Interview With Adewale Maja-Pearce
BY YEMI ADEBISI
Wole Soyinka
How would you describe your experience so far in Nigeria’s book industry?
I’m right now a consultant for Evans. Evans bought over Nelson Publishers and they want to develop together a literary series. I told them we shouldn’t leave the foreign publishers to be publishing Nigerian writers. Some of these old publishing houses publish textbooks for schools. We are ready to publish six papers every year. Instead of waiting for other series, let’s publish the first two so we would generate interest. We would begin to launch our first papers in November at the Lagos Book Fair that is run by Toyin Akinosho. We have to make things happen in Nigeria. Apart from that I have a small publishing company since 2005 called New Gong. So that is really a small fascinating publishing house we have and we don’t physically publish books. We load up a book and then they print, sell it as Print On Demand (POD). We don’t have probably any physical book in Nigeria. If you want to buy it you have to go online to purchase the book. The only problem we have in Nigeria is distribution because in small developed country like South Africa and even in America, the publisher is not involved in selling the book. The publisher goes to train that we have so, so and so copies, bla, bla, bla. So the train has bookshops all over the countries and they will distribute it. So the publisher doesn’t know how they sell the books; we don’t have that in Nigeria.
Adewale Maja-Pearce
Let’s talk about the POD you spoke about. Judging by probably what you have been able to put together, what would you advise an author that wishes to publish through such medium too?
Anybody can do it. If you simply go to our site, there is an icon in the site called ‘create space.’ When the book is ready you upload it, the cover and the inside pages. They will give you a file page so that every of your work will be filed. What you see about a week is your book on our site. We print and sell as requested. And it is a big advantage, a very big one.
There is this rumour that you have some personal grudges with Wole Soyinka over your comments in your review on one of his books. It was even gathered that you were exchanging abusive words publicly. Can you throw more light into this?
Grudge! No! I first met Soyinka shortly after he won the Nobel Prize because I used to work for a magazine in London called Index On Censorship. I was their African editor from 1983 to 1997. So, before I joined, Soyinka had already been published by them and also had written for them. He was familiar with the magazine. So when I joined, I told him, “I am the new African editor. I hope you will continue with us.” We have a means he used to send us materials; we had a good working relationship. The problem came when he published You Must Set Forth At Dawn. I was asked by the London Review of Books to review it. I didn’t like the book so I gave my reasons. So, when it came out people told me that Soyinka didn’t take it kindly with criticism. I was just working for a magazine anyway.
