We’ll make publishing poetry profitable – Richard Ali
Richard Ali is a busy literary enthusiast and entrepreneur, as well as being a writer. The author of is a cofounder of Parresia Publishers Ltd and Jalada Collective. He has ventured again into a new collective, dedicated to publishing excellent poetry. In
Could you tell us about this new initiative of yours?
Konya Shamrumi is a new publishing house for works by African poets. Its pedigree is a bit complex and I will get to that in a moment. At the centre of Konya Shamsrumi is the KSR Collective and the idea that informs this is that the collective is the best and the most suitable way of governing the arts in Africa.
At present, the KSR Collective comprises five members; me, Umar Abubakar Sidi, Kechi Nomu, Funmi Gaji and Rasaq Malik Gbolahan. Each year, we will add new members to the collective and we hope to have our first non-Nigerian members from 2018. Our purpose is to publish a mix of poetry collections and chapbooks by the most exciting poets on this continent, one. Two, to make it easily available in print at a fair price anywhere in this continent. Lastly, to do everything to highlight the work and boost the profiles of members of the KSR Collective.
I see you have a team of exciting poets on this project. How did the team up come about?
It is a bit arbitrary, I admit. The idea of Konya Shamsrumi was mine and my cousin, Umar Abubakar Sidi’s. We came up with the unusual name and the concept of it. Sidi was working on his second collection of poems, titled The Poet of Sand, and I was, finally, putting together my first collection, The Anguish and Vigilance of Things.
So, we decided to pool our efforts together and see how far we could stretch the half a million naira we had. So, a brainwave occurred-why do we not have chapbooks in Nigeria? A chapbook is a sampler of a poet’s work, such as those small 10 ml perfume samples. It gives the market an opportunity to engage and enjoy a poet’s work before a full collection comes out. That was how Konya Shamsrumi was born.
The first members of the Collective came from people in our experience who were fine poets. I had published Funmi Gaji’s wonderful poems in the ANA Review, which I edited for three years, and I was smitten by her talent as a poet. So, we asked her on board and she put together the chapbook Here, I Bring You Gnarled Roses for Konya Shamsrumi. Kechi Nomu was known to both of us and we also asked her on board.
She is one of the most prescient poets now writing in this country and has been for a while now. She accepted and put together the chapbook, A Memorial For My Body In Apocalypse. Rasaq is also a very good poet and I’d read his stuff online, Sidi was very impressed with his writing, how he delved into domestic life and his work in the Yoruba language-Rasaq’s work is a powerful intersection of the communal and the personal. So, here we all are, the KSR Collective.
Considering that traditional publishers shun poetry as not being commercially viable, what makes you think you can turn this around?
All publishing, especially in Nigeria, is a gamble and at some level, Konya Shamsrumi also is a gamble. But if you do not take a considered bet on what you believe strongly should win, you do not count at all. We have created the website and the blog is at the centre of our strategy. The Konya Shamsrumi blog is meant to be the curator of strictly original poetry content, from interviews to essays to guest poems and more. We think that if we succeed in making this space known for great poetry, Nigerian and African poets, which number in millions, would flock there.
This then adds to the value recognition of the publishing house and translates, we hope, in sales. Secondly, each of the members of the KSR Collective has their own individual following and Konya Shamsrumi intends to leverage this for the pre-order and sales of our box set. In this, all five poet’s work will be offered at a discount. We intend to sell 2000 box sets in our first year. The major push towards this will begin, I expect, as soon as we release the cover designs of the collections and chapbooks. Of course, people will also have the option of buying single collection or chapbook.
From our calculations, if we are able to sell 2, 000 sets of our box set, that’s 10,000 individual poetry books, we will not only be able to pay respectable royalties to the current members of the KSR Collective but be able to replicate the same machinery for the next set while keeping these five in print. Can we do this? This is the gamble.
I am willing to lose my shirt for this, as are all the five members of the Collective. Kechi Nomu is our Editor and she’s been doing a wonderful job running Konya Shamsrumi and the other members are pulling their weight as well. So, I think we can create a new traditional poetry press which will make sales and pay royalties. I think, if we get it right, we will have disproved the wisdom that “poetry doesn’t sell”. Now who would not just jump at the opportunity to do that?
What model is this initiative going to run on?
Oh yes. I had said the model for City of Memories Konya Shamsrumi, Parrésia’s facilities in production design and execution.
Ours is an unusual model but this has been born from my experience working in arts administration in the last thirteen years as well as my writing. As an NGO project, we will pay royalties to the poets, pay bills related to production and administration, but the proceeds of our sales are ploughed into the purpose of the initiative.
How do you propose to raise funds for this initiative?
The funds we have raised are from private sources, a gift of N500,000 was put on the table by one of us and it was this that gave us the guts to take a gamble. I will be putting a further N200,000 in the coming months, I expect some money will come in from Parrésia Publishers Limited too. The work Kechi is doing as Editor is, frankly for now, unremunerated, though I am certain this will change.
But the model has also incorporated pre-orders, of which we have received a few already. And, as a nongovernmental organization, we can and will apply for grants from donors and philanthropists as may become available. Between leveraging all this, and keeping our costs anorexic, we expect to be able to fund and execute Konya Shamsrumi.
You have been part of initiatives like Jalada and Parrésia Publishers before. How different is this from the others and how sustainable is this?