Category Archives: Content

Paperight and beyond: learning from disappointment

At a Mobile Literacy Network Meeting this week hosted by the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, I talked about Paperight, why we had to close, and some of the lessons my team and I are taking to our next ventures – particularly Bettercare and Book Dash

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In the next ten minutes I’m going to talk about three things: what was Paperight, why we had to close, and a few lessons (out of a great many) that I’m taking into my next ventures.

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But first, a quick note on learning lessons from disappointment.

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Hindsight is cruel, because it’s almost certainly wrong.

The disappointment you feel when you decide that your project didn’t work only indicates what particular set of circumstances, and series of events, didn’t work out the way you hoped. That disappointment makes us regret our decisions, and looking back we’re tempted to say ‘We should have done this instead.’ The problem is that your journey was one of an infinite number of possible alternatives, and you have no way of knowing what exactly you should have done differently.

So when we draw lessons, we can say ‘For us, this didn’t work and this did’. We can’t say ‘If we’d done this, everything would have turned out well.’

  • It’s okay to say ‘This didn’t work.’
  • It’s foolish to say ‘This would have worked better.’

Watch out for that trap of wishful alternatives. Once you start noticing it, you realise that we all fall into it all the time, wasting energy on we-should-haves.

It also means that our lessons might not apply to your project directly, but perhaps they are a rough guide to potential challenges.

So, let’s see what happened to Paperight.

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At Paperight we built a network of independent print shops that could print books out for their customers on demand.

We worked with publishers to provide an online library of books that print shops could legally download, print and sell to customers.

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We wanted to:

  • turn photocopiers into bookstores in every village in Africa
  • dramatically reduce the cost of tertiary (higher-ed, university college) textbooks
  • prove that publishers could make money selling instant licenses (we’d sustain ourselves from commission).

In short, we wanted to offer a more effective way to get textbooks to students. And thanks to the Shuttleworth Foundation, we had time and money to make it happen.

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So how did we do?

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From May 2012 to Dec 2014 we got to:

  • 200+ outlets on our map (there were about 200 more that we didn’t believe were active copy shops)
  • 150+ publishers
  • 2100+ titles (with 1000+ in our queue)
  • 4049 copies distributed.

We worked with copy shops to make sure their customers knew about the service.

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In some cases, we helped with signage, and in others…

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…copy shops did a great job of promoting on-demand books themselves. The early signs were promising – we told ourselves we had traction.

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But revenue just didn’t climb. I began to realise that, starting from a small base, a trickle can look like traction. A trickle can inspire confidence that is both valuable – to confidence, to our ability to sell – and misleading. It’s a dangerous time for an ambitious team, because both trickle and traction make you think your model is working, and that it’s time to plan for scale. A trickle can hide fundamental problems with your model.

A trickle can look like traction. It’s a dangerous time for an ambitious team, because both make you think your model is working, and that it’s time to plan for scale. A trickle can hide fundamental problems with your model.

In 2.5 years we charged R57500 in licence fees. Of this:

  • R26000 to publishers
  • R20000 as a publisher ourselves
  • R11500 in commission

That wasn’t enough to meet one month’s payroll. More importantly, after a year the rate of growth in sales had slowed to almost zero.

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Our problems were of course, in part, the result our strategic decisions: out of an infinite number of possible alternatives, some would have been better than others. But aside from that, we knew we had three major external challenges:

One small collection of high-value, low-price titles made as much as all our other sales combined.

Despite our disappointment, buried in those revenue stats is a promising story: we made far more as a publisher than as a distributor. We had created a hundred simple, low-priced books of our own: collections of past grade-12 exam papers. That one small collection of high-value, low-priced titles made as much as all our other sales combined. And that’s after those past-papers were free for the first seven months.

Even though we made so much of our revenue from past exam papers, we often regretted deciding to charge for them. When they were still free, we made really good headway growing customers for copy shops in poor areas, especially in Khayelitsha and in peri-urban Eastern Cape towns.

From the day we started charging for them – between $1 and $2 a copy – those sales declined massively. It was a great lesson in the infinite distance between free and paid.

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Free content is easy to sell. Paid content is infinitely more difficult.
You don’t just ‘add on’ paid to a free model. Payment changes a project fundamentally.

Still, we really wanted to prove a paid model. And we did have paying customers.

If I had to draw broad conclusions from this, I’d confidently say that if we’d had the right content, we could have done well.

