Despite the fact that I am a writer and I have manuscripts, I have been unable to publish any for years until now. All I had been doing for years was writing articles, blogging, speaking at events and creating contents for different magazines, writers and bloggers. I just couldn't publish a book.
At first it was the fact that I kept desperately searching for a known and established publishing house to help publish that was delaying me. The few publishing houses I had approached because I believed I stood a better chance with them, had been quick to say No to me. Later there was one that eventually agreed to publish my book, back then I had been overjoyed and I even started telling family and close friends that I was going to get published by a "big publishing house". Little did I know, that one of the workers who was majorly in charge of new authors and manuscripts had somethingelse in mind. My dad who had experience with men in publishing had warned me earlier to be careful but I thought he was just being protective.
At the end of the day one of the men I had encountered wanted to go out with me " to speak concerning my book". Of course that was the end of that chapter, and many more like that which occured. The ones that had the decency not to ask me out, wanted me to wait. There was a particular publisher who kept saying " paper is expensive, paper is this and that but your manuscript is good if only you can wait for a while...". Of course I waited for over a year to no avail. It took tact and wisdom to get him to release the manuscript after wasting so much time.
I then started to try getting published by foreign publishing houses, I tried so many that I cannot even remember all right now, but there was one particular one that kept contacting and calling me, Dorothy Publishing house. In the end, it turned out they wanted me to partly finance and share the expenses of the publishing. Imagine that, I didn't have enough money to publish in Nigeria now they were asking me for dollars ???
To cut the long story short, after several thoughts, self condemnation, self denial and self motivation, I decided to publish on my own late last year. Of course I had few people who encouraged me to do so too. And although today, I have started with the smallest of my manuscripts, I'm grateful that I have started.
Even if this looks small to some people, to me, it is like I have taken a big leap and I'm excited that I'm sharing this with this community. I'm officially an author!
All images taken with my phone camera.