Chiki Sarkar's Juggernaut is ready to roll

If office location, and its charm, were to determine success, then Juggernaut, Chiki Sarkar's publishing start-up, is already a winner. Housed in the ground floor of a 70-year-old, two-storey bungalow across charming Sujan Singh Park and separated from tony Khan Market by a narrow bylane, it's centrally located, yet quaint and quiet – just the kind of place, you'd imagine, to bring in the book-reading and -writing crowd.

Flippancy aside, the amount of noise in the social media that greeted the launch of Sarkar's publishing start-up earlier this week is a surer indication of its chances. "We've been trending since announcement," she says, looking pleased as we settle down on cane chairs laid out on the open verandah for this interview.

The buzz is only to be expected. Sarkar is, after all, the closest we have to a celebrity editor in India -- she was even featured in a full colour spread in Vogue India last October. With a reputation for dynamism and out-of-the-box thinking, for combining literary judgement with business sense, Sarkar was publisher of global behemoth Penguin Random House in India before she quit this April. She is credited with publishing some of the biggest sellers of recent years such as Sanjaya Baru's The Accidental Prime Minister, Naseeruddin Shah's memoir And Then One Day and Neel Mukherjee's Booker-nominated The Lives of Others. Her repertoire of writers includes established names such as Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri and Amit Chaudhuri as well as interesting new voices like Aman Sethi, Deepti Kapoor and Supriya Dravid. And then, of course, there's her crack team of editors – all former colleagues in the publishing houses she's worked in earlier - that's she's put together in Juggernaut, and top notch investors such as Nandan Nilekani and William Bissel who are backing the venture.

The reaction has not been all gung-ho, however. Juggernaut, the name, has divided many, for one. It was suggested by Sarkar's husband Alex Travellis, a journalist with The Economist, but most of the well-known authors she's worked with have hated it. "But there've been a whole bunch of people who have loved it as well," Sarkar says. "But I don't need consensus; I just need to be unforgettable!"

What's really intrigued many about Juggernau's business model, or what Sarkar has revealed about it so far, is the emphasis on "phone books" that can be accessed via an app and read on smartphones. "There's going to be a robust proper physical list, going up to 50-100 books, as well, and e-books as well, even though their market", she says, quoting a recent New York Times article, "has plateaued, and it's staying there".

The world is increasingly moving to the mobile phone - but reading on the phone? Sarkar is convinced it's the future. "All of India and the world is betting on the phone. Myntra does not have a website any more, it has a mobile app. And if we're going to live and read on the phone, can Juggernaut create a reading experience tailored to the phone?" She herself, she says, reads on the phone all the time. "I read manuscripts on the phone. I read long articles from the NYT; all my The Economist and FT reading is on the phone. I wrote a review of Jonathan Franzen on the phone."

Juggernaut will, says Sarkar, commission writers to come up with works suited to reading on the phone. "A certain amount (of that) we'll put out as physical books, so the physical will be a subset of the phone. We'll also consistently keep monitoring what we do on the phone - if a book does well, we'll put it out in the physical, like hardback to paperback. So the physical and the digital will be talking constantly."

And it's not all trade publishing, publishing lingo for quick, mass appeal books. "Our literary and big-name authors will get a three-part life - a book, an e-book and a phone book," she says optimistically. Lengths will be shorter but, as Sarkar says, "I have published Suhel Seth's Get To The Top - it sold 40,000 copies - which was about 25,000 words and Ruskin Bond's books are about 15,000 words."

Be flexible, she urges optimistically. "Play with it; there are no rules. The world is our oyster."

India's tight-knit Indian publishing industry – struggling to grow at a time people are reading less and less – will be following her and her new venture keenly to see how much of it comes true.