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A few high-value titles will sell. But it’s almost impossible to build a working experiment relying on commercial publishers’ content. Experimental projects like ours need high-value content to work with. If it’s open-licensed, we all get much further much faster. It’s critical that impact-minded content projects and funders prioritise open licensing.

I was determined to push for change in publishing by enabling a better way to sell. But I now believe that you cannot create industrial change by enabling its participants.

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‘Here’s a tool that will change the way you work!’ No one wants a tool that will change the way they work. Work is complicated enough as it is.

Nonetheless, change must be possible. We just need different motivators. So I’ll try a different approach: competition. I’m actively implementing open-access models, easy licenses and print-on-demand at Bettercare.

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If we can take market share at Bettercare by doing things differently, perhaps we’ll tempt established players to do the same.

Meanwhile, in other work I’ll focus on building readership for the long term. If twenty years ago, South African publishers had made a concerted effort to invest in early-childhood reading, perhaps Paperight’s distributed print-on-demand might have worked out better.

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So at Book Dash, a volunteer-based non-profit, we’re creating new, high-quality, African books for little children that anyone can freely translate, print and distribute. Already our books are being reused by literacy projects like Nal’ibali and the African Storybook Project, who in turn create translations in many local languages. We’ll soon be distributing digital versions through FunDza, Worldreader and others. And we’ve recently crowd-funded over R80000 to print copies to give to children.

It was disappointing that Paperight didn’t work, but my excitement about our next steps far outweighs that. Those were good lessons.

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World Design Capital Cape Town 2014 and the Paperight Cover Art Competition

Great news for creative folks everywhere: Cape Town has been chosen as the World Design Capital for 2014. Arguably even better than this news is that Paperight has been chosen as an official WDCCT project. Along with this honour, we’ve been featured in their promotional output for this momentous year and we’ve been given access to various media channels through the project for pertinent news from our camp.

In the spirit of the project, Tarryn had the brilliant idea to launch a cover art design competition. We selected a shortlist of thirty-three classic literature novels, available through Paperight, for creative types to play around with. These covers have been done hundreds of times already and we thought the challenge to come up with something new would be particularly appealing.

The competition is still open for entries until the 25th of April 2014. Once we’ve received everything, we’ll select our favourite designs – hopefully one for each book title requested. The successful entrants will then be honoured by having their names appear on the imprint page, as the cover design artist of that book. Our top three favourite designers will be awarded a Paperight edition of the book featuring their design, in addition to having their name featured in all copies of the book. We wish we could give more, but as a small start up, we simply don’t have the resources.

The competition has been open to all South Africans, but we’ve chosen to promote it mainly in Cape Town and specifically to design colleges and universities across the mother city to give young artists an opportunity to test their mettle. This competition has also served as another opportunity to reach students about what Paperight does and particularly, as an opening to discover the #textbookrevolution by association.

cover-art-competition_uct-poster_20131125We put posters up on UCT and Stellenbosch University campuses, and emailed digital copies to fifteen art/design/advertising colleges and university departments around Cape Town. Our most impressive response has been that both Red and Yellow School of Magic and the Visual Arts department at Stellenbosch University chose to include the competition in their curriculum for the first semester.

The competition posters were designed by Nick and we made six variations to highlight different Cape Town based Paperight registered copy shops. We chose not to agonise over the competition Terms and Conditions simply because we didn’t want to end up confusing anyone. Complicated Ts&Cs can put people off from entering altogether – what’s the point of that?

Once we’ve deliberated on the entries and chosen winners, I will write an updated post about the results. We’ve already received some wonderful stuff and it may be difficult to choose in the end.

Onwards and upwards

Though our speculated pivot meeting had been set for the end of April, following the close of the #textbookrevolution campaign, by the start of March we’d already made significant decisions about what was going to happen.

One thing was clear though: the team would be downsized. This was where the value of openness came to the fore

While we were still ultimately deciding on the actual pivot we would make with Paperight, we had several options on the table. One thing was clear though: the team would be downsized. This was where the value of openness came to the fore, as the team could see this coming, and understood, and supported the necessity of this move. The result was that, while morale was perhaps not at it’s highest, there was no resentment among team members. We decided that in moving on it was important to wrap up the first chapter of Paperight. To this end we each began writing up our individual histories (an endeavour that lead to the creation of this site). I coordinated the team in the creation of a consolidated wrap-up list to prioritise tasks to be completed before leaving.

