Author: Nick Mulgrew

Happy reflections on our PYWA13 launch at Open Book

PYWA13 launch at Open Book!

On 7 September, we launched our Paperight Young Writers’ Anthology 2013 at a beautiful event during the Open Book Festival in Cape Town. Our event, titled “Young Writers, Big Futures”, featured a panel discussion that reflected on the importance of young writing in South Africa, as well as the process and results of creating a multilingual anthology. We also invited some of our young writers to give readings of their published work!

Paperight CEO Arthur Attwell hosted the discussion between essays judge Hedley Twidle, poetry judge Sarah Rowan, acclaimed author and foreword author Niq Mhlongo, and the anthology’s editor, Oscar Masinyana. The atmosphere was contagious with the happy murmuring of the contributors, their families, friends and teachers. Members of the public who arrived to hear what the youth of today is getting up to left the Fugard Theatre with a far more positive outlook. The youth are speaking up, and what they are saying is valuable.

To see our beautiful photos from the evening, click here, and click here for another perspective on the evening from SLiPnet’s Naydeen Fisher.

And – if you’re a Paperight outlet – click here you’ll find a poster to put up in your store advertising the anthology to your young customers!

Here are videos from the heart-warming event.

 

And our August sales winner is…

Hennie van der Merwe from Minuteman Press Vanderbijlpark!

Congratulations to Hennie for being the most successful Paperight bookseller for the month of August! A fairly new addition to the Paperight family, Hennie’s win proves just how easy it is to be part of the list of champions and win a R1000 cash prize!

Want to win R1000 too? Good news: we still have 4 months of cash prizes to give out to the best-performing Paperight salespeople. To qualify for this competition, you need to make sure all of your staff are signed up as individual Paperight users on your outlet account (details here). You also need to remember a few really simple criteria:

  • Free documents don’t count towards your sales (e.g. Quirk Emarketing and College Campus guides).
  • You must include your customer’s first and last names on every purchase you make.
  • The competition is only for South African shops.

Here are all the competition details in full. The race for September’s winner is already on!

Cambridge University Press books now available at Paperight outlets!

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Big news: new study guides and African literature from Cambridge University Press are now available at any Paperight outlet.

Look out for the amazing Study & Master study guides, as well as their Afrikaans equivalents Ken & Verstaan, for Grades 8, 9, and 12. Also great are are CUP’s PASS and SLAAG study guides for matrics. Perfect for our outlets to market for matric exam season – and now more accessible to South African learners than ever before.

We also have new Cambridge Eleven African Language fiction titles, meaning that all of South Africa’s official languages are represented in our ever-growing catalogue of local fiction! No matter which language you speak, you can find something great to read at your local Paperight outlet.

To check out all of CUP’s 51 awesome books on Paperight, click here.

Introducing the Paperight Tillpoint Checklist!

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We’ve tried to make the Paperight website as easy to use as possible for our outlets. But sometimes in the heat of sales, you might forget something important: How do I find a book? How do I calculate costs? How do I customise the book for the customer?

But no fear anymore! We’ve made a handy tillpoint checklist that Paperight outlets can print up and stick at their point-of-sales terminals to help guide you through the sales process. It’s a step-by-step tool to help your staff from first contact with the customer to giving them a brand-new Paperight book, with minimal fuss and confusion. And, if you still hit a snag, there are our contact details right there, so don’t panic.

You can find our awesome tillpoint checklist here.

Join us at the Open Book Festival!

open-book_logo_20130724The excitement is building in the run up to the Open Book Festival, one of the premiere events on the South African literary calendar! Set in Cape Town, the event brings local and international writers together to talk about things that matter – and we’re going too!

On Saturday the 7th of September 2013, we’re hosting a panel discussion titled “Young Writers, Big Futures” to explore the successes of the Paperight Young Writers’ Anthology 2013 and the challenges of developing writers in South Africa. Hosted by our CEO Arthur Attwell and featuring an appearance from esteemed author (and our foreword contributor) Niq Mhlongo, this is a great opportunity to come together as a big Paperight family and celebrate our mission of bringing every book within walking distance of every home.

So, we’d love you to join us. The event will be held at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town on 7 September and tickets are going for R30 per person. Come around, say hi, meet some of our great young writers, and see for yourselves what we’re up to. For more information about the event and to purchase tickets, click here.

And our July sales winner is…

Unice Davies, from Revprint Claremont in Cape Town!

Congratulations to Unice for winning the Paperight sales prize for being the most successful Paperight bookseller for the month of July! How did Unice do this? It’s very simple. She sold Paperight titles and stuck to the rules of our monthly competition. Enjoy the R1000, Unice!

(It also helps if you have posters and flyers advertising your outlet’s Paperight services in your shop and at places like schools and places of worship in your area. We can make those for you – so get in touch by clicking here!)

Want to win R1000 as well? We’re awarding cash prizes for the best Paperight salespeople for the next three months. For individual staff members to qualify, you need to make sure they are all signed up as individual Paperight users on your outlet account (details here). And, in case you forgot, you also just need to remember a few really simple criteria:

  • Free documents don’t count towards your sales (e.g. Quirk Emarketing and College Campus guides)
  • You must include your customer’s first and last names on every purchase you make
  • The competition is only for South African shops

Here are all the competition details in full. The race for August’s winner has already begun – good luck!

Brace yourselves: matric exams are coming!

Paperight matric packs: accessible learning at last!

Paperight Matric Exams coverOut of the over-1 700 brilliant books we have on Paperight, the ones that sell the most are our packs of past matric exam papers. We think it’s because they are probably the most easy and accessible way for matric learners to get their hands on these valuable learning resources. (Don’t believe us? Click here to find our how it took us six months to source all the exams ourselves!)

