Since the cost of book printing contributes more to the retail price of books, one of the most important questions Nigerian publishers typically have to answer for themselves today is how to balance the cost of printing with the purchasing power of the reading public…
By Chimezie Chika
I
If one talked to (or read books about) founders of publishing companies around the world, it would become obvious that the reasons why they started their companies would linger somewhere between wanting to fill a gap and wanting to make money, with a few tweaks here and there in their narratives, which is the case with the Nigerian publisher, Gemspread Publishing.
It is likely that the reasons here will get starker as one looks at the genres within which each publisher operates. Publishers of commercial titles (which Gemspread at present part of) are going to discard any pretences around their intense pursuit of profit. Literary publishers, while still acknowledging the need for profit, are going to go to town with some profound-sounding raison d’etre about quality literature’s importance (That, though, is becoming more and more questionable as the Big Five continue to integrate into what might end up becoming a four-fingered monopoly.)
In Nigeria’s thriving publishing industry, such divisions are already obvious. On one hand, there are literary movers, of which the likes of Masobe, Narrative Landscape, Ouida, and Cassava Republic are part. On the other hand, there are newly greening publishers such as Gemspread and its likes (about whom not much has been written except, in some sense, my past attack on some of their sensationalism) who are focused exclusively—or so it seems—on releasing commercial titles.
The paradox of Nigerian publishing is that the prolificacy of the so-called commercial publishers elsewhere is hardly the case here, a condition whose origins cannot be put past the dearth of funding. As it turns out, Nigerian literary publishers are admittedly more prolific. (Masobe, to my knowledge, releases more fiction titles in any given year than any other publisher in this country).
While prolificacy is not a pin on quality in many cases, it can still affect it in cases where profit is placed above due publishing processes. Which is to say that the interplay of those motives can result in certain compromises on excellence, as is often the case with pop fiction titles everywhere.
Peters Israel, the young founder of Gemspread Publishing, which is based in Akure, Ondo state, has so far published books that lean heavily towards the commercial. He insists that his major objective is profit, which he also says does not translate to a disregard for rigorous editorial and printing processes, which he claims all his books go through.
Israel believes that the fixation with literary merit is unnecessarily academic and not reflective of the needs and desires of the Nigerian reading public. “What makes a book has gone beyond literary merit”, he says twice during our call. The sensibility of this statement comes from an understanding I have come to previously in my writings: there is a place for both the so-called commercial, the generic, and the literary in any given national literary ecosystem, for it is only proper to assume that books—depending on their type—mean different things to different people who approach them with different goals and motives according to their desires, wants, and, surely, intellectual capacities.
If Gemspread’s goal is to become the new face of pop fiction in Nigeria, then it is already harvesting that reputation. A few of their catchily titled books—which include light romances, YA fiction, and short story collections—have caught the attention of a section of the Nigerian bookstagram and booktok focused on “feel-good” reads and suchlike. The fairly popular hype on social media belies the young age of the company, and demonstrates an ability to market towards a target audience (young, mostly female, and online-savvy)—something some of this country’s bigger publishers can learn from.
Israel has been decidedly entrepreneurial for much of his life. He started organising quite early in his university days and initially established Gemspread after graduation as a consultancy that offered scholarly writing services. It was part of a series of ventures he started early on, alongside a writing community called Read to Impact. The Read to Impact community, which he founded in 2016, has now grown into a continent-wide initiative with branches in other African countries.
In 2022, when Israel founded Gemspread Publishing in Akure city, it was supposed to be the publishing (and commercial) arm of his writing community, able to feed from and off it; the resulting company has not embraced that yet, he says, because the publishing arm itself is still growing. “I knew nothing about publishing when I started,” he says, “and I had to consult widely, including with Kraft Publishers. Their CEO’s daughter worked with us for a while. I had to go out to get the knowledge”.
In a way, Israel is referring to his non-literary background in response to my follow-up question on whether he has always been into literature. During his first degree in mathematics at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, his energies were channelled towards student associations in school. After graduation, he tried to build an education startup focused on teaching mathematics, which failed soon after.
Then, he established Gempread Authors’ Services, the scholarly research consultancy, offering editing and research services to scholars and academic researchers. “We were making good money, until the Covid-19 pandemic came, and our clients stopped bringing work. Then I considered and started a publishing company, which is still a way to continue the previous venture, this time as a publishing house”.
After the formation of Gemspread Publishing, he went for a master’s degree in Publishing at the University of Exeter. “I learnt firsthand how publishing works. The step-by-step analysis. That was valuable because I want Gemspread to publish exactly the kind of books people want to read. I don’t think there’s a lot of that.”
Israel has a way of talking that recalls the character and language of self-help literature; when I asked if he had read a lot of self-help books, he answered in the affirmative. They had been his type of reading long before his literary ventures and Gemspread. For some reason, he does not yield completely to questioning as much as I would prefer; he gives very little away about his literary or intellectual disposition, even if he may not be aware of this, clipping whatever he says to a narrative of growth in his company. No ruminations or philosophical expansiveness. Most of his answers are kept straightforward, almost curt, even—or perhaps there are no such ideas to expound upon except the matter-of-fact responses he offers.