Despite our various wrap-up tasks and activities, we were still in the final phase of the #textbookrevolution campaign. We hosted two #textbookrevolution Twitter debates along with Kelsey Wiens and Eve Grey. You can read more about how those went here.

Publisher registrations

  • Blood Moon Press (15/3/2014)
  • Gamal Lydian Marketing (17/3/2014)

The Blaze of Glory begins

I went away over Christmas time and came back to the office a couple of weeks later recharged and ready to start the Blaze of Glory. Our funding was due to run out at the end of August so this was the last main spike in the academic book buying cycle available to us and we needed to make it count. By this time our focus had shifted from the high school market to the university market as we had realised that Paperight could make the biggest price reduction in this area. My part in BOG was to hack away at the reformatting of all A4 documents on the site, and then to reformat all Paperight novels, prioritising those on the University Prescriptions list.

The look of the Paperight PDF saw a few improvements over the years, first reducing the ad-space that had seemed like a good idea at the time but was never used, and then by removing the lines above and below the watermarking. The final product looked so much better after these improvements were made. But once the changes had been made on the site I needed to update the PDFs that had already been created using the old format. To do this I used the new PDF-PDF converter tool on the Paperight server. This tool had been in the pipelines for a long time and took quite a bit of testing and bug reporting to get it working properly, but when it was ready to go it worked like a dream. I simply had to select the PDF I wanted to convert, click convert, and wait.

I feel really lucky to have worked in such a sharing environment and to have had so much training.

I then moved on to the reformatting of the university setworks. In fact, I was reformatting some, but also adding many books that were not yet on the site. The list was 157 titles long. First I needed to learn how to use the HTML-to-PDF converter which had also just become operational. I was excited to learn how to prepare books from HTML using this shiny and much awaited tool. Tarryn, the fearless trainer, taught me how to scrub HTML, a process that at first sounded exotic and turn out to be a little less than. Before I arrived at Paperight I hardly knew what HTML was and I certainly didn’t know what CSS was, nevermind how they related to one another. But Arthur has such a great philosophy of training his staff on all aspects the company and I gained skills beyond what were necessary for my day to day job. I feel really lucky to have worked in such a sharing environment and to have had so much training.

I began scrubbing those books prescribed at the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University as we were carrying out targeting marketing campaigns at these institutions, and I found that I quite enjoyed it as long as I wasn’t scrubbing Tristram Shandy or The Tragedie of Mariam. And I was able to listen to podcasts while I worked so I listened to a lot of ThisAmericanLife. (I mean like a whole lot.)

It struck me that these students were Paperight’s target market, but this was the first time we had really spent any time with them, on their turf.

This task, interspersed with our #textbookrevolution outings to Stellenbosch University and UCT, has been my ongoing task to date. Our outings to the Universities were fantastic and challenging. We handed out specially designed beer coasters to students and asked them to sign our petitions for cheaper textbooks (see Marie-Louise’s blog post for more on this). It struck me that these students were Paperight’s target market, but this was the first time we had really spent any time with them, on their turf. It was tiring approaching groups of students and getting them excited enough about the idea to sign the petition, but it was incredibly rewarding when they ‘got it’ and were genuinely enthusiastic about it.

Lessons learned from Now What?

now-what_together-we-pass-paperight_cover_low-res_20130228One of our better-sounding early marketing ideas was to break into the Unisa market – and thus get Unisa’s attention – by creating a book that would appeal to students struggling with Unisa’s bureaucracy and merciless stinginess. In early 2013, we teamed up with Together We Pass, a Unisa-specific study-aid service, to produce the book.

I wasn’t directly involved with the commissioning process of content, etc., but I did design the book and headed the marketing for it. Although the experience of designing the book was something I really needed to further my skills, and appreciated it as such, the editing and layout phases were both quite frustrating. This was chiefly because the content I had to work with was changed at inopportune times. The result was a product that, although I thought was useful and could potentially sell very well, I didn’t completely feel great about. In the end it didn’t sell fantastically, for a number of reasons:

  1. Together We Pass gave away the book for free to all of their subscribers, in other words, the few thousand people most likely to buy the book. Even though we thought we might potentially get exposure from this move, it was not a beneficial decision for Paperight in the slightest, especially as we took the bulk of production costs. A lesson we learned could be, in other words: never try to sell something that someone else is giving away for free.
  2. The cover and the messaging for the book weren’t as strong as they could have been, probably because we were trying to be nice to Unisa, in the hope that they would more readily partner with us. It probably should have been more provocative – in retrospect we did a lot of things with kid gloves when we really should have tried to grab people’s attention by any means necessary.

