African Publishing from the outside

Kelvin Smith

Paper presented under the title of "African publishers and writers in British and International Markets" at the African Publishing and Writing Conference panel, British Library, 17 October 2005

In his acceptance speech for the 1st ZIBF Award for Life-Long Contribution to the African Book Industry in Harare on 2nd August 2004, Henry Chakava made these comments, succinctly encapsulating a confident and optimistic view of a future direction for African publishing.

African publishing has come of age, and the challenge facing us now is to democratize the book so as to make it available, accessible and affordable to all our people. These are the challenges I must now place before our new generation of publishers. You must build on the foundations we have established, take advantage of the liberalized marketplace, and harness the emerging technologies to put African publishing squarely on the world map. (Chakava 2004)

I want to spend this short time looking at how African publishers do and can interact in different ways with the global book community to “put African publishing squarely in the world map” – recognising that this is a world map where publishing is always trying to reconcile its two faces of culture and commerce.

In this short presentation I will look at:

• Africa as a book market
• Africa as a book producer
• Ways that African publishing may arrive squarely on the world map

Africa as a book market

It is important to recognise that UK publishers mostly see Africa as a market. At the margins of world book trade, Africa is sometimes a lucrative but frequently troublesome supplementary market, sometimes a haven of piracy and poor payment practices and sometimes as the source of an occasional literary jewel, which will then, like most of the jewels of Africa, be extracted from the continent to adorn the catalogue of one of the prestigious publishing houses in London, New York or Paris.

As we can see from the 2004 statistics, only one African country is a significant market for UK publishers:

South Africa at £44.9m is more significant to UK publishers than Japan (9th - £42.5m), Canada (£26.4m) or India (19th - £17.7m)

But as far as other African markets go, they are of limited significance (except for some – mostly educational – publishers)

Slovenia (33rd - £7.4m +35.6%) and Czech Republic (34th - £6.4M +43.7%) aremore important to UK publishers than Nigeria

UK publishers’ Sales to Spain (£49.9m) are double that to all of sub-Saharan Africa (excl. South Africa) - £24.8m

Africa as a book producer

When we try to examine book production in Africa, statistics are very hard to come by, so we must fall back on the general observations that, in most of sub-Saharan Africa, publishing is confined to educational books, with a high proportion of publishing being connected with contracts funded by IGOs, bilateral funding and NGOs, with limited adult and children’s trade production, very little academic and professional publishing output.

In this brief presentation, I want to focus on trade books, and the possibilities for increasing not just the participation of African publishers in the “world map” of publishing, but also to suggest some ways in which African publishers can increase their influence on the way in which that “world map” is drawn.

Let’s look at literature. On “the outside” African literature can be seen in a number of ways:

The Classics (Heinemann African Writers Series)– Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Miriama Ba, Mia Couto – and the World Writers - the Nobel group – Gordimer, Coetzee, Soyinka and Mahfouz

More Recent Authors – Helon Habila, Yvonne Vera, Veronique Tadjo, K Sello Duiker, Phaswane Mpe

If we search Google for “African bestseller” you get another group, mostly white authors – the “Heart of Darkness” legacy - and some books that like Vic Guhrs - I am unclear what to make of this. I might have got Wilbur Smith.

We have to look quite hard to find popular fiction – although with crime fiction one of the healthiest genres in most of the world, there must surely be some potential interest in Africa crime fiction which is currently unfulfilled.

African writers do not tend to get on the world stage via African publishers except through activities like Africa’s 100 best books prepared and promoted by ZIBF, ABC and others, and some activities of NGOs (Reading Africa, African Book Trail) working with library and book group promotions.

While the promotion and distribution activities of organisations like African Books Collective, Africa Book Centre and of NGOs like Book Aid International and SABDET have increased the dissemination of African books in Europe and North America and book prizes are important to raise the profile of African writing and publishing outside the continent, Africa continues to have a low profile for the mainstream international publishing community.

Africa 2005 activities have also played a very important part, and we must all be sure that the momentum is not lost. AT SABDET we are intending to carry on a vigorous Reading Africa campaign in 2006 to keep promoting African fiction to a British readership.

And it’s not just fiction. Earlier this year my MA course had a talk from the International Director of Random House, who compared the British Publishing Industry to the Australian wine industry – looking at their relative sizes and growth (they are about the same size – but Australian wine is growing faster). As I was going to South Africa shortly after the talk, I was encouraged to find out more about South African wine. An amazon.co.uk search generated these two titles:

You can see two things here. Firstly that only one of these title entries has a cover illustration. Secondly neither had received any reviews, and therefore had no star ratings. Furthermore the descriptions of these books were very limited (“This volume is a 2005 guide to South African wines”). What this means is that while the amazon search would eventually lead me to these titles, other searches that would look for elements like reviews, ratings, and product descriptions and images to find suitable matches to my requests would not.

All publishers need to make sure that people are dragged to their sites. They must check, check and check again that the search that should find the African book does find the African book. Keep adding, changing, and linking your site. Never stop.

