Alcance Editores
Rui Rocha, Executive Director of Alcance Editores, in his own words
“Alcance Editores is a 100% Mozambican publishing house, with around 100 employees. A company for the creation, marketing and distribution of school textbooks and literature in general. Founded in 2007, the company currently has partnerships with, and represents, other publishers from all over the world, and a portfolio of approximately 2,000 clients, which includes more than 33% of the 100 largest companies in Mozambique. Our mission is, at every moment, to provide a personalised and faithful service according to our clients' needs, and to be efficient and competitive. Our vision is to be and remain a reference in our field of activity, to keep up with trends and to pursue continuous improvement and constant innovation.
These 15 years have been years of hard work. Years in which we had sustainable, dynamic growth, always with the aim of improving the service provided. They were years of learning, of exchanging experiences in Mozambique and abroad, and, above all, of recognition of our work nationwide. Today we reach every part of the country and people know Alcance Editores and its work. We have many authors and many published books, we have expanded into the international market and developed specific content across the various editorial themes, our main focus being school books and Mozambican literature. Over the last 4 years, we have begun to give prominence to content and to the book. We started in 2017 with the production of 52 new books, and we have been growing every year. In 2021, we will end the year with 96 new books published and produced. The coming years will bring many challenges, above all to maintain the company's good name, develop new school content, particularly in secondary education, an area in which we have little momentum, and embrace new projects in the technical and vocational area.
Mozambican literature has been growing strongly, with a much broader perspective of writing, criticism and literary analysis. Proof of this is the “new” writers who have developed by analysing and drawing on the experiences of the “more experienced”. There is a noticeable interest in writing, in publishing, in showing ideas. That is the first step towards knowing how to behave in this world of the art of writing, which is delicate and not always well looked after. Mozambique is a country of great cultural diversity. The country's literature is quite strong, with heavyweight names in the most varied fields. This is good, because they are examples that inspire the improvement of our literature. One notices the concern of the Mozambican Writers' Association, of the various foundations, of the literature groups and of the writers themselves in the provinces to develop this area and show the importance of reading and writing. And naturally this ends up being synonymous with improvement in our literature.
The focus is not on the young; the focus is general, we want to promote Mozambican literature, that is the point. Our literature needs to be promoted, cherished, protected and encouraged, because only then will we have more quality, more work, more interest, and more of a habit of reading and writing. Only then will we have more and better education and culture.
Calane da Silva was one of our first authors. He believed in Alcance Editores and in the objectives we had. He was a person who followed our journey, put forward ideas and suggestions, had a very close relationship with the publishing house and showed this publicly. He was a member of the jury of the Alcance Editores Literary Competition from the beginning, and was an integral part of the criticism and support given to the authors who went on to win the prize. Today this competition is called the Calane da Silva Literary Competition, as we consider it a fitting tribute to one of the icons of our literature. When we approached the family to put the idea to them, it was warmly received. It is a name that naturally adds value to the prize, but it also shows all new writers the literary side, as an example they should follow.
Social responsibility is an active part of our project and of our growth as a publisher. Every year we support schools and institutions with books, talks and meetings with pupils, teachers and parents or guardians, in order to encourage reading and writing, bringing together education and culture, entrepreneurship and human development. In 2021, we visited more than 100 schools nationwide, with responsibility and social investment campaigns.
Reading improves students' learning, as it stimulates the proper functioning of memory, develops interpretive ability, helps one to reason clearly, dynamically and actively, and gives the reader broad and diverse knowledge of the most varied subjects. The book is one of the greatest inventions available to mankind. Through it, knowledge and varied cultures are transmitted. Our country has still embraced the book and its writers only on a small scale, and this needs to be worked on. There is a prospect of developing a National Reading Plan, encompassing books by Mozambican authors, from various national fields, and making it an integral part of the curricula, updating the books in line with the subjects and the new curricula that are being worked on. Alcance Editores has had several conversations to this end and has expressed its interest in being an active part of this process. We hope this project moves forward and that, together with the publishers, the Ministries of Education and Human Development and of Culture, and other bodies, we can definitively move forward with this plan.
The book market improved between 2016 and 2019, with several bookshops appearing nationwide, with the search and demand for books to be part of bookshop collections, with interesting dynamics and events with authors in the spaces, and this naturally caused this line of business to expand. From 2020, we have once again felt that this market is declining. Few bookshops exist today nationwide, most of them buying few books and having weak cultural activity. The market shows that people still do not go to bookshops very much, and, naturally, bookshops' investment ends up being smaller and more limited. I believe they will show growth again, and so we hope, for the good of literature.
The objectives of Alcance Editores for the coming years are:
To pass on knowledge, because books transmit knowledge and/or know-how. Human knowledge owes much to books, which allowed each generation to show the following generations what it had learned, its tests, its research and its successful results. When we read good books, we are interacting with knowledge in the most diverse fields.
To promote education and culture, because books help to transmit cultural values and to develop the ability to debate and to analyse the various lifestyles, art forms, and ways of thinking and of relating in society. Reading widens our horizons.
To contribute to the development of critical analytical ability, because books help us develop our capacity to read and interpret in the most varied ways and effectively, with an impartial but critical stance. When we criticise something that we think is good or bad, we need to do so with discernment and specifically, and to demonstrate by argument. For that, reading is fundamental.
To foster a taste for reading and writing, because books are a good foundation for Knowing How to Behave, Knowing How to Be and Knowing How to Do. The habit of reading helps to develop our arguments, our words, our use of language, among many other important skills in a society.
These are the main objectives with which Alcance Editores, in its work year after year, thinks and produces, so that there will be more books, more readers, more education and culture.
