Publishing in South Africa suffers a number of vicissitudes. In a new book, publishers Nicholas Combrinck and Maggie Davey engage in a dialogue on the subject
Combrinck: Rarely do trade publishers [publishers for a general retail market, as opposed to educational publishers and so forth] make a serious return on their publishing, and rarely in South African publishing have trade publishers been profitable for long. So why publish books at all? Davey: It has infinite potential as a creative act; it bridges the individual’s intentions and the public’s reception of them; it engenders a product; and it is social: there are delicious possibilities confirming the publisher’s original hunch, through the applause lent by commercial success. Combrinck: True, if you want to define publishing in creative terms, but it is also a prosaic endeavour. Many books are put together, assembled, by competent compilers. This kind of general publishing is best described as the production of material for the entertainment and possible edification of general readers who usually patronise bookshops, though they might also belong to book clubs. But, as with all seductions, passion will eventually be succeeded by an embrace-breaking argument about money. Which brings us back to the challenges that face publishers. Davey: I think that the challenges, particularly in the “new digital economy”, are commercially, structurally and conceptually daunting. There is a timeless absurdity in the interconnectedness of artistic endeavour and its economics. Yet this absurdity persists, or at least it has done until now. What will become of publishing in the era of the new economy is anybody’s guess.
The Internet forces a radical business model on publishers. New Directions in European Publishing says: “Whatever channel is to be used, paper or digital, the key is to look first at the community and let that define the channel, rather than picking a channel and seeing who it hits.” When the publishing industry comes to deciphering the coded abstractions of the digital age, a fundamental argument will be that publishing was especially vulnerable because publishers represented the part of the community that constantly pushed against the cutting edge of technology. Combrinck: You’re saying that how publishers respond to the electronic medium represents one of the most powerful challenges facing us since well, since the printing revolution of the 15th century. I know librarians who now regularly state that “the print medium [they mean books] is outmoded”. Their concern is channelling information to online users. Once it is available digitally, information is freely available, often free to download and always, in theory, freely copiable. That’s what librarians mean by the “free flow of information”. But I want to know: What happens to writers if their ideas spread and are copied without their authorisation and outside their original context? What happens to intermediaries, like publishers and agents, who see themselves as guardians and nurturers of intellectual property? What happens to the integrity of information, for example medical information, if the barriers to providing it to a credulous and information-hungry public become ridiculously easy to surmount? Nobody knows yet, because the implications of digital change on the written word have not been fully digested by anybody, anywhere.
General publishing in South Africa can be described as being successful in three areas: l First you have “how-to” books gardening, cookery, business, hobbies and crafts, self-improvement books, do-it-yourself publications and meditations on the world around us, quite often of a “new age” variety. l Then there are books on natural history and travel a highly successful area for many South African publishers. With the recent increase in tourism this is an area that in the main holds little risk for publishers. l The third area is politics, history and social studies. Because of South Africa’s turbulent past and still-developing future, such books find a wide readership among South African and foreign readers alike.
What separates general trade publishers in South Africa from their counterparts in the rest of the developed world, however, is that in many cases South African publishers are forced to be jacks of all trades and, as a result, masters of none. Whereas it is possible to specialise in a single category of general publishing in the United Kingdom (cookery, for instance) it is impossible to do so in South Africa. The result is that the list of a general publisher in South Africa might often seem without identity and direction.
The problem of publishing in a small market is exacerbated by the fact that specialised publishing cannot rely on retail chain selling, as it requires specialised selling. A 1992 breakdown of the distribution of book sales in the UK showed that the biggest share of trade sale 28%as I recall was attributable to independent booksellers. In South Africa the independent bookseller accounts for less than 5% of publishers’ sales. Davey: To talk about the retail side, there is a highly concentrated niche market in book retailing, and books are definitely a “niche product”. The kind of wide-ranging leisure reading that takes place in developed countries is not a notable feature of South African consumer habits, which reveal major disparities between the various population, income and social groups.
Fiction publishing can’t find a wide readership in South Africa, which is ironic when you consider that so many township residents are interested in reading, try to become writers, and recognise the value of narratives as part of individual and community life. Combrinck: Because the consumer market for fiction is small, mass-market fiction has always originated outside the South African publishing industry, with local authors publishing through foreign publishing houses, and publishers’ agents either importing stocks or placing their imprint on a South African edition. They believe that making cosmetic changes to an indigenous fiction title and bringing it out under a foreign imprint will fool South African readers into thinking it is worthy of being read, and perhaps they’re right, because frequently it has worked. Since the print runs needed to maintain fiction publishing in a local edition are impossible to justify, the reasons for publishing a joint local-foreign edition are at least partly economic. JM Coetzee, currently our most famous writer, is published by Secker & Warburg, represented in South Africa by Random House; and Wilbur Smith, currently the most-read South African writer globally, has long since ceased to be considered a “South African” author and is being published and marketed as a writer of pulp novels internationally by Pan Macmillan. Davey: South Africa, being by turns post-colonial, post-apartheid and possibly even post-development, doesn’t have a significant reading community in either the print or electronic channels. With a book-buying community of around 400 000 people out of a population of over 40-million, with illiteracy levels running at between 12- and 15-million people, and without strong financial support for science, technology and the arts, is it surprising that books and reading are activities of the literate and the leisured, and, for learners, are casualties? I think that, as a publisher, one way to adapt to the projected changes is to look backwards, at the serialisation of the 19th century. Publication on the Net goes back to the idea of creating a community of readers, and at the same time attempting to extend the applications of content over a range of media.
For those who argue that there’s nothing like the feel of a book, the prediction of scenario planners of large telecommunications companies is that, by 2015, machine-social interaction and imagination will be so efficient that it will replace, or at least compete with, the imaginative experience offered by books. That’s the real allure of the Internet. Combrinck: So another revolution is here, and publishers in South Africa as elsewhere can still find meaning in their creativity? This is an edited excerpt from The Politics of Publishing in South Africa, edited by Nicholas Evans and Monica Seeber (International Publishing Monitor/Ehling/University of Natal Press)