All in all, Now What? was an interesting experiment and an amazing learning experience, but a very frustrating selling experience. The book ate up way too much of my time that I should have been spending on marketing Paperight books to university students.

The #textbookrevolution and tough times

February 2014 saw the launch of the #textbookrevolution. We donned our Paperight #textbookrevolution t-shirts and made our way to Stellenbosch University. Once there the team split up: Arthur and Dez stayed at Jetline Stellenbosch to assist in store, Oscar and Yazeed trekked around campus to put up posters, and Philippa, Nick, Marie and I spent our time handing out coasters and getting students to sign the #textbookrevolution petition. Students loved our More Money For Beer campaign slogan, and were very receptive to the idea of Paperight. Mostly though, they bemoaned the high costs of textbooks and the lack of availability of alternatives.

We had the same experience later in the month on UCT campus. Again, we handed out coasters, chatted to students and explained what drives up the price of books. While students were enthusiastic, we soon realised that there were two key gaps that we had not been able to fill. The first was a content gap. We knew that we’d have this, and we’d structured our campaign around it, but the result was that while we had a lot of queries, we were not able to leverage publishers to make this content available (the same problem we’d been experiencing for months).

Additionally, and perhaps more worryingly, we realised that service in copy shops was not what we had assumed it would be. While the majority of registered outlets were very enthusiastic about the Paperight service, and had topped up their accounts, there was often only one person in the outlet who knew how to use the site, despite multiple training sessions with other outlet employees. If this person was not around to field customer orders, or if the customer encountered an employee who did not know of, or who had forgotten about Paperight, the customer was being turned away. More and more frequently we were receiving calls from customers who were going to outlets only to be told that these did not offer the service.

At this point Arthur and I started actively looking into potential pivots. We considered merging Paperight with other companies working in the educational sector, and to this end, valuated Paperight’s assets.

We were struggling to maintain enthusiasm as a team for the #textbookrevolution, and working on publisher follow-ups, reformatting, and uploads seemed futile given an imminent pivot.

Things became very difficult here. We were struggling to maintain enthusiasm as a team for the #textbookrevolution, and working on publisher follow-ups, reformatting, and uploads seemed futile given an imminent pivot. Yet, at the same time, we hadn’t decided on a pivot, so we couldn’t realign our priorities. The result was that we started to flounder a bit. While we continued on, the morale in the office dropped.

Publisher registrations

  • Cambridge Scholars Publishing Limited (12/2/2014)
  • Methodist Church of South Africa (25/2/2014)

Preparing for the #textbookrevolution

We hit the ground running in January with preparations to support the launch of the #textbookrevolution in February. We reformatted all A4 one-up documents – I created the detailed list of documents for Philippa to work through, and assisted by adjusting crop marks of these for easy conversion. I also supported Philippa’s uploading and document processing efforts by sourcing pricing and metadata information. I finalised the DocRaptor compatible CSS, and bug fixes, and we went live with the DocRaptor adjustment.

Other activities included a call with Louise from Bookstorm, a meeting with Hetta from UNISA Press to finalise contracts, and finishing uploading of the backlogged documents.

The disappointing news for the month was from Harlequin: they declined a partnership with us, saying that they were unable to pursue this opportunity for the time being.

Publisher registrations

  • Pearson SA (8/1/2014)
  • TIE, LCC (15/1/2014)
  • Mkuki na Nyota Publishers (23/1/2014)
  • Neosmart (Pty) Ltd (26/1/2014)
  • Bookstorm (28/1/2014)

 

2012–2013 analytics analysis

Arthur was away for a bit, and so I took his place in a Smart Monkey Interview with Russel Southwood:

Part of our focus on university prescriptions meant ensuring that prescribed English and Classics setworks that were already available on Paperight were reformatted. I drew up a list and progress chart for the reformatting of these texts, and Philippa began the process of scrubbing the HTML for those titles. In the meantime, I continued to hack away at the CSS for the automated HTML-to-PDF conversion, to fix compatibility issues that had arisen when we switched over from Prince XML to DocRaptor. And, I continued testing the PDF-to-Paperight-PDF document conversion software on dev. Oscar continued to work on the university prescriptions list, completing the data and making sure that it was updated for 2014.

On our other content-generation fronts: Andi began an internship with us, working on the grade 11 and 12 question bank. Our conversations with Susanne Collins’ agent were going well, and our next step was to secure funding for the project.

