‘Unique perspectives on South Africa’: imagining South Africa through the Homebru book marketing campaign, 2002–2012

Abstract

Publishers’ and booksellers’ marketing campaigns are aimed at ‘target audiences’ – groups of potential book buyers who can be demographically and geographically segmented. This segmentation is not always overt, but in the case of a ‘buy local’ campaign, it becomes so. One example is the ‘Homebru’ promotion run annually by South Africa's biggest trade bookseller, Exclusive Books. The campaign aims to promote South African publishing, and as a result has inevitably been seen as promoting token local works for commercial purposes. Marketers for Exclusive Books argue that Homebru holds a mirror up to the local publishing scene, but this discourse of reflection and uniqueness conceals the careful construction of a certain reality. The 2012 campaign, titled ‘Unique perspectives on South Africa’, had a deliberate emphasis on the environment and landscape of the country. The marketing poster featured a photograph of a South African township, but its realism masks the fact that this is certainly not the milieu of the average local book buyer. This article examines the changing imagining of South African identity and space, as constructed over the past ten years in the Homebru campaign. The marketing materials and their messages – both textual and visual – are analysed for insights into their discursive framing of the spatial reality of South Africa and, indeed, South Africans. The article thus examines how the consumption and reception of post-apartheid South African books are mediated by paratextual elements.