Publiseer Announces Expansion to South Africa, the Country of Its Name
Publiseer recently took to its Facebook page to announce its third expansion outside its home country, Nigeria.
This time, the digital publisher expands to South Africa, the country from which the word ‘Publiseer’ originates. Prior to the expansion, the digital publishing platform had expanded to other African countries, Ghana, and Kenya — the former being Publiseer’s international debut.
According to the founders Chidi and Chika Nwaogu, “an expansion into South Africa has always been in the pipeline”, considering that over a year ago, the founding duo gave Publiseer a name adopted from Afrikaans (the official language of South Africa, spoken by about 6 million people as their first language) which translates to ‘publish‘ in English. A third party wouldn’t need to tell them that expansion into South Africa was imminent.
“When naming the platform, we brainstormed and played around with a couple of words. Many words from different languages, but the name Publiseer really stood out. It stood out in many ways. One, it was just a letter different from the word Publisher and it also means publish in Afrikaans, a language spoken in South Africa and Namibia. Finally expanding into the South African market is a dream come true. Hopefully, we get to make several milestones here as we’ve done in Nigeria.” Chidi Nwaogu, Co-founder/CEO of Publiseer “
The book publishing and music industry in Africa is very large.
In Nigeria alone, the music industry is worth $47 million (2015), which is expected to reach $86 million in 2020. Kenya’s music revenue is expected to grow from $19 million (2016) to $29 million in 2020.
South Africa’s music revenue is projected to be $178 million in 2020, while its digital music streaming revenue is forecast to rise from $5.3 million in 2015 to $31.5 million in 2020, and the turnover from locally published e-books in South Africa was $209,300 in 2015. We know that South Africa has a huge potential for digital publishing and that’s why we’re here,” Chidi buttresses.
Launched on August 4, 2017, Publiseer publishes, protects and monetises the creative works of writers and musicians from low-income communities in Africa, at no charge.
Since inception, the founders claim Publiseer has published 133 books and 518 tracks by 121 authors and 240 musicians respectively, thereby generating over $3,000 in monthly revenue. Publiseer has received several awards and recognitions during the past year, which include being nominated for the 4th AppsAfrica Innovations Awards, being the first African publisher to be inducted into the International Publishing Distribution Association (IPDA).
The digital publisher came into the limelight when it emerged a finalist at the 2018 Harvard Business School New Venture Competition and got accepted into the Venture Incubation Programme by the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town — all of which contributed to Publiseer’s limelight.
With this new expansion, Publiseer’s authors and musical artists from South Africa will get customer support directly via +27 64 396 8857 and probably ditch emailing and chat messaging which they used before now.
