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A friend messaged me about an online opportunity to publish my works since I have been chasing to be a published author for far too long, in 2016 I would have jumped at this opportunity to get visibility, traction or even have a little audience to showcase my work, not to get paid but to get validity as to if my works were good or not. Back in the days in Nigeria, publishing was a really big deal and it took a lot of process, from the writing, the printing, the editing and most importantly the marketing process. The costliest of all these processes was the marketing and this is where you pay to have your book exposed to retailers and wholesalers without the certainty of purchase.
Your target audience is still unidentified and unknown since you're using a third party marketer whose marketing skills you're unsure of. Now you're not expected to have immediate sales unless you get recommend to government pitches which might feature your books for sales but then you still don't know your audience, you can't calculate how much you've grown and it's difficult to gain feedbacks
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Choosing The smarter Way?
Aside from spending a lot of money on futile marketing the process looks redundant and unsmart and that's why a lot of people going into publishing are choosing the smarter way and that's being an online published author, having the opportunity to be exposed to unlimited audience and being able to keep track of your book's progress how many people has viewed it, carted it, recommended it, and eventually bought it.
We're heading into a smarter future and very soon the longer processes of doing things will be ignored, nowadays in Nigeria people prefer the soft copies of a material to the harder copies this is because the hard copies which will come in paper is susceptible to be destroyed, it can weigh and occupy too much space and of course it can't always be accessible. Smart phone are becoming smarter and people are becoming more attached to it than their lovers, education or anything.
Unlike printed materials people want to read through their screens and if you want to sell anything nowadays you have to put it in a digital format, on an iPhone screen, a PC or an android and people can even buy it for even lesser, it's becoming easier to use the internet in Nigeria and even though the cost is still high it gets to a time when the internet will be almost free to use and that will be the end.
Not Still Smart Enough?
Irrespective of how smart publishing through mediums like Amazon, createSpace, iBooks, Barnes & Noble Press, Kobo, and ingramSpark, are it's still not smart enough because we haven't eliminated the limitations of centralisation and that's why I feel that unless the internet is totally decentralised we will still have people being unreal owners of Instagram or Facebook accounts because everything can be up and taken from them without any explanation.
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How About A Smarter Way To Get Traction?
It was impossible for me to publish in real time and it was still impossible for me to publish through centralised internet options and there was one sole similarity and this was the issue of cost. With blockchain blogging we were exposed to the truest definition of free almost no expensive paid, a means of being paid through cryptocurrency and a certainly of expending your network, having instant feedback and still having the opportunity to own your work. This to me was the smartest way.
In all honesty people still await for when physical or real time publishing will become less costly, the truth is that it won't, in Nigeria the rich becomes richer by exploiting the poor and average and while I feel it hardly pays to be published I still believe publishing schemes in Nigeria hardly works for who has the equity the skills and the abilities, marketing is a sham and even if you save up to publish, these huge publishing firms do not promise you any traction. With places like hive, steem, blurt, Leofinance or other blockchains projects it's become easier to become published, be exposed to decentralized communities of writers online of which you can improve your art, own your work and earn decently for the amount of work you put in.
In Conclusion
I rejected submitting my works to any online outlet despite it being what I always wanted years ago. So what happened? What happened was that I've chosen the smarter way. You see back in the days people were being ripped, you'll see blog sites without content asking Individual writers who hasn't gotten any traction to showcase their content on their site since they have audience coming to their websites, so at the end what's the end game for the owners of these websites? To profit from the works of being and the owners of these works gets nothing all in the name of traction for their work.
People never understood what it means to earn real time digital currencies for their tangible skills. Basically knowledge makes people take a different turn and in Africa people are yet to understand how to get smarter. The exploitations continue and still continues, when people understands the endless possibilities of the web and how it become a powerful tool and agent of decentralisation they'll understand that there's no limit to what can be achieved. At this stage I can no longer offer my contents anywhere for free talkless of a centralised setting where you don't understand true ownership or freedom.
Interested in some more of my works?
The Motivating To Stay Mentally Healthy In An Unmotivated Universe
The Nigerian State; What Change Would Generally Influence The Economy & More?
Scouting In Football; A Failed Commercialised Venture In Most Football Clubs?
Our Love... That Glitters.... (An Original Poetry)
Doing Right By Our Consciousness; Is Death Always Peaceful As It Is Often Thought?
What Is And Isn't The True Definition Of Weakness?
My name is @Josediccus, a young Nigerian student who is a Vlogger, A Psychologist, Poet And Sports Writer/Analyst. I'm using my contents as a process to create shared meaning as well as create expressions through which people on/off hive can relate. I believe content is a process to be enjoyed and relished and I'm up for any collaborations in my field stated above. Cheers
@Josediccus, your brother-in-pen & heart
I'm hoping to reach more people who are broken at heart and spirit, so share on any platform or reblog