About Read South Africa, By Zukiswa Wanner

by Damaria Senne on Oct 1st, 2009

Comrades in ink (and some in drink),

Two weeks ago I wrote a blog piece complaining on what I perceived to be the problem with our literary landscape entitled It’s Still the Marketing Stupid.

Some of you responded to it with suggestions. Over the last days I have been thinking perhaps instead of whining about what’s wrong in cyberworld we should actively take our destiny into our own hands.

The fact is, only eighteen percent of matric students go through to university and of those, a good third of them do not graduate.

A major part of the reason is that there is not much of a culture of reading and therefore, at tertiary where students are required to do much research, they fall short of requirements. Perhaps it is time that we all encouraged a culture of reading for pleasure.

Currently we have over 25 writers (this is a very conservative number taken just from my library) who have emerged in the last five years. I feel that we should campaign for politicians, teachers, and everyone who has the interest of the future of the country to read (on a writer’s self-interested level this of course may translate to higher book sales for us). I suggest a marketing campaign to push this encouragement.

Because I am a sadistic character, I think getting a mailing list of politicians (municipal, provincial, and national) and shaming them into supporting writers as artists (in the same way they support musicians when we see them gyrating on stages) by buying and being seen reading SA will be one way to go. This is a cost-efficient form of marketing although am not sure how many politicians actually read their emails, or can readJ.

Additionally, organisations like Alliance Francaise, Goethe Institute, and British Council can be written to for funding as they have been known to support the arts in the past. They could fund the posters encouraging everyone to Read SA (I have asked fellow writer and graphic designer Ivor Hartmann to give an idea of cost for this kind of project with an initial print run of 5000 posters so sponsorship requests can be sent with some idea of figure). These posters would be placed in schools, libraries, clinics, etc. Ben Williams of BookSA has been supportive of this and has even offered to sponsor a part of the posters (thank you Ben!).

I am also thinking of working on trying to get corporate sponsorship for more expensive advertising – newspapers, magazines, television perhaps. Of course this is quite ambitious of me but I suspect if we all work together we can have an idea of the corporates who would be keen to lend their name to this.

Some of you have correctly noted that some of the books published by PASA are crap but I think we owe it to ourselves to let everyone know what is out there and the country, knowing what’s available, can then separate the wheat from the chaff.

I would welcome any other ideas from the rest of you on how much more we can do to get the country to know our work is out there, buy, and read it, as well as other marketing strategies you may all come up with to ensure we actually make a living from what we do.

Please leave a message here if you would like to be involved. You can also forward a link to this to call to action to any writer that you think may be interested in getting involved.