The Bookseller.com

7th January 2009

John Makinson is chairman and c.e.o. of Penguin

Branching out

09.10.08

The taxi queues in Frankfurt next week will remind us, as they do every year, that this really is a global business. Publishers from almost every country in the world will have made the pilgrimage to Germany to buy, sell, talk, eat and queue for taxis. Then at the end of the week we'll all go home and that'll be it for another year.

Anglo-Saxon publishers are, if we're honest, a parochial lot. We don't spend much of Frankfurt week chasing off to see what's new in Japan or Brazil. Yet it's fairly obvious to those of us who work in the mature Western markets that the developing world is where the growth is. It's there and it's in digital. But we feel more comfortable pushing digital than building a presence in emerging markets.

Emerging markets are complicated. We may face regulatory issues that constrain our freedom to publish, censorship barriers that compromise our freedom of expression or simply cultural challenges that may lead us to do the wrong thing. Customers don't pay on time, you can't always get your money out, and local partners may be reliable, or they may not. It's really not easy.

Yet our view here at Penguin is that we must persist, not just because of the potential for growth and eventually profit, but also because we have a responsibility to share whatever knowledge and experience that we've gained with less developed publishing markets.

This week we're announcing the launch of the Penguin African Writers Series, which will build on the great heritage of the Heinemann African Writers Series, and we are also initiating two prizes for unpublished African writing, in fiction and non-fiction. Chinua Achebe, the doyen of 20th-century African writing and the founding editor of the Heinemann series, has kindly agreed to serve as the senior advisory editor of the new series.

Why are we doing this? We have a commercial motivation, of course. The best African writing is increasingly reaching an international audience and our hope is that, from the prize entries and the works published in the series, writers may emerge who develop a following across the African continent and beyond. But we also believe that, as publishers begin to engage with emerging markets, they should do what they can to encourage authors to write and publish in their local market, as well as for that market. It would be a loss to Nigeria if the great Nigerian novels were being written in Paris or Los Angeles, published in New York or London and then simply distributed in Nigeria.  
 

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