Reading Culture: Nigerian Writer’s Intriguing Story on The New Yoker

 

The Secret of Nigerian Book Sales

By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

October 1, 2015

 

At almost every Nigerian literary event I have attended, the topic of the country’s lack of reading culture has come up. The falling standard of education, increasing culture of materialism, poverty, and online distractions are given as reasons for this alleged loss of interest. Abysmal sales at bookshops across the country are presented as evidence. For the past eleven years, Jemiyo Ariyo has worked as a salesperson at The Booksellers Limited, in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State. “Nigerians don’t take reading seriously,” she said, adding that she has observed a dramatic decrease in the sale of fiction.

“It takes anything from three to five years to sell off a print run of about two thousand to three thousand books,” Bankole Olayebi, the C.E.O. of the publisher Bookcraft, which counts the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka among its authors, told me. To give me an idea of the difficulty of reaching readers, he pointed out that, despite Nigeria’s ballooning population, he was able to sell a similar number of books in the same amount of time when he first entered the publishing business, back in 1988.

A number of public and private programs have been founded to address this growing concern. Leading books activist Koko Kalango launched her Get Nigeria Reading Again campaign in 2005 and founded the Port Harcourt Book Festival three years later, with the idea of getting “people back to the good old-fashioned habit of reading books to improve our society,” she told Nigeria’s Vanguard_. _In December, 2010, then President Goodluck Jonathan launched his Bring Back the Book campaign, which aimed to “develop a book reading culture in Nigeria, especially amongst the youths who have lost value for reading either for educational purposes or entertainment.” Plans included hosting readings and establishing reading groups at schools, as well as supporting local publishers by buying their books and distributing them to libraries.

But amid these efforts, one Nigerian bookseller, who has been in the business since 1999, says he cannot meet his customers’ demands. Without any formal advertisements or other marketing efforts, forty-two-year-old Wale Rasaki, the C.E.O. of Book Liquidator Ventures, has been selling thousands of secondhand books from a warehouse in Alausa, Lagos, for the past sixteen years.

“The most popular titles are books by John Grisham, Sidney Sheldon, Frederick Forsyth, Jackie Collins, Judith McNaught, Johanna Lindsey,” Rasaki told me. “People also like to buy motivational books by authors like Brian Tracy, Jack Welch, Napoleon Hill.”

Every three months, Rasaki travels to Atlanta, where he stays with family and drives as far as ten hours to buy books from secondhand suppliers, such as libraries selling off their old stock, Goodwill, and the Salvation Army. He prefers going in search of books himself so that he can find the titles customers have been requesting. He said that it can take months, or more, for an American blockbuster title to catch on in Nigeria.

“Right now, I am importing ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ ” Rasaki told me. “The same thing happened with Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code.’ ” Most of the books cost no more than fifty cents, and he buys them in bulk.

Once his search is complete, he loads the books into containers and ships them off to Nigeria, at a cost of about thirty-five hundred dollars per forty-foot container. Rasaki usually shares the container with another importer, and fills his twenty feet with about forty-five thousand books. In Nigeria, he resells the books for between one hundred and fifty naira (seventy-five cents) and five hundred naira (two dollars and fifty cents), based on the demand for various titles. Sometimes, he also ships containers to Kenya. “But their market is not as large as ours,” he said.

Rasaki said that he usually sells at least eighty per cent of each container within sixty days of his arrival in Lagos, with customers coming from cities near and far, such as Akure, Port Harcourt, Owerri, Ibadan, and Abuja. Bright Ewemie, who owns Bright Books, in Benin City, in Southern Nigeria, has been buying used books from Rasaki for more than a decade, and makes the five-hour trip to him every two weeks. “I buy about four hundred thousand naira [two thousand dollars] to five hundred thousand naira [twenty-five hundred dollars] worth of books” each time, Ewemie told me, adding that Rasaki alone cannot meet his demand and that he has five or six other suppliers in Lagos. “When I resell in Benin City, I make about one hundred naira profit on each book,” he said.

Broad Street, in the crowded Marina District, is the center of secondhand-book buying in Lagos, with scores of retailers displaying piles of books on the pavement and on wooden stands. Rasaki, who studied finance at Morehouse College, in Atlanta, and worked at NationsBank (now Bank of America) before returning to Nigeria, believes that secondhand books have become popular in Nigeria because of most Nigerians’ low purchasing power: about seventy per cent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. “People consider books a nonessential commodity,” Rasaki said. “They can’t afford the high prices” of new books.

As Kunle Tejuoso, who runs the Glendora chain of bookshops in Lagos and Abuja with his brother Toyin, told me, “Everything is tied to the economy.” Glendora imports all of its foreign titles from publishers and distributors abroad, so the price of foreign books depends on the exchange rate of the naira to the dollar. Given the constantly rising exchange rate—ten years ago, it was one hundred and thirty-two naira to the dollar, and today it is two hundred—new foreign fiction is increasingly out of reach for most consumers. This August, Grisham titles were selling for twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred naira, almost ten times the prices of secondhand dealers.

Since his family opened the bookshop, in 1975, Tejuoso has noticed what he described as a “change in taste” among its customers: a dwindling in sales of foreign fiction, with more requests for works by African authors—which, with each title starting at about eight hundred naira, are much cheaper than foreign books. “Our African books are supplied directly by local publishers,” Tejuoso explained.

Rasaki sees businesses like Book Liquidator as local readers’ choice for foreign titles, while those like Glendora are the readers’ go-to place for books by African authors. He does not imagine himself to be in competition with bookshops like Glendora. He believes that they are each meeting a different need.

“I don’t aim to capture one hundred per cent of the market,” he said. “In a country of over one hundred and seventy million people, six or seven per cent”—the number of readers he hopes to one day supply with books—“is more than enough for me.”

• Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani is the author of the novel “I Do Not Come to You by Chance.”

This story is published by the New Yoker