If money is your only call, editor’s heartache alone will see you drop the pen

The perennial question whether writers are created or nurtured continues. And so does the one on merits of self-publishing versus relying on established publishers.

A writer, in many ways, is a creature of creation, but exposure to writing has also been known to ignite the creative spark.

Call it self-discovery if you will. After all, many people rarely know what talents they harbour until they get the opportunity to find out. One of the earliest opportunities we have is in school, where we discover whether we like writing composition or not.

In my case, I fortunately, had two brothers, Leonard and Sam, both writers. I took it as a personal challenge to one day also   publish a book, but in retrospect, I believe I would still  have been a writer even if they had no interest in writing.

From the time I learnt the alphabet, one of my best hobbies was reading stories, and at school, composition was my favourite subject.

The creative writer must have a lively sense of imagination and a love for writing for writing’s sake, not for money.

There is hardly any money in writing.  It is hard to see how a nurtured writer can develop these qualities and determination unless they were inherent in them.

LUCKY BREAK

It is like nurturing oranges to yield lemons and that does not happen unless we are talking of grafting, and nurturing human beings is nothing like grafting.

When I first wrote a manuscript and sent it to a publisher, they sat on it for months, and nothing demoralises a new writer than a perceived lack of enthusiasm on the publisher’s part. Like every writer — especially a new writer — I believed my manuscript was not just good but the best there was. It was hard then, to understand why the editor did not have it published pronto — until I visited him and saw a thousand other manuscripts piled up on the floor of his office.

So I used whatever little funds I could get and self-published the collection of short stories titled The Grapevine Stories, which won the Jomo Kenyatta Award in 1997.

From there, getting my manuscripts accepted by publishers became easier, but that was a lucky break many new good writers do not get.

When the manuscript is finally read and sent back to the author, the editor’s comments could be very discouraging. Some editors will go beyond their mandate and re-write a manuscript, at times totally changing the story.

Often, the recommended changes mean overhauling the entire manuscript and starting afresh. New writers, therefore, have to be thick-skinned and have enough faith in their own abilities or they will give up.

The manuscripts often come back a year or even years later. If they believe in their work, writers will re-submit them elsewhere, or set the rejected manuscript aside and start all over. Others will have been already too demoralised by then to ever write again. These are the ones who were never truly meant to be writers.

Even for a good writer, getting a publisher is hard. And even if the manuscript is accepted, it might still be years before it goes to the printers and becomes a book. Most publishers’ priorities are on course books, which as they say, is where the money lies.

They look at publishing creative works as some sort of fund-draining social responsibility; a task they must tolerate.

After their manuscripts are finally published and it starts looking brighter for the new writers, the next shock comes.

REVERSE MARKETING

At the end of the accounting year, or much later, when they receive a royalty cheque, they often stare at it in disbelief. They had been expecting real money, but they get only Sh5,000 or less, courtesy of poor marketing. If they do not give up at this stage, then they were definitely meant to be writers.

Currently, there is a debate in the literally pages as to whether publishing creative works is worth it.

Of course the naysayers are looking at it only from the profit-motive angle. It is tragic that some of them are even editors or publishers who ought to know that publishing is not enough. The titles must be marketed.

Looking at a given title, which I have done, its distribution in bookshops country-wide is not more than 10 per cent, yet creative titles are already being given a bad name by the same people responsible for marketing it!

The argument that self-publishing is inadvisable because the authors cannot efficiently distribute their books like the publisher can does not hold any water, given the above facts.

Poor marketing effort spurs a fresh round of charges that creative works are loss makers, or they do not sell because they are sub-standard. This is further used to justify why publishers should not waste money on them. So assume we don’t publish them; what next? Shop abroad for foreign works based on foreign cultures? What happened to our national sense of values as a people with unique cultures and histories? What will express who we are if not literature and other arts?

Most publishers do not have a sales team to specifically market creative works. The reward system is usually based on how much the sales people have sold overall, so the sales effort is unsurprisingly on course books.

KILLING NEW TALENT

These, being required school material, are easier to sell and they also have higher margins. Little wonder then that most creative works are not to be found in bookshops other than the major ones like Text Book Centre.

The creative titles mainly depend on school teachers’ demand, and where an author’s title does not appear in the Orange Book, which is a guide on the Ministry of Education’s recommended titles, then that title is doomed.

What is worse, teachers usually select those titles they have already read, which, I gather, is true of university lecturers.

Talk of recycling and killing new talent, then saying Kenya is a literary desert!