The Thing that Nuria Kenya Is Doing
Kenyans are writing A LOT. And they are all selling at Nuria.
I find the Nuria Kenya website overwhelming. Very much everything everywhere all at once. But this is not necessarily a Nuria problem: I am not much of an online shopper. I hate to be on any site that shows me too many things at once. It is overstimulating. It’s also why I cannot read many online newspapers or magazines.
My thinking is that if you’re going to play the role of curator, then play it. Select with intention. Categorise. Describe effectively. Show me why your selections matter, and let me see why they should matter to me too. In a world where everybody is a creator, curation becomes that much more important, no matter if people prefer to call it gatekeeping.
But with online stores, I suppose that is not the point. The point is volume. It is the equivalent of wandering through a large supermarket that sells everything. Or Toi Market. Or House of Leather, which forces you to see everything in the one long, winding aisle, claustrophobia be damned. They are marketplaces: a noisiness is to be expected.
Nuria is interesting to me as a marketplace for Kenyan authors. At Nuria, everybody and their book is welcome. And it is interesting because this is not how booksellers typically operate.
Like publishers, booksellers have to decide which books they will invest in. So when you publish your book, you’re not going to just walk into Textbook Centre and tell them you are ready for them to hold your work on their shelves. That is, unless you are an established author with a good sales track record or a public figure with a large enough following that can be marketed to. It makes sense, this approach, because it is a business, and the numbers will always matter more than anything else.
How it worked was: booksellers would buy copies of your book—how many depends on how well it looks like your book might do—at a discount, typically 30%. The discount is what then allowed them to sell your book at a profit. Sometimes they would agree to stock your book and then give it a few months. If within that time frame the book didn’t sell, you could be asked to take back your copies. Again, from a business perspective, I see how it makes sense. Shelves are not infinite, so you save them for the books that will fly off them.
Nuria took a different route. They made it a priority to be the place where any Kenyan who publishes a book can go. There are no hoops to jump through, nothing to prove. Rather than buy your book at a discount, Nuria will take it, display it in both their physical and online bookshops, and then take their cut of every sale. (I believe other booksellers have now been moving towards this model as well.) An author who wants to stock their book at Nuria creates an account with them, through which the author can see how many copies of their books have sold and also initiate withdrawal of payment from sales made. Additionally, their focus on supporting Kenyan authors manifests in their curation of a quarterly local bestseller list based on their own database (we did not have anything like this before, to the best of my knowledge), their spotlighting of local authors on their digital platforms, and the fact that by their own report 70% of their marketing focuses on local books.
What strikes me as innovative here is the deeper collaboration they’ve established with authors. The dynamic feels refreshingly inclusive—much less “elitist” than what you often find with other booksellers. It aligns with a broader promise of greater access and reduced gatekeeping.
The publishing industry has a long history of inaccessibility, and while that isn’t entirely without reason (many of these barriers are driven by business decisions, and business decisions will always be friendlier where the money resides), it has always raised questions about who gets to tell stories and whose stories become the national story. Like I said, curation can easily resemble gatekeeping—especially when it’s being done by those with the resources to broadcast their selections widely. Still, I believe there’s value in spaces with smaller selections and narrower entry points. Both models serve different audiences and needs. If you like to browse, to treasure-hunt, then the chaos of the marketplace is likely part of the appeal.
From watching interviews done by the founder of Nuria Kenya, Abdullahi Bulle, I find that his views and mine on marketing are aligned. I am of the opinion that the Kenyan book industry does not have a production problem but it does have a marketing problem. In my wildest dreams I know that if I did set up a literary outfit, marketing would be my biggest point of focus. Abdullahi attributes much of his business’s success to consistent, persistent marketing. Nuria is active on social media, but this alone isn’t enough. He says in an interview that you could post 15 or 20 times and have only a sale or two to show for it. Marketing is basically making enough noise about what you are doing that you gain the gift of memory in people’s minds.
And Nuria helps Kenyan authors in marketing simply by existing, even without the rest of the support that they offer. Because when you publish a book, particularly when you self-publish, you will tell people about it and if they are interested they will ask you where they can get it. Before online bookstores were a thing here, and no bookseller would go anywhere near self-published books, you would have to coordinate distribution and sales yourself. You would have to carry your books around with you, in your handbag or in your car. You would have to figure out yourself how to send your book to that one relative in Meru who wants to support you. What Nuria did was make it possible for any Kenyan author to say, “Yes, you can order it at Nuria, and they will deliver it to you.” Even now when most booksellers are in e-commerce, Nuria’s doors are open the widest.
This is excellent, in many ways. But it’s also part of what makes the Nuria Kenya website overwhelming for me. I am on the website from time to time because the store often has niche books that I am not confident I will find anywhere else as easily. What I see are some interesting books and very many ugly covers. Ugly covers are not Nuria’s fault, obviously. But I was not aware just how many of them are in our market and how bad they can be until I saw them on the Nuria website. And the thing is that those books could be incredible, but I will never know for sure because I would not buy them. This is what I mean by a marketing problem.
Book design is a significant part of marketing. How a book looks and feels in the hands matters, and it costs more to give it the sort of look and feel from which a reader will derive sensory pleasure. Book marketing also includes the description that comes up when you click on a book in an online store. That description serves the same purpose as the back cover book blurb and, I think, should be even more detailed because I do not have the opportunity to flip through the book and get a sense of what it is I will be purchasing. But so many of the descriptions on the Nuria site tell me nothing significant about the book, give me no information that can help me make a decision on whether it's up my alley or not. And because the cover already upset me, my curiosity is ended swiftly. How much are Kenyan authors losing in sales because they don't know or don't mind that their aesthetics are off?
This is not at all to say that the majority of Kenyan books are poorly designed. I do not have the numbers to make such a claim. Plus, a walk into Nuria's physical store, as well as other bookstores in Nairobi, reveals many beautifully done local books. Of note is that in a bid to address the quality problems in self-publishing, Nuria connects authors to designers, editors, and printers—for free. I am saying that based on what I see on the online store, I think there is still a knowledge and skill gap to be filled. Generally, it seems that the more experienced an author is, the better their books look. Is there a way we can make it so that these lessons are not so hard won?
Nuria Kenya shows me what the Kenyan literary ecosystem looks like uncurated. We are writing a lot. But perhaps book authors and book editors and book designers and book marketers need to come together and figure some stuff out. The gap between international standards and local standards is still too wide for my tastes. It is a great thing that anyone who wants to be an author can. It will be even greater when the goods in the biggest local marketplaces are as compelling as the existence of the marketplaces themselves.
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As one who isn't familiar with the Kenyan literally space, your perspectives in this article are a good way to learn about it. Thank you! I'll be checking out Nuria Store.