Whatever we feel about the power of Google, Amazon and the others, they are here to stay and can work to our advantage. For African publishing – at the moment – they don’t. This is significant for what is now being called “Long Tail” marketing.

Where are African Books on Google? Earlier this year, a Google search for the term ‘African Book’ gave the top ten results as a directory of African-American Bookshops, two individual bookshops and a small book review site, UK organisations such as ABC, SABDET, Book Aid International, Hans Zell’s African Publishing Companion, and a personal travel diary.
There was nothing from Africa. All this information about ‘African books’ was supplied to the rest of the world either from or via non-African sources.

If African publishing is to get on the world map, it might do well to focus more energy on the creative and energetic use of information and communications technology, to make sure that the messages about Africa originate in Africa, rather than rely on the intercession of organisations in other continents

Another example of the lack of African material on the Internet was found by looking at the nominees for this year’s Caine Prize.

Most of these authors live all or most of the time outside of Africa – and when I did a search against their name I got a number of useful non-African information sources. The exception was Mutual Naidoo. It proved very difficult to get any information about this author from the Internet. She still lived on the continent and had not been put on the Internet world map.

Looking for Cape Town Book Fair, I had a similar experience. The book fair website did not come up first and I only found it through the PASA site, and its identity was very closely connected to Frankfurt.

Hans Zell has written an excellent guide to searching for African material on Google – great – but how much better it would be if the intuitive searches that possible readers conducted led seamlessly to the information they were looking for. At the moment it can be like going to the library and needing an extensive guidebook to use the catalogue or browse the shelves.

Ways that African publishing may arrive squarely on the world map

We need to use the Internet to PUSH information towards to potential user – not just put it up and hope people find it.

The Long Tail

At this stage, it is worth looking at the idea of the ‘Long Tail’ – something that is exposed by the technology used by Google and Amazon. In his 2004 Wired article Chris Anderson (2004) noted how the ‘Long Tail’ enables us to see markets in a different way. Big corporations and global brands have tended to focus on seeing the world in terms of large market segments, each one representing the possibility of millions of sales, but the Long Tail implies a multitude of smaller market segments.

‘What’s really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it.[…] Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000. Consider the implications: If Amazon’s statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are.’ (Anderson 2004)

What now emerges is that more than half the revenue of Amazon is in the ‘bottom’ two million books on the list.

So, the ‘Long Tail’ principle goes, we are now looking at a technology that can service the needs not of dozens of markets of millions, but millions of markets of dozens. This has great significance for the small publisher, whether that publisher is in a large publishing nation or in a country where publishing is a smaller scale activity.

How does the publisher take advantage of what the ‘Long Tail’ has to offer? According to Anderson it is a three stage process that entails firstly ‘making everything available’ and ‘embracing niches’, then lowering the prices to reflect the savings made in production in the e-environment, thirdly ‘helping the consumer find it’.

It is in this last area where many fail to understand that this is something that cannot now be done in isolation. Any and every publisher is going to have to engage with these tools (e.g. Google, Amazon) on a serious and sustained basis, and this engagement itself may do something to reduce the US domination of Googleland.

Long Tail gives any publisher access to the market and to low-cost marketing. Couple this with the reduced costs of production (including POD), lowering barriers to entry, and this means that the Long Tail is becoming even longer with more and more publishers entering the market all over the world. Another important factor is that, to a certain extent, on the Internet, no one cares where those publishers are in the physical ‘world map’. So a book from Nigeria can occupy this space as legitimately as one from Norway, New Zealand or Nicaragua.

Indian Comparisons

We can frequently learn a lot by looking to other markets, other cultures and other business experience. I wonder if some recent developments in India are relevant here.

Penguin has, more than 25 years after founding Penguin India, realised that not everyone wants to read or write in English, and so are now publishing in Indian langauges. Can they be persuaded of the same in Africa?

Another example is that one of the biggest British book chains has realised that there may be a market for English language books from India in the UK. African publishers produce some books that might sell well in other countries? Can African publishers emulate this? And the success of New Zealand publishers who sell large numbers of children’s books into the US.

South Africa

In March 2005, Random House announced the launch the Umuzi imprint, which will “build more vigorously on […] local publishing foundations” (Umuzi Press Release, 2005) and “establish itself as the home of choice for both new and established literary voices from South Africa […] and also consider favourably any manuscripts it may receive from writers living elsewhere in Africa.” Random House is aware that a good author, writing in English, can travel to their world markets courtesy of the Random House brand. Many authors from elsewhere in the African continent will doubtless hope that this regional publishing policy will be pursued sooner rather than later.

Translations

There are other opportunities for African publishers to play a distinctive role in the global publishing networks. Why cannot, say, African publishers step into the role that UK and US publishers have mostly abdicated, that of bringing literature from other languages into English?
The African continent is well suited to form a bridge between English, French, Portuguese and Arabic writings. Perhaps it could then take this further to include other languages with vibrant literatures, literatures that the major English language publishers show little interest in but have a readership and can often be supported by translation subsidy grants.

