adminRaisedon Baya Arts Focus
EVERY year I get a few young writers with finished manuscripts asking for advice on how to get published. True. It is every writer’s dream to get published and then be read by as many people as possible. However, it is very difficult to give good advice on publishing in the current economic state. The economic decline has seen the closure of several publishing houses — the worst was the closure of the Literature Bureau.
This economic situation saw the surviving publishers shelving massive publishing, especially of novels and other forms of literature that are not directly related to classroom learning. These few publishers prefer publishing academic books as there is money there.
A publisher can never go wrong with academic books these days. And so the advice I have always given has been for these writers to try self-publishing. It is easier. All one needs are resources to print a few copies and one is a published writer.
But what happens when one self-publishes and prints a few copies of their book? Well, experience has taught us that nothing much happens after the book launch.
I went through self-publishing. I was lucky to get support from the Culture Fund of Zimbabwe Trust. They supported the printing of 500 copies of my anthology of plays Tomorrow’s People & Other Plays. I have also done two other literary projects and self-published.
After publishing the anthology of plays I managed to sell a couple of copies. I was over the moon when the anthology was selected to be part of the A-level literature set books for Zimsec examinations.
Here was my chance to sell as many copies of my book so I thought. I was excited until reality hit home. Schools wanted the book. They were looking for it. Unfortunately I had no money to print more copies to distribute nationally. I also had no marketing and distribution plan.
It is not easy to write, publish, market and distribute a book all alone. It is actually a nightmare. And so as I write I am watching copies of my published projects sitting in the storeroom, gathering dust. Once in a while I sell a copy or two. But the sales are very slow. Of course, without a marketing and distribution plan a writer’s dream of making it big in the literary world remains but just a dream.
Away from literature the same illness afflicts theatre. A lot of young thespians take months, some even years, to create plays that only live on the premiere night and then suddenly die and are discarded.
After the premiere night artistes seem to lose focus on why the art product was created in the first place. Many plays have died on the night they are premiered and the reason for the sudden death is mostly because production companies will not have thought beyond the premiere night.
Some companies produce for festivals and if their applications to festivals fail they just dump the project and move on to something new. Most of us are guilty of starting projects without mapping out a proper marketing and distribution plan. Without a marketing and distributing plan any project is doomed. The whole purpose of making art is to make money out of our talent. So before creation, a concrete marketing and distribution plan needs to be in place or else it will be just art for art’s sake.
Honestly speaking, the absence of a marketing and distribution plan permeates the whole arts industry. We hear about films that die immediately after being premiered. I could name several.
We see visual arts products that are launched and when the exhibition closes you never see these again. It is the same with music. Most young musicians only think of printing a few copies of their music to take to the radio stations. No bigger plans.
Strangely, we all somehow forget that the money is actually in that marketing and distributing plan. If artistes are serious about making money then we need to rethink how we do business, especially about marketing and distribution.
Online Reporter