Prajakta Koli · HarperCollins India · 2025
Too Good To Be True
Too Good To Be True, Prajakta Koli’s debut novel, sold 1,50,000 copies within a month of its January 2025 release and reached No. 1 on Nielsen India BookScan (Fiction). The campaign treated the book as IP rather than a release date: an original soundtrack, a custom Blue Tokai coffee blend, a Blinkit quick-commerce billboard, and a 14-city tour rebuilt around college campuses.
20,000+
pre-orders before release
1,50,000
copies sold within a month
No. 1
Nielsen India BookScan (Fiction)
3
awards, including Crossword Popular Choice (Fiction) 2025
The challenge
Prajakta Koli’s 18M+ followers know her from 60-second videos. Getting that many people to pick up a few hundred pages, and giving a first-time novelist the launch energy usually reserved for a film, meant rethinking the whole shape of a book launch.
The strategy
We treated the book as IP, not a single event. An original soundtrack and music video,“Saanvare”, gave the story a life beyond the page. A Blue Tokai coffee blend and a Blinkit quick-commerce billboard, complete with a 10-minute delivery moment, met readers where they already were. A dedicated, fan-first Instagram handle gave the book’s community somewhere to belong outside the author’s own page. And when the data showed a heavily campus-based readership, the whole 14-city tour got rebuilt around colleges and universities instead of bookstores alone.
The result
20,000+ pre-orders before release. 1,50,000 copies sold within a month of the January 2025 release, making it HarperCollins India’s most pre-ordered title, and No. 1 on Nielsen India BookScan (Fiction). It won Amazon India Popular Choice Debut Book 2025, the Crossword Popular Choice Award (Fiction) 2025, and Book of the Year (Fiction) at the Puri Literary Festival.
A year later, it’s still going — the campaign led into a hardback anniversary edition in February 2026.