The multilingualism common in Africa could be a major asset in this activity and lead to the development of a distinctive international competence.

Here are just two examples that I came across a few months ago in France – neither at that time available in English. A Cameroon author writing a novel about Zimbabwe (as a white person!), and Jack Lang writing on Nelson Mandela. Calixthe Beyala needs an English language publisher. And Jack Lang has a worldwide reputation. Wouldn’t these books have a market at least in Southern Africa – and from Africa into other anglophone countries – including UK?

Languages used by smaller language groups (in Europe and North America as well as in Africa) are claiming their place in both the digital environment of the Internet and e-publication and in the world of print (often newly revitalised in the forms of short-run and POD publications), so why not African languages. Not only can language markets be opened up both locally and internationally by using appropriate technologies, but with the demise of specialist importers and retailers, ICT provides indispensable tools to reach the many potential market pockets – parts of the “Long Tail”.

Conclusion

This paper is self-consciously titled “African Publishing: a view from the outside” and it has tried to focus on those things that might, in Chakava’s words, help to “put African publishing squarely on the world map”. The new world map, for the producer, reader or the consumer, is now not really bounded by geography.

When my bank manager is in India, my travel agent in Ireland and my i-tune supplier in the USA, do I really care where the publisher is? Service is what counts.

This is a world in which Indian books can sell in the major British shops, Lightning Source (the big POD supplier) produces books in the UK for US publishers and vice versa, a quarter of all books sold by German Internet booksellers are English-language titles and e-books come from all over the world – or from nowhere in the world…

We are increasingly navigating the publishing landscape with a map produced by Information and Communication Technologies rather than by geography, politics, or national culture – publishing will increasingly operate on this cyberstage. So all publishers, including African publishers, must develop a place in this new world and adopt methods of working that will reduce the reliance on and subservience to the heirs of the old topography.
This requires us all to have the confidence to master not only local markets but learn to work with the new value chains and new supply chains that service the “Long Tail” market, developing extended networks of relationships by harnessing the new technologies and the new business models they make possible.

Cape Town Book Fair

In this context, I hope that the Cape Town Book Fair will not be just a selling fair for Northern publishers but play a significant role in “putting African publishing on the world map”. Is it planned as a market or as a festival? Or both?

I hope that there is another function – to do with a democratic idea of a “world map”. There are hopes that this event can work for African publishers, and various external bodies are working with African organisations to do this. At SABDET we are working to put African language publishing and scholarly publishing firmly on the Book Fair agenda.

Inside the African continent, collaborations and new connections will make an impact. Outside Africa, African books, which are for the most part in the “Long Tail”, may be of potential interest to a million different markets with special interests and characteristics. The longer this tail becomes, the more likely it is that the power relations in international publishing will change – at least a little. They might move away from increasingly monopolised industry in Europe and North America and start to favour the far greater number of publishing countries and companies that make up the Long Tail of publishing output and consumption. When this balance changes the tail may not necessarily “wag the dog”, but, like the tail of a large aquatic animal, there is the possibility that it will become the part of the beast that steers the rest of the animal in a new direction and determines its future.

I hope that next time I search for an African book on Google or Amazon I get an African answer.

Another area where African books may have global impact is in the world of graphic novels, BD, or comic books. Graphic books are both great communicators and for many of us are our first reading experience. When I was young I read a comic called the Eagle which had a (pretty colonial) hero called Dan Dare. Here he is.

Dan Dare certainly started off with an unreconstructed 1950s colonial mission, but I think this later Dan Dare with a gritty confidence in the face of an uncertain future seems like a good place to end.

Thank you.

References

Anderson, Chris, 2004, ‘The Long Tail’, Wired Magazine, 12.10, October 2004

Chakava, Henry, 2004, ZIBF Acceptance Speech, retrieved from the World Wide Web on 16th November 2004 from www.africanbookscollective.com/acceptance.pdf

CWP (Adichie), 2005, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, retrieved from the World Wide Web on 2nd March 2005 from http://www.commonwealthwriters.com/2005/adichie.html

CWP (Collen), 2005, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, retrieved from the World Wide Web on 2nd March 2005 from http://www.commonwealthwriters.com/2005/collen.html

Google Search for ‘African book’, results retrieved from World Wide Web at http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22African+Book%22&hl=en on 14th March 2005

Habila, Helon, 2004, ‘African Renaissance’, The Guardian, Saturday 12th June 2004

Lessig, Lawrence, 2004, Free Culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, Penguin, New York, 2004 (downloadable under a Creative Commons license at http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf)

Loots, Michel, ‘Information for all: access to knowledge as a basic right’, the Courier ACP-EU, N0. 201, November-December 2003, pp32-33.

SABDET, 2004, Report of Reading Africa Conference. Oxford, October 2004

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