Publishing in Zim: has it changed for the better?
Daisy Jeremani
Publishing houses, which had scaled down on their operations for the last three years are now picking up.
Most of the publishing houses, which had concentrated on school textbooks and selected fiction novels, have seen their sales go up since the beginning of the year due to dollarisation.
The editor of Zimbabwe Publishing House, Tsitsi Gwatidzo, said they will increase the production of books hoping the upward trend continues.
“Most schools had resorted to buying just 10 copies that will be shared by all pupils in that form. But now we can safely release one to two novels and four to five textbooks a year,” she said.
She said over the years, traditional buyers like schools had scaled down the numbers of books they would buy.
Now that there is an increase in the number of variety of books that ZPH is able to produce a year, it means schools will have a wider range of textbooks to choose from. Those that read for leisure are also assured of getting something from the publishing house, she said.
“There is less exposure of our products, especially to the kids, more needs to be done as we only have one platform to market our products which is the Zimbabwe International Book Fair,” she said.
National Merit Award nominee in the fiction category for the book My Children, My Home, Wonder Guchu, said the situation was bad for the industry in recent years but some of the publishing houses were now taking advantage of writers.
He said most writers have decided to self-publish to avoid being fleeced by publishing houses that did not pay them royalties.
“The thing was they (publishing houses) never experienced a rough patch. They chose to maximise on their profits. It had nothing to do with rough patches, I have done mine with my second book and have done for other writers such as (Richmond) Tera and others,” he said.
He cited one writer who wrote a book and had not been paid anything by 2007 yet his books had been selling for over four years prior to that.
“Writers, like musicians, are being ripped off by publishers,” he said. – Chronicle.