Books Sell One Another
A few thoughts on book marketing in Kenya
Some authors can sell many books.
Authors with wide networks they enjoy connecting with regularly
Authors who have written multiple books and are consistently active on digital platforms
Authors who are well known enough that their name alone sells books
Authors whose publishers have a robust marketing infrastructure.
In each of these cases, multiplicity is at play. Many people are involved or many books are involved or both.
Compare that with one author selling one book to a few people. It is going to be a lot harder. It is still hard even for one author selling one book to many people — unless those many people are already deeply engaged with the author’s work, and have been for quite a while.
Each example given above requires a lot of effort. It takes a lot to form relationships within your network. It takes a lot to write multiple books. It takes a lot to build an audience that is interested in what you have to say. It takes a lot to get in with a publisher that has invested in marketing infrastructure. Because you need trust in order to sell books. Readers have to know who you are, and then before they become buyers they have to trust that you know what you are talking about. It takes a lot to build the credibility that invites trust.
It is easier to sell books when many books are involved because books sell one another. If I ask for someone’s attention and then offer them just one thing, it is easy for that person to make a quick yes or no decision based on just the first impression I make. If I offer them 10 different things to look at, now they are browsing. Now they are going over each one and beginning a process of elimination based on their own tastes. When you look at 10 things and they have made a good impression and they fit your budget in a way that doesn’t feel like imminent bankruptcy, chances are you will buy at least one of them. And when the browser in question is a reader looking at books, chances are they will buy more than one because this is just not a demographic known for its self control.
Here I want to point out that people love to spend money. Nairobians love to spend money. Yes, the economy is in shambles, and yet, a quick look around will tell you that those who do have money are spending it. People especially love to spend money on the things that they value, whether because the thing brings them deep enjoyment, or the thing elevates their status, or both. We spend on our hobbies, the things we are genuinely enthusiastic about, because the truth is that every single hobby becomes expensive if you love it enough. As your skill and knowledge base in that hobby grows, you want to keep investing in it to keep getting better at it. And so a knitter buys more expensive yarn because it’s higher quality and they want to get better. A hiker or biker buys more expensive gear because it’s higher quality and they want to get better. This is the power of passionate pursuit. The hobby and what it brings become baked into the hobbyist’s identity.
So with readers. Even when they have little to spend, readers will buy another book. When I was 20 and had just enough for matatus to school and back and as cheap a lunch as I could manage, I still saved up to buy novels at Prestige Bookshop in town. It felt less like a choice and more like a compulsion. I believed that having and reading those specific books would add a lot of value to my life, and that made the decision to forfeit other things to buy the books easy. Some of those books I haven’t even read to this day, but I bought them anyway, and I would make that same decision again given the chance. This is how most avid readers are.
They buy books as one hobby, just for the enjoyment of knowing that a book is in their house, looking good on their shelf and waiting for them to pick it up when they are good and ready. They read books as another hobby, for the enjoyment and nourishment of reading and the satisfaction of having read. And then, often, they talk about the books they’ve read, for the joy of having opinions about those books and the even greater joy of agreeing or disagreeing with other people’s opinions. And, the most avid readers have typically been readers their whole lives, and so they do not know another way to be. They do not need to be convinced of the value of reading, and whenever life happens and they find themselves reading less, they are wracked with guilt, even shame, as though they have betrayed a core part of their identity, and expend a lot of brain power on how to reclaim more time for reading.
Granted, this is not actually a very big proportion of the general population. But I suspect they are the ones who keep the engine of a local book industry running. They go into bookstores regularly, browse, and buy multiple books at a go. They read them and talk about them and use them as reference points. If authors and publishers produced books only for this demographic, far fewer books would be published because there would be an acceptance that the market exists — it is just not that big.
Instead, in the pursuit of more market share, which I assume is necessary to sustain themselves because the profit margins on books are slim, publishers tend to produce far more books than the general population can consume or is interested in. Then they have to spend a lot to make the books ubiquitous and persuade more and more people to buy. And where publishers do not have the resources to undertake this, there’s a lot said about how people are not reading anymore and the book industry is dying and look how much the screens have taken from us. All this may be true. But it’s also true that there are more books than anybody can keep up with, so it makes sense that many of them will fall into the void of attentionlessness.
