Dear StoryMoja
Dear StoryMoja,
The sixth Hay Festival in Nairobi has just drawn to a close and it was bigger and definitely bigger than previous years. The staff at UP magazine have been following you for years now and we are great champions of your cause.
It has however come to our attention that a section of the local writers have raised complaints on how they were treated at the Festival. According to them, it is great that international writers are flown in and treated with all the respect they deserve. However, they point out, why not accord a fraction of that same courtesy to their Kenyan counterparts? The writers we spoke to were keen to underline that they are not asking for private jets or a fleet of limos packed with half naked girls. Just a little consideration for them in the planning of the event.
According to one participant that we talked to, ”StoryMoja is just becoming a business. Taking advantage of writers and everything they have to offer”
Some of Kenya’s heavyweight writers were approached to give master classes or grace various events at the festival. Their names and achievements were used to headline and hence to publicise the festival. They felt however that communication was limited and writers and artists facilitating the sessions, were often not given their timetables on time.
Another sore point was over the book tent where it would appear that books could have up to a 100% mark-up. The writers weren’t consulted on this, so some decided to direct those interested in their books to bookshops outside the festival instead.
A writer who chose to remain unidentified, confided with us,”I can’t tell anyone that my book is available here. It’s being sold for 1000bob more than what it goes for at the book shop!…”
On a different note, one that does not regard the writers, we would like to raise one further issue. We have been following your Start-A-Library project with interest and fully support you in your cause. After all, every child deserves a book even the ones who live on the streets or in our slums. Yet don’t these kids also deserve a chance to enjoy a literary event even if they can not afford it? When we called you to ask if we could bring four genuinely inspired and inspiring slum children to the Saturday event for free or half price, your no was quite categorical.
We enjoyed the 2014 StoryMoja Hay Festival immensely this year. There were great conversations, fantastic performances and very informative panels. We look forward to coming back again and again and to seeing you grow and develop as the richest and most diverse literary event in the region.
Yours,
Writer at the Corner of the Dome
Muthoni says:
Habari Writer at the Corner of the Dome,
Thank you for both the compliments and constructive criticism of the 2014 festival. Thank you too for attending the festival over the years - Up magazine has been and continues to be a valued partner and support. Really appreciate your mature tone and manner and think your feedback deserves a full response.
Storymoja is on a journey of continuous improvement so your feedback is valuable in pointing out key areas that we need to address. First let me emphasis that as a local writer (and Storymoja is founded by writers), we value our own more than the international. This may not be obvious to some for various reasons - the biggest and most honest being that we have to cater to our sponsors expectations/requirements about publicising the artists they help bring to the country and we just lack the finance to do exactly the same for local writers. Being foreigners, they do need more attention just to operate here. And then there is the huge question of time. The lack of sufficient finance, (and really most people have no idea just how incredibly expensive it is to pull off an international festival or what it could do for the country) means that we spend 10 months of the year or more on fundraising and barely two months on planning the actual festival. And we do this with an such a small number of staff that other festival organisers literally gape when we tell them.
But attention to local artists is something we are dying to change and want to involve local artists more in planning the festival to ensure their expectations are met. To that end, we will invite many of those who’ve participated to a stakeholder’s meeting next month to help chart the way forward. We dream of the day that local artiste, especially writers, will consider the Storymoja Festival the spring-board showcase for local and international success.
This year we will break even, maybe even make a small profit (for the first time ever!), but only because we accepted the reality that we simply had to keep a tighter lid on costs e.g. not give away more complimentary tickets than pre-planned.
We reserve 1000 complimentary tickets for children and students from poor backgrounds. We also make available tickets at half price through rupu, buymore and direct offers to universities and colleges. We go further - approach and secure Corporates to sponsor children in orphanages and you will note at the festival just how mixed the children attendees are in terms of social backgrounds. So apologies for not accommodating your request to provide complimentary tickets for the four children but please approach us earlier in the planning phase.
Last year, we tried selling the books ourselves, and although we loved the inclusiveness of allowing all local authors to sell/market their books at the festival at reasonable cost, we ended up making a loss on books sales, overall, especially as so many authors did not show up to reconcile as agreed ( we still have stock from 2013 authors that we cannot move!). And retailing books is not our area of expertise and sucks up more human resource than we have available.. So in 2014, we decided to go with a book retailer, Text Book Centre, who set their own terms as they have to factor in their costs and profit margins. Note that Storymoja did not make any margins/commissions from the sales of non-Storymoja books sold at the 2014 festival. But I hear you - ideally, festival books should be sold at a discount and if you have any ideas how we can do that, we would be more than happy to consider a different approach. Incidentally, two local writers have given us such good ideas this week about how we might use book-signing to increase book sales at the festival that we are going to implement at the 2015 festival.
That ‘Storymoja is just becoming a business’ - hmmm, I hope the writer did not mean to imply there is something wrong with being a ‘business.’ For us to be sustainable, we have to become profit-making and not ashamed to be so. But we are writers first so achieving a balance between profit-making and meeting our heartfelt objective of ‘getting a book in every hand’ is a key pillar in our long-term strategic plan. You could even say the more money we make the sooner we can achieve that vision.
Let it be said that we do not get everything right, but please never let it be said that we do not listen or try to do better. Please don’t tire of joining us in the struggle to develop our country’s appreciation of knowledge and ideas. And please come to the stakeholder’s meeting when we call…
Muthoni