I tried to set up a meeting with OUP to discuss reading tree books and expanding their catalogue, met with Hyreath from Juta, and sent her our contract and additional information. We also had further contact with Elsevier, WHO and Jacana about contracts and content, and set up a CoreSource channel to deal with RHS doc transfers.

Near the end of December, I did a comparison of analytics from 2012 to 2013. This included an analysis of traffic to paperight.com, taking into account both the total visits (including recurring users) and unique visits. As the current version of the Paperight site only went live in May 2012 (marked in the data by a *), all data for August 2011–April 2012 is for the earlier version of the site.

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Fig 1.1 Overview of total visits from 2011–2013.

In comparing data from 2012 and 2013 it is clear that:

  • There is an overall increase in volume of traffic from 2012 to 2013
  • There are two definite dips, and two peaks in site traffic each year
  • Dips occur in June/July, and December each year
  • In 2012, the peaks for visits occurred in February and March, and again in October and November.
  • In 2013, the peaks for visits occurred in May and October, with two smaller peaks also occurring in February and August.
2011 2012 2013
Jan NA 369 1979
Feb NA 1282 2499
Mar NA 1613 2141
Apr NA 1078 2812
May NA 1211* 3999
Jun NA 950 3041
Jul NA 1349 2467
Aug 12 1398 3054
Sep 185 1264 2494
Oct 334 2319 4363
Nov 215 2460 2779
Dec 203 727 672

Fig 1.2 Figures for total visits to www.paperight.com from 2011–2013.

2011 2012 2013
Jan NA 302 1454
Feb NA 1120 2071
Mar NA 1420 1663
Apr NA 871 2076
May NA 871* 3110
Jun NA 567 2289
Jul NA 875 1793
Aug 10 810 2455
Sep 166 964 1993
Oct 239 1765 3622
Nov 157 1857 2207
Dec 125 309 469

Fig 1.3 Overview of unique visits to www.paperight.com from 2011–2013.

In analysing the license sales for the period from May 2012 to December 2013, it was necessary to show the number of copies sold per completed transaction each month. Transactions marked in red are the result of inhouse testing, those in green are actual sales.

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Fig 2.1 Overview of actual vs. test license sales from 2011–2013.

In comparing data from 2012 and 2013 it is clear that:

  • There are peaks in May, July (Pelikan Park and Silverstream) and September (Kwamatua High and Tambalethu) of 2013, both as a result of sponsorship deals.
  • While in 2012 we had fairly high organic sales in August and October, we did not see these happening in 2013. The majority of these sales came from Silulo branches.
  • Graph also shows that actual sales in June and July 2012 were roughly the same. Spike was as a result of inhouse testing.

A comparison of license sales data to site traffic:

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Fig 2.2 Overview of site traffic vs. license sales from 2011–2013.

  • The most interesting thing to note here is that high traffic volumes do not result in high sales. In fact, both years, almost every peak in sales is in a month where traffic is lower.
2011 2012 2013
Jan NA NA 16
Feb NA NA 25
Mar NA NA 170
Apr NA NA 44
May NA 22 398
Jun NA 76 72
Jul NA 121 861
Aug NA 228 84
Sep NA 82 1410
Oct NA 186 44
Nov NA 173 25
Dec NA 20 10

Fig 2.3 Overview of license sales on www.paperight.com from 2012–2013.

For interest sake: here is a breakdown of sales per province.

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Fig 2.4 Overview of license sales per province from 2012–2013.

Publisher registrations

  • Niz Publications (2/12/2013)
  • Vij Books India Pvt Ltd (14/12/2012)

Footnote Summit and investment discussions

On the tail-end of our frustration at the long lead time in getting publishers signed up, Arthur was asked to speak at the Footnote Summit. He spoke at the summit about the tough truths we’d learned about selling to publishers. His talk was very well received, and while we were concerned that the points we covered might be taken badly, it seemed that they resonated with those championing the cause in their larger publishing companies (it even prompted a long-awaited registration or two).

One of the outcomes of the Frankfurt Book Fair in October was that I met two potential funders for Paperight. In November, Arthur and I had conversations with both of these leads. While, ultimately these discussions did not lead anywhere, it was incredibly useful to find out what potential investors are interested in, and what kinds of questions they are likely to ask.

