Lack of financial and institutional support for the formal book publishing and distribution industry has meant that less and less books have been published and the reading culture of the nation has slowly died down in Zimbabwe. The 80s and the 90s were the golden age of Zimbabwean literary production, coupled with a literacy rate second to none in Africa as well and as a growing reading culture. The economic woes of the country have resulted in people focusing on being able to buy bread, rather than buy books. Literary production must not be allowed to die and innovation is now required on the part of writers and publishers. Given the strategic imperatives of a vibrant publishing industry, this paper contends that Zimbabwe urgently needs to adopt new models for the production, marketing and distribution of literature. In view of our interconnected world brought about by globalisation and digital citizenship, there is need to capitalise on the digital literacy of Zimbabweans throughout the world by moving away from the focus on “Hard copies” to “Soft copies”, which can produced cheaply as well as be sold at an affordable price via popular online stores as well as the growing “App” industry. This paper will explore how literature can be produced, enabled, and disseminated using the Internet, app stores, e-books, and social media. Brief mention will be made of how Zimbabwean writers can adopt new forms of media such as digital and audio poetry and interactive fiction to express themselves. The paper will also explore how digital tools can help emerging writers when composing and distributing their work. What are the specific online literary communities that can be influential in the so called blogosphere, web journals, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms? How do we best prepare our writers to be ready for digital citizenship’s potential to create fragmentation, where we find the self being contrasted with the virtual self? This paper contends that the “fierce urgency of now”, to quote Dr Martin Luther King (Jr) phraseology, is for the Zimbabwean book/literature industry to have a clear-cut and modernised marketing and distribution policy that takes into account our current widespread access to the internet. Zimbabweans have now become natives of the digital kingdom and the time has come for writers and publishers to harness the power and potential of the digital realm.
Keywords: Digital marketing, modernised marketing and distribution, digital composition, Zimbabwean literature, publishing policy, hard copy vs soft copy.
Background
The act of writing and publishing is an attempt by writers to share their passion for the written word, an act of giving to others fragments of one’s imagination and creativity. The poetic word has a life of its own, a mind of its own and operates using reasons best known to itself, inspiring people from different parts of the world in divergent ways. This inspiration has to be shared via some form of media and in Zimbabwe, this media has traditionally been the printed book. We are now living in an era of electronic publishing which has been generally defined as non-print material that is produced digitally. This is an encompassing term used to refer to a variety of digitally produced materials (Jones & Cook, 2000). We will use the following as our working definition of the term e-book: “An e-book is a digital object with textual and/or other content, which arises as a result of integrating the familiar concept of a book with features that can be provided in an electronic environment; e-books typically have in-use features such as search and cross reference functions, hypertext links, bookmarks, annotations, highlights, multimedia objects and interactive tools” (Vassiliou and Rowley, 2008)
The 80s and the 90s were the golden age of Zimbabwean literary production, which capitalised on the high literacy rate of the country and a genuine desire on the part of the population to intellectually enrich themselves through reading and serious study. The economic challenges of the country have resulted in people focusing on being able to buy bread, rather than buy books. Lack of financial and institutional support for the formal book publishing and distribution industry has meant that less and less books have been published and the reading culture of the nation has slowly died down. This will lead to the situation that Doris Lessing in her Nobel lecture refers to as: “[…] books never written, writers who could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard.” It seems that economics is now dictating what and who is published, with most of the remaining publishing houses and bookshops focussing on set schoolbooks which have a ready market. They then have to compete in this market with book pirates who are seen plying their trade on the pavements of the major cities. All this paints a dark picture of the future of writing and publishing in Zimbabwe, and without creativity and innovation on the part of both writers and publishers, things will continue to “Fall apart”, to quote Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. The time is now for our nation to develop a national book policy, a practical language planning policy and new initiatives that seek to secure adequate finance for local publishing. (Mushakavanhu, 2013). The purpose of the present paper is to elaborate in greater detail on how literature can be produced, enabled, and disseminated as e-books using the internet, app stores, and social media and also demonstrate that printed and electronic books can co-exist within the Zimbabwean literary landscape. This co-existence must be embraced and is critical to our Zimbabwean reality: “old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies” (Jenkins, 2006); while we find other ways of ‘bringing back the book as we know it’.
E-Books The rise of the personal computer and the internet is a natural reflection of our evolution as humanity and also our way of defining the form that we would like our future to take. E-books tend to be defined with relation to print books, their digital format, their searchable nature as well as their ease of transmission via the internet. This part of the paper will focus on the discourse around electronic books and give guidance on how writers can self-publish, market and distribute their work. This section consists of three parts; in the first, we will look at the creation of e-books and their publishing on Amazon and Mazwi (which was formerly the Openbook startup from British Council Culture shift challenge). The second part will explore the various online literary communities where writers can exchange and market their creations and in the last part, we will look at self-publishing, from the e-book to a printed book using online tools and services.
