India’s largest digital literature platform, Pratilipi, has released a new web series Midnight Lily, adapted from their massive success story On the Hedge of Midnight Lily, written by Nitin Mishra. The four-episode web series is currently streaming on MX Player.
Mishra, who is a well-established comic book writer and Hindi novelist with a long-standing career at Raj Comics, has created the longest-running series and origin stories and worked on many popular comic characters like Nagraj, Super Commando Dhruv, and Doga.
Over recent years, India’s digital content platforms reached a wide range of audiences and for the first time, India’s largest free-access digital publishing and storytelling platform, Pratilipi produced and developed the web series Midnight Lily adapted from their stories and novels. However, Midnight Lily was first adapted for Pratilipi Comics before being developed as a web series.
The story revolves around Ved, a renowned novelist, who is happily married to Neena. Later he discovers his wife has been cheating on him and in the ensuing fight, he accidentally kills her. As Ved tries to hide the crime, to his shock, he finds the body missing. While Ved admits that he killed his wife but he is not able to explain the disappearance of her body and as the police investigate the case many unexpected truths about Ved and Neena are revealed.
On the Hedge of Midnight Lily has been read by over 50,000 readers on the digital platform with 1,756 reviews at an average of 4.7 stars; the later comic book adaptation has been read by an additional 58,000 fans. These digits are the biggest reason behind the adaptation of the web series.
Pratilipi IP development head Shubham Sharma said, “The content ecosystem in India is getting competitive day by day and the way we source new stories and develop them, is going to decide the winners of this game. The past decade has seen breakthrough technological innovation in content distribution, but the way we source, and curate new stories have not changed. We believe there should be a better way to do this. With Pratilipi’s literature, comics, and audio platforms, we can source millions of stories and gather audience data with a minimal upfront cost. We are betting on this fundamentally different data-informed approach to source, curate, develop and market new stories.”
The web series closely follows a new partnership between Pratilipi and Yali Dreamworks to develop and co-produce a web series based on a book trilogy by Varsha Srivastava. Both deals show the continued success and strength of Pratilipi, signifying a clear demand for their content and ability to source new stories from writers in 12 Indian languages.
Pratilipi is the largest storytelling community of readers and writers, with 3,23,000 writers and over 25 million monthly readers across 12 Indian languages and regions, where anyone can write or read stories for free.