I continued to work on our translation project applications, meeting with partners who may be able to offer advice on moving forward. We were turned down by JK Rowling’s agents, who were reluctant to move ahead with a new distribution model, but who invited us to reapply when we could work around those concerns (or relieve them). We facilitated the transfer of Future Managers’ titles, uploaded Xhosa Fundis titles, signed on with Worldreader to distribute the Paperight Young Writers’ Anthology on their platform, started planning an #authorsforaccess campaign with Marie (this later went onto the backburner), and tested document conversions using automated PDF-PDF.

Publisher Registrations

  • Passion (2/11/2013)
  • Lorisha Educational Publishing (4/11/2013)
  • Bunya Publishing (13/11/2013)
  • Wordsmack Publishing (14/11/2013)
  • Lorca Damon (15/11/2013)
  • Siber Ink Publishers (20/11/2013)

 

Frankfurt Book Fair and CONTEC Startup Showcase win

October saw us participating in the CONTEC Startup Showcase in Frankfurt. The showcase formed part of the CONTEC Conference which was attended by industry leaders in digital publishing, and focused on the connection between content and technology. Paperight was expected to offer a 3-minute pitch, against five other innovative start-ups in digital publishing. We were selected as the winner of the showcase by a panel of judges.

As was the case after our London Book Fair win, the discussions had after the award announcement, and in the tea breaks just before, were very productive, with a lot of excitement about our project and aims. In particular, the Brazilian publishers in attendance (Brazil was to be the market-focus for the book fair that year) were very enthusiastic about the possibilities for Paperight in the Brazilian and wider South American market.

My focus for the fair was on publishers who could provide content that was in line with our current marketing focus. Namely, early childhood development materials (for children) and research (for teachers/caregivers), core textbooks and study materials for grades 10, 11 and 12 learners, core reading material for first and second year university level students, and trade fiction for young adults.

I had many productive conversations, and furthered negotiations with several big publishers (including Elsevier, Harlequin, and Bloomsbury). While I was optimistic about the possibility for Bloomsbury signing on with us, and while they were very receptive in our meetings, they later decides to hold off until after their South African distributors, Jonathan Ball, had had a chance to pilot the system.

We continually found that it was imperative to follow up on marketing material like this, be it with outlets, or schools, as often things would fall through the cracks otherwise.

While I was away, Philippa held the fort, and continued the process of uploading documents in the backlog queue, and Marie completed content tagging. Following my return from the fair, I completed the usual feedback reports, and followed up on the posters we’d distributed to schools (to make sure these had been put up and the flyers handed-out). We continually found that it was imperative to follow up on marketing material like this, be it with outlets, or schools, as often things would fall through the cracks otherwise. Dez and I also completed the Gifted Citizen Award Application on Arthur’s behalf.

Given the difficulties in getting content timeously, specifically as a result of the long lead time when signing publishers, we revisited the discussions (recurring over the last year) of creating our own content. It was around this time that we had been talking to Pearson about making their backlist (some of which included important African literature titles) on Paperight, only to find that this would not be possible due to the fact that font-licensing issues meant that these would have to be re-typeset, and the cost of this was just not a viable option. In our in house discussions about increasing the pool of books published/available in African languages, we began to envision a translation project for popular international YA titles into isiZulu and isiXhosa. This lead to my applying for rights to translate Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games (a project that is still on going). Another of our projects for content creation revolved around matric exams, and the fact that the changes in curriculum meant that past exam papers would no longer be as relevant for students. We contacted Siyavula about a collaborative project to develop a bank of open CAPS-aligned maths questions for grades 11 and 12, but while supportive of the endeavour, their current commitments precluded any involvement on their part. Instead, we looked into hiring an intern to assist us in the creation of a question bank.

We’d increasingly been concerned that we were not close enough to reaching sustainability, and we’d ultimately need to shrink the team in order to extend the funding runway.

October was also the month in which we decided to plan for and prioritise a university marketing campaign as a “Blaze of Glory”, last ditch effort to see if we could gain enough traction in the university market to avoid having to make a serious pivot within the next six months. We’d increasingly been concerned that we were not close enough to reaching sustainability, and we’d ultimately need to shrink the team in order to extend the funding runway. As a team we started brainstorming the #textbookrevolution. Part of this planning lead to us focussing our attention on university prescriptions. I set up a database of prescriptions, and worked with Oscar to flesh this out.

Publisher Registrations

  • Short Story Day Africa (25/10/2013)
  • Jacana Media (30/10/2013)
  • A Poet’s Tree (30/10/2013)