There is a reason everyone in the book industry goes on constantly about target audience. It matters more than anything else. The goal then for a regular author should not be to sell as many books as possible to as many people as possible in as many places as possible. Unless you have the resources to do that, in which case, go for it. For an author who just wants to write their books and share them with the people who need and want them, that second part is where to pour effort: those who need and want them.
These people ideally, belong to that core demographic of readers who keep the industry’s engine running. The ones you don’t have to persuade to buy books or convince that books are valuable. Book buying is already an ingrained habit for them and books are foundational to their worldview. They probably believe the world would be a better place if people read more. They already go to bookshops and attend book-centred events. In Nairobi, they are probably looking for even more of those events because we are a people who value experiences and their aesthetics. This demographic is small, as we’ve said. Even smaller is the part of it that is interested in your specific genre or subject. They could be 50 in number or they could be 5000. Those are the people you are selling your book to, not the entire population of Kenyans who are literate in English. The more constrained your target audience, the better.
Better then, to start as small as you can go, and let this reflect in the number of books you print. Yes, it is cheaper per copy to print 1000 books, but then if you end up selling only 200 in three years, now there’s a room in your house in which boxes of books have served as furniture for three years. Authors often underestimate the challenge of marketing and selling their books because they overestimate the size of the market.
The number of readers you will find for your first book as a regular author without an enormous platform may be small because most of your target audience don’t know your work or haven’t met your book in the wild or maybe your book makes a terrible first impression, as many Kenyan books do. The best thing you can do is play the long game and write another book and then another. When you have more (and better!) books and allow your writing career to take time, just like any other career, your readership will grow as your authorship grows. The more books you have the easier it becomes to sell them because they sell one another. Books do well in an ecosystem where they anchor one another. Think of them like keys. A single loose key is impossible to find. If you put it on a keyholder with a few other keys used in a similar environment, now the system makes sense.
Situating your book within an ecosystem works similarly with publishing houses. Publishers can invest in robust infrastructure for book marketing because that infrastructure makes sense when it serves many books. It’s also how bookshops work. You go to a bookshop because you will find many books to select from. Again, it works in the case of authors with wide networks and active online platforms. People will buy from such an author because the book is related to the other work that the author has done. For example, memoirs from celebrities and politicians sell because they are situated within the ecosystem of the authors’ other work. Nonfiction books sell because they are situated within the ecosystems of the topics they address: a parent of a teenager is already primed to notice a book on parenting teenagers.
My point is that a single book by a single author is always going to be a tough sell. The book needs to be situated within an already active ecosystem in order to be found by the people who need and want it. This is why publishers want authors who already have an online platform. If you spend years writing about or speaking about a particular topic, to the extent that there are people who associate you with that topic, then when you write a book on the same, it is already embedded within the greater ecosystem of your work. I think authors would find themselves a lot less frustrated with marketing and selling if they viewed their book as a thing needing to exist within a greater ecosystem because they would then recognise the work and time that need to go into creating such an ecosystem. You cannot afford to take the ecosystem for granted.
Publishing books is not a way to make a lot of money quickly. It’s not even a way to make back quickly the money you spend on producing the thing. The only people who make a lot of money quickly from books are the ones who first made some money slowly from something else, and then when the fruit of all that effort was finally economically lucrative, published a book. But the one book at a time approach is really where the process is most enriching for the author and the product is most resonant for the reader. Allow it to take the time it needs.
In the meantime, as authors face their books, I think publishers in Kenya have room to serve authors and readers better by curating better. When everyone is a publisher, it is curation that signals to people where to go to find what they need.
I would love to see Kenyan publishers that stand fully in that role, serving specific niches of adult readers rather than focusing on the ambitious goal of improving the country’s reading culture. Speaking from the outside looking in, it seems that successfully publishing literary and genre fiction for adults has proven near impossible for Kenyan publishers. I do not doubt that they are interested in surmounting the challenges they have faced with this market because people who go into publishing tend to do so because they love books. My best guess is that none has found a way to approach it at a small enough scale to serve the readers (who do exist and have been waiting for those books for years) while allowing the numbers to make sense financially. The industry is growing, though, and I am hopeful new publishers will enter the market and take risks that older ones could not.