Blogger Ahmed Al Mueini published a news article stating that the Cultural Club announced a national program to support the publication of new books in the country in hope of publishing a 100 new books a year. The program will be funded by the Cultural Club and other private and public bodies. It will be headed by a committee made up of representatives from the Cultural Club, SQU, Scientific Research Council, the Authors Association, and others.

The initiative is a result of one of the recommendations made during the period national discussion meeting of the Cultural Club. Other recommendations include:

• Requesting the Ministry of Information to update the Publication Law, which is according to the news report, a barrier for the proliferation of book publication in the country.
• Requesting the authorities to establish and support  more public libraries.
• Requesting the authorities to support publications houses by assigning more publication works to them (How else was the government publishing its books? Duh.)
• Preparing a nation report on “book problems”.  The preparation of this report will be carried over three phases is aimed to conclude with solutions for short and long term goals.

The meeting concluded that Omani authors are faced with many obstacles such as the lack of financing, the strictness of the old Publications Law, the lack of decent publication houses, and distributions and marketing difficulties.

A more “interesting obstacle” stated by the Club is the lack of “appreciation, criticism and reward” for authors in Oman. 

The press release made mentions in what is almost a footnote, the ‘emergence’ of a problem in ‘readership’  - as reading is not a daily activity for people in the Arab world and has become sort of an “activity for the affluent”.

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I guess it is nice that Omani authors will have some support to write and publish their books. Not sure if this will have any impact on readership though, publishing books (which have no contraversial content) is a relatively easy process in Oman, it is relatively very cheap to independently publish small books and novels, but distributing them is very difficult.

Making money from your book is even much much more harder, especially due to the low price at which Arabic books sell.You can buy an Arabic novel for something as low as 700 baisa (About $2) with expensive novels going for Ro1.5 (Less than $4). 

Due to the very small demand for books, the dominating publishers in the local market are stationers who sell books as a secondary product to their “papers and pens”. A book author who manages to convince this sort of  ”publisher” to publish his work will provide the script and the publisher takes care of printing and distributing on a share of profit basis – which usually goes on at 50-50. Usually 500 prints are made in each release, this number could go up to a 1000 copies in certain circumstances. The most oft hese copies are sold at the annual book exhibition.

This means if an author manages to sell every single copy (1000) of his book that costs RO 1.5, he would make: RO 750. This number is subject to reduction relating to printing costs, design costs, registrations costs, and just everything else that has to be done through the process, from writing and typing, to driving up and down to get your book out.

You can add to this the lack of respect for copyright by people, including school teachers and university lecturers, which could mean that your book will be copied like hell without you being able to do anything about it. 

The business of writing in Arabic for a living is just not a viable business in Oman.