Inexperience was one of the things he acknowledged in the first year of Gemspread Publishing’s existence. As he acquired more experience, he set out a number of practices which, in my reckoning, shift away from the conventional practice among (at least) Nigerian traditional publishers. For one, according to Israel’s own revelations, his authors are more involved in the publishing process. They are given the liberty, if they so choose, to make certain decisions about their own books, such as their book covers.
Marketability features a great deal in Israel’s language. Titles have to be carefully chosen to touch something targeted contemporary readers are interested in, with the belief that a book has to be written to the interests of people, not the opposite. He believes that for a book to be marketed well, the author must also be marketable. In signing authors, Gemspread Publishing is, for this reason, primarily interested in names, known or unknown, who are marketable (and it is not clear what is required to identify this quality).
This marketing philosophy has allowed them, like many Nigerian publishers, to create imprints tailored to authors and readers, and aimed at balancing profit and literary quality. Does this mean “literary quality” doesn’t sell? “It depends”, Israel replies, “but it definitely takes time to build the right brand that makes it possible”. Harmattan, their flagship imprint, is the traditional publishing arm of the company, while its vanity publishing imprint is Unbound.
Ma Keke, a literary magazine run by Gemspread, can be added to the mix. There is nothing remotely out of the ordinary about Gemspread Publishing’s approach to publishing. In a capitalist world, where demand and profit remain the golden sceptre, it is even commendable that their motives are kept simple and uncomplicated.
II
The first three books published under the Harmattan imprint are A Hot Lagos Afternoon by Promise Onyekachukwu (2023), Ka Chi Foo Nu by Harachi Nnamchi (2023), and Of Musical Affairs (2023) by Kenyan author, Mwangi Nyambura—all short story collections. For first impressions, the printing quality of these books is in serious bad taste.
The cover designs are rudimentary at best. This is especially true of A Hot Lagos Afternoon. The sizing of these books and the quality of paper used create an unpleasant thinness in the spine, which has more to do with the printer the publisher uses (Israel tells me the company prints in Nigeria, between Akure and Ibadan, which are cheaper options).
Since the cost of book printing contributes more to the retail price of books, one of the most important questions Nigerian publishers typically have to answer for themselves today is how to balance the cost of printing with the purchasing power of the reading public without diminishing the print quality of their books.
Many of the country’s larger publishers come close to achieving that when the variables—page count, genre, and type of book—are right. One of the few times in recent memory when decent-enough print quality matched the purchasing power of Nigeria’s immense poor class was with some of Cassava Republic’s erstwhile trade paperbacks, particularly the JAMB-recommended In Dependence by Sarah Ladipo Manyika in the 2010s.
Whether anything like that can be achieved today, with a much higher inflation in the economy, is anybody’s guess. Nigeria’s bigger publishers mostly print in Asia (often India and Indonesia), leaving their poorer counterparts to scrounge in the morass that is the world of printing in this country. Perhaps this is also why other aspects of printing evident in these Gemspread books are, unfortunately, to put it mildly, amateurish.
The typesetting of each of these books can even be said to be unprofessional. There is no Table of Contents in each of the books, and for short story collections, this is telling. There are paragraphings and indentations, and that structuring usually begins from the writer’s table. What stands for paragraphs are spaces, which can sometimes be quite wide indeed. Israel, when I point out these shortcomings, seems quite open to making the necessary corrections.
While my interests here are not exactly the contents of these books, even those did not transcend the quality of the printing bestowed on them. No matter, however, since it was aimed at a specific audience, in the same way that Onitsha Market Literature of the 20th century was aimed at a certain class of readers in the old Eastern and Southern region.
Even if the problem with these books may not be a lack of talent and patience with material, it is surely the absence of editorial oversight. There is no reason why we should have books, regardless of whether they are popular fiction or not, whose prose is nothing but a malady. To quote an obvious one from A Hot Lagos Afternoon:
Four years ago, a man messaged her, agreeing to disagree about her Facebook post, a post she couldn’t even remember now; she hardly indulged strangers or even gave a minute to anyone who voiced a contrary or rude opinion, but he was polite and at the end of their conversation she had had one of the most intelligent conversations ever.
This is the typical hot-take prose, as I have called this kind elsewhere. In this book, there are issues with everything from plot to character to dialogue to grammar and punctuation. The better of the three books is Nyambura’s Of Musical Affairs and Nnamchi’s Ka Chi Foo Nu. Even with these, there are still a number of repetitive issues. The discreet conclusion is that Gemspread Publishing has a lot of work before it, if it wants to position itself as a respectable institution. It must find the right balance between its own goals, audience, and excellence.
A straight line can be traced between Gemspread Publishing’s issues and those of many of this country’s smaller publishers. These errors, which are a combination of any number of things from lack of resources to incompetence, fail to give them any leverage in the publishing market. Although for those like Gemspread, which have already grown a certain kind of pop fiction readership, the choice is either to remain in that sphere and corral its benefits fully, or to rise somewhat above the limits of that reputation, if indeed it is any limit at all in their primary pursuit.
Chimezie Chika is a staff writer at Afrocritik. His short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, The Iowa Review, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Channel Magazine. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1