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I have turned the themes of publishing and media over in my head for some days now and have begun to wonder about the more obscure elements of the business that I am in. There is no doubt that much of it, or at least the part that makes it compete with movies and music, mobile phones and the like, is nothing more than a yarn (formulaic and predictable, with an anticipated twist) packaged as a book. It is made to endure half a dozen readings and should really then retire. It is an international trade that boasts "promotable" authors, sexy or unshaven, with a screenplay in the making. It works, with bigger advances and even bigger marketing spends. I have nothing against this business and feel no need to defend it; it is on a par with any other in the entertainment sector, and should by all rights not be confused with the bookish literary pursuit, where many of us closet ourselves in private.
Everyone imagines that they can write that formulaic novel. Whether it panders to the short and very clichéd Mills and Boon style of publishing, or perhaps to the ever more popular genres of crime fiction and thriller, there are simply thousands of people - tens of thousands - churning out manuscripts and submitting their efforts to publishers. Some of these then get published and through a combination of predictable story lines and just the right jawline with the gift of the gab, have enough marketing spend behind them to drive them to number one within the space of three books. Once you are in that favoured position you sell because you are selling. A combination of satisfaction (or even instant gratification) in the metros and undergrounds of Paris, London and New York, advertising, eyeballs and word of mouth, and quickly you sell three million paperbacks. This sector of airport reads, of international best sellers, of deals constituting multimillion dollar advances, is called the Mass Market. In South Africa we don't have a mass market; what we do have, though, is the occasional book that spills over and sells ten or twenty thousand - hardly massive for a population more than twice that of Australia.
Here it is important to make a few concessions: many people are poor, many people are illiterate, the genres don't travel (which does not imply that if you publish in a genre that appeals, you get the sales); and of course there are sectors that can be called big. I refer to a number of Afrikaans authors that can clock three times the number of sales of any mass market import.
For a moment we should explore the possibility of growing the domestic publishing market so that it can become a viable entity on its own. What I mean by this is having authors - and there are a dozen or so already - that not only play on the international stage but sell numbers significant enough for there to be a bidding war to get them in this country, that is, to publish them in South Africa. It is far off, and even if we double or treble the copies sold, we would still not be able to buy the book from under the noses of a British house, so we collaborate, which is essential for the broader business, and as a result a portion - granted, minimal - of the profits is lost to us. Any thinking person reading this independently would then argue that the core of the problem, before we get to the economics of it, is in the lack of people that read, hence no great number buy books.
So how do you go about making people read? It goes without saying that there should be campaigns that drive the importance of reading. You may then argue that in the context of the broader society we live in today, it is not important that information is not transmitted in the traditional tome but through a myriad other media that are in essence far more able to penetrate or effectively communicate the essence of what there is. Fair enough - that debate, as far as I am concerned, is not worth entering into. If it is about extensive decade-long reading campaigns, then it comes down to who will spend the money - and it is my experience that the sort of money that achieves the substantial end of sustained public campaigns is just not available.
The latest Economist World in Figures states that 6,7 of every 100 households in South Africa have computers. If this number grew by 10 percent per annum we would still have only 10 percent of the population with computers in their homes by 2010. It is time that we got real about the fundamentals in this country. If we want to achieve a literate, educated society in any real time-frame, which would not be less than five decades, we need books in schools, books in libraries and generally speaking, access to the written word on the whole.
Now here is the leap in the argument: we have a problem in this country that puts the broader population into a position that they cannot buy books. The problem is twofold. One, there is massive illiteracy; and two, books are too expensive. Accepting this, it becomes the task of writers, publishers and booksellers to see what they can do with the market that remains - obviously keeping in mind that the general aim is to grow reading and the reading public, with the tools that they have available to them.
My intention in this has not been to write a diatribe on the desperate job that needs doing, but rather about publishing, about the role of publishers and authors, about what should be done in this country - or at the very least my perspective on these things, which is commercial; and yet my perspective holds passionately the promotion of reading and books.
I think we could agree that what everyone in this country involved in books really wants is a business with healthy fundamentals. Healthy fundamentals constitute: a good number of authors producing a book every year or every other year; a number of publishers competing to publish; a number of good bookshops punting the books; and lastly an audience buying the books that grows, consistently, in numbers year on year.
Well, simply put, publishers cannot publish and be damned. There is just not enough profit in the business to take risks that are perhaps greater than one would take if you could afford for the occasional book to flop. What I am saying is that with the domestic publishing business it really is a question of publishing what you know will work and only every now and then chancing what ostensibly is an outsider. Publishers, like any other commercial undertakings, venture into the business to make money, and their commercial viability is not merely fundamental but essential. Sometimes, and to achieve this in any sustained way, you have to be a viable commercial entity; you can make contributions on the cultural front after making gains on the commercial front. Simply put, publishing is not a charitable undertaking.
For the sustained health of the South African book business it is my contention that we should crush any idea of there being a charitable requirement, or a social agenda that comes into play outside of editorial selection. We do have social requirements, but in real terms they are as onerous or generous as any other business of a comparable size. Yet because of the nature of publishing, people automatically assume that anyone in the book business has to carry the candle.
So where does that leave us?
Yes, it is a small market - at around a billion rand, one of the smaller industries in the country. We can debate every aspect of the commercial side of things, we can deliberate on how we will get people reading, we can even argue that there should be a shift to focus on South African literature replacing the imported books. At length we could go into the detail of the role that the media may play, and the presence of books in the press. However, there is already a fairly high penetration, because journalists read and because publishers collaborate with the press to get books out into the public space. We could petition the government to drop VAT on books (though I don't see how that would change the market); we could even have a book fair. But actually, if we want to achieve something, we have to compete. Competition - that is what it comes down to.
We have half a dozen authors that play on the international stage. Surely that is preposterous for a country that boasts a population the size of ours, even in the context of the book-buying literate and rich. Many young writers come into writing thinking that there is some obligation on the part of the publishers to publish them. Nothing could be further from the truth. What we actually require is for aspiring authors to realise that we are now an international community, where everything should be professional and to one extent or another must compete on the global stage. That is not to say that everything that is written should compete, but an author that writes something that does not compete, should not expect to make a living from writing, if said author does not penetrate internationally. In short, publishers should exercise more rigorous discernment, and writers more peer reviewing, because the audience has something from America (or Britain, India, Australia or even China) on offer and will spend the little they have on that which catches their attention.
Many will say that this simply brings to bear that which is conceivably not literary. I beg to differ - what is literary will always survive in an enclave consisting of the writer and his audience - as one tongue-in-cheek response has it, the literary novel is read by aspirant literary writers. I doubt that this will ever change and there is great value in it.
As for the commercial publishing that makes writers rich and audiences queue every year for the new book, well, that is up to the writer, and I assure you that if it is good enough, if it competes on the international stage, there is no reason for it to stop short of the million copies mark - it is, after all, a global game. This raises the question: Why do we isolate ourselves with our writing while in everything else, in every sphere, we aspire to achieve and compete internationally?
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Eugene Ashton was born in Barberton.
His secondary education at Pretoria Boys' High School was followed
by a BA and Honours in History at the University of Pretoria. He is
currently at work on his MA. He has worked for Jonathan Ball Publishers
for some seven years in various capacities and currently heads up
a sales division at the company. 
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