury of time to find the right writer.” This is also where Dastaan picks up industry projects, like translating training material into Urdu and recomposing it for delivery in schools and districts across the country. The third vertical is events: literature programming, creative-writing workshops, and grant-funded community work delivered free of cost.

The company has twelve employees and is, in Umar’s words, “above break-even.” Muzamil pushes him on what “scaling” means in practice. The answer is that the supply chain — printing, binding, design, distribution — has finally been figured out after years of expensive experimentation. The economics, he says, now work at price points between Rs. 20,000 and Rs. 40,000 per book package: “If a writer can afford the mobile in their hand, they can afford the publishing package.”

Muzamil walks through some of the titles on the platform on camera: Abdul Samad Khan’s Marhor and the Search of Unseen, a Pakistan-India peace-letters anthology written across four languages, a biography of Aziz Bhatti Shaheed written by his brother, and the platform’s best-seller — Mera Jism Mera Hai by Ashyad Qureshi, an illustrated activity book teaching children to protect themselves against sexual harassment. That title alone has sold 3,000 copies across three print runs and is on the curriculum at Zindagi Trust schools.

The 3,000-copy ceiling — and the writer-first problem

Three thousand copies is the number Muzamil refuses to let go of. It is, he tells Umar directly, a great number “by the standard of competing with yourself” — but at a Rs. 250 retail price, that is roughly six and a half lakh in revenue per title. For a serious player in any consumer category, that is small. The question on the table for the rest of the conversation is: how does Dastaan move a 3,000-copy best-seller to 30,000?

Muzamil’s diagnosis is direct, and it lands as the most important moment of the episode. Dastaan, he argues, is currently writer-first when it should be consumer-first. “Writer-first says, I’ll work myself to death to empower anyone who wants to write. Consumer-first says, I’m going to help the consumer find the best stories in this country.”

The implication: the platform spends too much of its energy upgrading the weakest links — first-time writers whose draft borrows half a plot from a TV drama — instead of identifying people with strong stories who never thought of writing a book in the first place. “Go to them,” Muzamil says. “Tell them, listen, we have a ghostwriter. Your story is impeccable. All we need is five meetings in a coffee house, and we’ll give you a first draft.” That kind of commissioned book, in his view, is the one that breaks past 3,000 copies.

Umar’s response is that this is precisely the 2022 plan. He describes a pilot biography project the team is already running — the family of Dr. Bashir, the man who brought neurology to Pakistan, has commissioned Dastaan to turn his life into a book through exactly the interview-and-ghostwrite process Muzamil is describing. “Nobody in Pakistan provides this service,” Umar says. “Because there are too many ifs, too many logistics issues. Nobody has been able to solve it.” The first draft is due in January, and the book is expected in the first quarter. If the pilot lands, the plan is to commission industry experts at scale.

Building a press because no one else would

One of the more revealing passages comes when Muzamil — who has run a separate consumer business with its own printing pain — describes the standard Pakistani print run: “Out of a hundred copies, forty have some kind of defect. The concept of quality control doesn’t exist.” He has seen this even at the largest factories, including ones running Heidelberg 5000s and exporting to Walmart and Primark.

Umar agrees, and explains the workaround. Dastaan now runs its own mini-press, built over two to three years in partnership with a printer. “We experimented with how to do low-volume runs,” he says. “Which machine to use, what we can do in-house, what we have to outsource.” The reason is structural: if the reading experience is poor, the Instagram amplification that drives sales never happens. Quality control, in his framing, is not an operational detail. It is the marketing engine.

This is also where Dastaan’s data advantage shows up. Because the company sells direct, it has the phone number, email, postal address, and age bracket of every buyer of every title. When a new book lands in the same genre, the marketing goes to the exact people who bought the last one. “That’s why we have been so successful,” Umar says. The traditional publishers, by contrast, have no such record — Saeed Book Bank sells to NGOs in bulk and never sees who reads what.

The market that nobody has measured

Asked for a market size, Umar concedes the honest answer: no one has it. The government doesn’t have it. The Pakistan Academy of Letters doesn’t have it. His own rough estimate is built bottom-up — every HEC-recognised university has a literary society, each society averages around thirty members, and on top of that sits the much larger pool of literature and social-sciences faculty whose local knowledge is not being preserved.

Muzamil pushes back on the bigger demographic numbers and offers a tighter frame: take university-going students, take ten to twenty percent of them as the writing-and-reading-inclined pool, and use that as a working estimate. He also keeps returning to Saeed Book Bank as the right benchmark — not because they have customer data, but because their daily and monthly book throughput, broken down by local versus international, academic versus non-academic, would give the industry its first real number.

The most striking statistic Umar gives is on the supply side. “Since Pakistan was created, until today, there are only 1,200 registered publishers,” he says. In a country of more than 200 million people, that is the shape of the problem. The Instagram poets and Facebook bloggers exist. The university faculty with local knowledge exist. The medium does not.

The digital doorway, and why this matters at all

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Umar — born in 1992, twenty-nine at the time of recording — what Pakistan looks like in 2050, when he will be in his late fifties. The answer is the cleanest articulation of why Dastaan exists.

“The biggest issue Pakistan has had,” Umar says, “is that the platform was absent for the people to perform. And the gates that did exist on the platform were for certain people to pass through — not for everyone with the talent.” That bottleneck, in his reading, is why Pakistani media has the monotonous, narrow voice it does. The dramas, the books, the public conversation — all of it is shaped by who was allowed through.

His thesis is straightforward. If you democratise content, give knowledge creators a medium to produce at scale, and build the technology that lets royalties land in a bank account the next morning instead of a year later, the supply of writing changes. International authors whose pirated copies flood Urdu Bazaar would have somewhere to publish that protects their content. Local experts would have a route to print that doesn’t depend on a bookstore’s stocking decision. “Assuming we are able to fill this gap,” he says, “our country will be able to regain its past glory, where it was known as the land of thinkers and philosophers.”

Muzamil closes by noting where Dastaan sits in a broader 2021 shift: Pakistani founders in hard categories are finally getting attention, money is starting to follow press, and press is starting to follow money. Umar is candid that he has not gone the VC route — the reports and metrics required for a serious raise are not something he has prioritised as “an engineer who just kind of does this because he really loves it.” The bootstrapping continues. So does the work.