Think Reading Culture Is Dead? This Kenyan Author Proves You Wrong

Reading culture has been viewed as a dying culture thanks to the advent of technology and social media. But one author, Kimari Kimari, is defying all odds in reviving humanity’s most important culture, both as a tool for knowledge acquisition, promoting cognitive development and cultural understanding.

Since mainstream reading has been relegated to small groups of book-lovers, Kimari sees this as an affront to the search for knowledge and deeper understanding of our lives and what makes it worth living.

The 47-year-old author of the book Slaves, Priests and Kings started his career as a speaker but during covid-19 period in 2020, he broke his ankle and was mostly bedridden and that is when the spark of writing kicked off. Once he stepped his feet into the industry, he realized that a lot needed to be done to make it better.

“I went for a surgery and I was bedridden.  I spent a lot of time alone which means I had no one to speak to and that is how I discovered my writing career,” Kimari says. 

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For Kimari, writing is a business like any other but the infrastructure for selling Kenyan books is in tatters. Coming from a marketing background, he undertook research on the local market for books and came to an astounding realization that there is a huge market for books but most of these books are foreign not locally written.

Lack of infrastructure for writers

“Before you write you have to know where your customers are. I used to visit a lot of these street vendors to the point they used to tell me you come and scan our books and never buy. But I realized they are selling a lot of books and I knew there is a market for books but what we are lacking is infrastructure that Kenyan authors can ride on,” he says.

He adds: “What street vendors sell is what customers are asking for and mostly are books from foreign authors because they are well known since the marketing infrastructure for authors in the West is well developed.”

Kimari says the market for books already exists but the current structure is not attuned to promote local authors. According to him, the authorship in Kenya remains a cottage industry which is so hard to scale. 

“All businesses start small. We are a cottage industry country. The challenge is that some of those businesses will not be profitable if they remain small. Unfortunately, authorship is like that. It has to have a model of scaling,” he observes.

Just like other businesses, he opines that the publishing sector needs author incubators to discover the next big authors and investments to market books. However, he acknowledges that this endeavour requires time to see it come to fruition.

“What we need now is to start building an incubator for the next big authors and once we discover them we need to put in money to scale them to become the biggest authors not only in Kenya but worldwide and it will take time,” he opines.

Author Collaboration

Additionally, he says that collaboration among authors would catalyse the growth of the publishing industry and market for local books in the country. He says many authors fail to understand that working together will unlock the market for all, contrary to the belief that it’s going to bring unhealthy competition.

“We are still stuck where we are thinking ‘my book is my business’ and I don’t want to work with you because I think you are eating my market. But we have two problems. We need to keep growing the market not just for books but for Kenyan books and that is how we are going to grow. I might not be able to sell a lot of books now but once there is a market for books, other authors who are still unknown will find the market and will grow very fast. We also have to build awareness for local authors so that retailers can restock books of local authors because with awareness there will be demand,” he says.

AI in publishing sector

Asked about the impact of artificial intelligence in the publishing industry, Kimari says AI plays a small role in writing because people are interested in the human voice in books and the authors which AI won’t be able to do yet.

“Authors have a writing voice and AI doesn’t have it. Human beings can pick that voice. But AI writing is dry and doesn’t sound human but we can use AI after writing to improve the language. A book is a representation of you as an author, it’s your brand and they are going to judge you,” he says.