Self-publishing on Amazon and Mazwi and via mobile platforms Any writer who has access to a computer or any device capable of writing text, can consider publishing electronically. The American company Amazon provides straight forward instructions on how any writer can have their work published and readily available on the on their Amazon.com website as well as their Kindle store. Amazon has an international presence and should the book be successful, the writer has high chances of gaining some form of international recognition. Zimbabwean writers are still held in high esteem internationally, and according to Jane Morris: “success stories such as NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names or Bryony Rheam’s This September Sun have stimulated an interest in local literature”.
According to Amazon, to publish on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), one needs to: “to complete an account profile and have a book file that has been formatted in one of their Supported Formats. One then needs to, log into one’s account and go to Bookshelf and create a new title.” They do not charge you to upload the file and according to them, authors can get royalties of 35% to 70% of the sale price when the book is sold on KDP. It is advisable for Zimbabwean writers who follow this route to have their work edited by a qualified individual before submitting or uploading. The website www.fiverr.com allows writers to get links to various websites that offer a professional service to set up a book, format it and convert it from a Word file to a mobi or ePub file (the formats required by KDP and Apple.)
On the local scene, a new internet based company called http://www.mazwi.co is also proposing services similar to what is being offered by Amazon, with the advantage that they specialize in promoting local literature. According to them; “Mazwi is a digital distribution platform that seeks to give writers and publishers a set of tools to publish and market their books as well as collect revenue completely digitally all on their mobile devices”. This company plans to capitalise on the wide distribution of smartphones in Zimbabwe and their aim is to “give new tools to writers and publishers to create and market books to mobile devices users, who in Zimbabwe alone, are in the millions” (Makura, 2013). They have also developed an app that can be downloaded to the user’s smartphone for easier access to their service. Their website gives the option to authors and publishers to contact them in order for the latter to have their e-books distributed and sold by them.
Writers can also find ways to partner with the organization called Worldreader (www.worldreader.org ), whose mission is to: “bring digital books to every child and her family, so that they can improve their lives” through the development of relevant technology, curation and cataloguing of books and finally conducting fieldwork, monitoring and evaluation.
According to Kulesz (2011), MXit is a pioneering South African cell phone company that signed an agreement with the writer Karen Michelle Brooks to sell her novel through the platform, where the book could be sold chapter by chapter, with Moola micro-payments (the equivalent of our Ecocash, Telecash and Onewallet). This can also serve as a model to our own literary community, who need to create symbiotic and win-win relationships with our local mobile networks.
Print on demand
The other option available to writers who need to have some hard copies of their books is Print on demand (POD), which is defined by the Oxford dictionary as: “A system or process whereby individual copies or small numbers of a text are printed to order, typically using digital technology”. There are interesting developments in this area in Sub-Saharan Africa and, according to Arthur Attwell:
“There may be other ways of harnessing digital as well that will include distributing e-books through libraries and Internet cafés, kiosks, any infrastructure that doesn’t require someone to be spending a lot of money on a device. I think print-on-demand has got a massive future for Africa, and developing countries in general, because of the way it caters to people with low cash flow and who just need a book right now; they can’t afford to get an e-reader or even a netbook computer to read books in the long term.” (Cf, James, 2010). This approach has the potential to re-invigorate publishing and book distribution in Zimbabwe.
Our neighbours in South Africa have a well-established POD industry, with such websites as:
Another option is to go with Amazon’s Create-Space service which allows you to sell a paperback copy of your book either on CreateSpace.com or directly from Amazon.com. One needs to upload a PDF based on their specifications and the advantage of the service is that one does not pay for book printing – one simply collects a commission whenever the book sells (Jacobs, 2014).
Marketing the self and the book: online author communities and platforms. Shafer (2015) contends that it takes a village to market and sell a book. It is always advisable to start with a grassroots campaign, that is obviously underpinned by a comprehensive marketing plan, start with your local and immediate community, then move on to building regional buzz, finally targeting the larger national and global audiences. As a writer, you shouldn’t be looking for blockbusters, you should be thinking about gathering readers. Each time you promote your work, you are introducing more people to your work. Some of those people will be your lifetime readers, or “true fans.”
The theory of 1,000 true fans states that an artist (not just writers, but musicians, filmmakers, carpenters, whatever) need only acquire 1,000 true fans to make a living at their art.
