Local is Lekker: Kids & YA Books

We are a proudly South African publishing house, which means a large focus of our business is in supporting local literacy. This means publishing local writers and illustrators, but it also means publishing stories that we think will help grow our local literacy in a sustainable way. We're approaching this idea differently to others.

Supporting Local Authors

Of course, the first step in being patriotic is supporting our local authors. Giving our home-grown writers and illustrators a platform to launch their author careers. That's why South African authors do take preference in our submissions, but above all, we publish stories that we believe support our country's future literacy sustainability. What does that mean? 

Supporting Local Youth Literacy

While publishing local authors is important, we believe the bigger goal is to publish stories that grow our nation's literacy and international reach. That means we want to publish stories that will encourage the next generation to actually enjoy imagining, reading and writing, and these local stories must easily travel overseas... giving our local flavour an international readership. Our local stories must compete against international titles, and so let's compete well. That's sustainability in our minds. 

Supporting Local Suppliers

The last piece of the puzzle is, of course, the suppliers we choose. Again and again, we're egged on to choose international suppliers who are supposedly "cheaper and faster". But we choose to stick with our local printers and binders, who are plenty affordable and swift enough for us. There's not much more to it, other than this thought "How can we expect our readership to buy local books, if we don't choose local first?" We choose to lead the way. 

You can also download free kids' books from Book Dash here. 

The Imagnary Collective (t/a Imagnary House) is a proudly Level 4 B-BBEE contributor (9118603880).