Paperight’s matric packs are cost-effective for both learners and copy shops. All subjects come in multi-year and single-year versions, with each containing all papers, answers and addenda for a subject in a given year or years. They are also relatively high-volume documents, helping outlets’ machines keep printing. Everyone wins.

(They’re also awesome to sponsor and give to needy schools.)

Paperight past matric exam packs are available for all languages and subjects from 2008 to 2012. Click here to see all Paperight multi-year exam packs and here to see all Paperight single-year exam packs.

Oxford University Press and Mindset Learn study guides: taking it to the next level

If matrics need some extra help with their exam preparation, we also have the best study guides around from Oxford University Press and Mindset Learn.

OUP Exam Success coverOUP’s Exam Success series of high school study-guides emphasise a holistic approach to studying, offering mock exam questions, practical studying suggestions and timetables to learners, helping them to maximise the amount of knowledge and insight they gain from the time they spend in front of their books. Exam Success guides are available in 15 subjects in English and Afrikaans, as well as for a selection of languages and English literature set works. Click here to find them.

 

Mindset Learn’s Revision X-Sheets and Comprehensive Study Notes offer super cost-effective supplementary learning, available in ten subjects in English. Click here to find them.

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We’re helping more matrics get prepared for the most important exams of their lives, and outlets can get in on the action. Get in touch with us if you want us to make you designs for flyers and posters to advertise them in and outside your shop!

Paperight Young Writers’ Anthology 2013 Winner no. 2: Triston Liebenberg

This past week we visited Bergvliet High School to meet our Paperight Young Writer’s Anthology 2013 essay winner, Triston Liebenberg!

Triston, who is 16, came first in the essay category for her piece titled “Reflections”, beating hundreds of submissions from all over South Africa. Her piece follows the ebb and flow of human life through a variety of developmental stages, underpinned by her insights about aspects in life that never really change. As Triston writes, “there is one thing about growing up: it’s never too late and it will never stop.”

According to Hedley Twidle, a lecturer in the department of English Language and Literature at UCT who judged the Anthology’s essay category, Triston’s essay is “a fast-moving meditation on ageing and the passing of time, and one that manages to cover a lot of ground in a very short space”. Triston was encouraged by her mom to enter the competition and was very surprised to hear she had won because she had never entered her work into a competition before. After this recent success, she has begun to consider pursuing writing as a career. She hopes to study English after school in order to become a journalist, or, in her own words, “write a book or two of my own.”

Congratulations once more to Triston for her excellent contribution to our anthology. Remember, the Young Writers’ Anthology is available right now at all Paperight outlets! (So why not also follow us on Facebook to follow the excitement and our upcoming Anthology competitions?)

(And if you want to find out more about our first winner, Jenna Solomon, head over a previous post on our blog here.)

And our June sales winner is…

Aletta de Witt, from Aloe X, Grahamstown!

Congratulations to Aletta for winning the Paperight sales prize for being the most successful Paperight bookseller for the month of June! Aletta and Aloe X are no doubt helped along with their marketing by customised materials made for them by our in-house design team. (We can make posters and flyers for your outlet too – so get in touch by clicking here!)
Aptly enough, we’ve covered Aloe X’s history with Paperight on our blog a few months ago. They use Paperight to offer Grahamstown’s burgeoning student population a legal alternative to photocopying books – something that is rife in every student town. Why not give it a read?

Want to win R1000 too? Good news: we’re awarding cash prizes for the best Paperight sales people over the next four months. To qualify for this competition, you need to make sure all of your staff are signed up as individual Paperight users on your outlet account (details here). You also just need to remember a few really simple criteria:

  • Free documents don’t count towards your sales (e.g. Quirk Emarketing and College Campus guides)
  • You must include your customer’s first and last names on every purchase you make
  • The competition is only for South African shops

Here are all the competition details in full. The race for July’s winner has already begun – so get selling!

O’Reilly books now LIVE on Paperight!

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Hold the phone! From today, ten fabulous technology textbooks from O’Reilly will be live and available from your local Paperight print-on-demand outlet.

O’Reilly’s techy textbooks are world-famous, and are among the most prescribed textbooks for computer science classes worldwide. O’Reilly has partnered with Paperight to bring better access to technology learning resources throughout South Africa through Paperight’s network of 180 print-on-demand outlets – many of which in places where traditional book stores don’t exist.

They’re usually cheaper in our outlets than in academic bookstores, too! Head First Design Patterns, for example, is an important programming textbook. From a normal bookstore, it costs about R550. From a Paperight outlet (when charging R1 per double-sided A4), a customer will pay R340. That includes R120 to the publisher, R30 to Paperight, and R190 to the copy shop for printing and binding. Many Paperight stores are even cheaper than this.

‘The irony of the digital revolution is that while democratising knowledge production, it has increased the gap between the Internet-haves and have-nots,’ said Arthur Attwell, founder and CEO of Paperight earlier this year. ‘If you’re not online, you can’t learn about technology, and you can’t close that gap. O’Reilly books on Paperight can change that. Many of our printing outlets directly supply schools and computer training centres, and these books will give them a huge advantage.’

This is the culmination of an agreement penned shortly after Paperight was named ‘Most Entrepreneurial Startup’ at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Startup Showcase, held in February in New York City.

Click here to find out which books we have available, including titles from the Head First and Learning series. So, check them out, and get learning!

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If you would like a poster or flyers for your outlet advertising O’Reilly books, get in touch with us at team@paperight.com, and we’ll be happy to assist you.