It is important to note that one thousand fans is a concept, not a means of measurement. The point is that a true fan in the context of the reader/writer relationship will want to read (that means buy) anything you write. They will download it on the day it comes out, buy it in print, and tell all their friends.
A lot of thought needs to be put into the e-marketing plan, and a lot of professionals use the SOSTAC planning framework to help them. SOSTAC stands for Situation Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions and Control (Smith 1998, 2001). According to Chaffey and Smith;
SOSTAC can be further explained as:
●Situation analysis – where are you now (as a writer)
●Objectives – where do you want to be in your growth?
●Strategy – how do you want to get there? Strategy summarizes how to fulfil the objectives.
●Tactics – which tactical tools can you use to implement the strategy (social media tools, google ads, etc?
●Actions – which action plans are required to implement strategy?
●Control – this looks at how you know if your e-efforts are working, and what improvements can be made – again,?
Social media and personal websites
The easiest way would be to use social media outlets such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tumblr as well as contacting local newspapers and magazines so that they can review your work as well as interview you. In preparation for this, every writer must have on hand a press kit, which serves as an introduction to them and their body of work. Such a kit may contain an author bio; a professional photograph; some reviews from book bloggers; and any media interviews. On the international arena, one can use the paid services of such Kindle promotion companies as Bookbub, Book Gorilla to have their book marketed to a much larger audience. (Jacobs, 2014).
It must be remembered that social media is one of the ways that one can use to reach their target audience (not the only one) and influencers (like agents, editors, book reviewers, other writers) who are already connected to your target audience (Brewer, 2015). Care must be taken on social media when one is a writer or any other public personality for that matter. One must always ensure that their updates, connections, posts etc. are focused on bringing value to the target audience. Brewer (2015) came up with nine points that guide a writer’s social media presence:
- Use your real name.
- Use your actual photograph on your profile.
- Complete your profile and give people a way to contact you that doesn’t involve using the social networking site, for instance, an e-mail address.
- Have link to your blog and/or author website.
- Make everything public.
- Update regularly.
- Join and participate in relevant groups.
- Be selective and only connect with and follow people or groups you think might bring you value- if not immediately, then eventually.
- Evolve as the social media landscape evolves.
These nine points are not exhaustive, but they serve as a starting point for any writer (or publisher) seeking to create a presence and a good profile on the internet. Another useful way of marketing is to create your own website, and there are many free tools out there, with the most accessible one being via the websites www.wix.com or www.weebly.com. These propose free ready-made templates that are easily customisable.
Amazon Author Central also allows you to create your own author page, where you can add such information as your biography; your photo; editorial reviews etc.
Online communities
Writers can and should be active online, be they on author communities (where they can interact with other writers, exchange experiences and get reviews as well as advice from thousands of other writers) or writer’s platforms which can be defined as : “The space in which the you the writer makes waves that attract other people to you—not about begging others to pay attention […] your platform gives you power to market effectively, it’s not something you develop by posting “Follow me!” on Twitter or “Like me!” on Facebook a few times a week.” (Friedman, 2012).
Some of the most commonly used online communities include:
These websites allows the writer to expose themselves to a wider audience as well as gain insights into how best to market themselves, starting from something as basic as defining themselves, focusing on who they are today, what they have already accomplished, what they are currently working on etc.
Challenges
The major challenge to self-publishing in Zimbabwe is that of funding. At one stage or the other, the writer has to spend some money on either paying a free-lance editor or having consistent internet access or pay for Print On Demand. At this stage in time, we also have a limited number of local digital publishers who can publish and market e-books locally. There may be serious deficiencies when it comes to digital infrastructure in Zimbabwe, but the extensive mobile phone network coverage and penetration (estimated to be at 87.5 %) creates a niche for potential publishing actors. Piracy will remain a big challenge to e-book publication as long as no local solution is found to encrypt the e-book and lock it to whoever would have bought it. This will deter the copying of the e-book from one device to another and will encourage more people to buy the book, thus allowing the author and publisher to earn some income.
Conclusion
One way or the other, both printed and e-books will need to co-exist and be promoted. Marc-André Ledoux, the head of Dakar based publishing house Nouvelles Éditions Numériques Africaines (NENA) is convinced that: “The essential thing is for African publishers to persevere and produce (…). To tell the truth, the key to development in Africa, in my opinion – which is shared by many others – depends on the creation and growth of viable and sustainable small and medium enterprises” (Kulesz, 2011). Local writers and entrepreneurs need to work together to create platforms that will allow the marketing and distribution of books via-mobile phone technology, at an affordable price. In the same vein, writers should ensure that they make the most of their digital citizenship to create a presence, and literary ‘make a name for themselves’, both locally and internationally.
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Kudakwashe Dhoro 