Nigerian book publishing
The paradox of Nigeria's award-winning novelists is that they have more readers abroad than at home.Bleak publishing houses
"Chimamanda Adichie's novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, winner of this year's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, may have sold over 240,000 copies in Britain, in Nigeria it has shifted barely 5,000..."Nigeria was once the centre of literary publishing in west Africa—not just for local companies but international houses as well. But when military rule and economic decline saw much of the middle class flee in the 1980s, the publishers left too. Today, there is no distribution network and scant demand for fiction...
"Ms Adichie's novel costs N850 ($7.30) from Kachifo [a Lagos publisher] and goes up to N1,500 in bookshops in Abuja, the capital. Far more readers choose self-help and religious books that are supposed to have a more immediate pay-off..."
Labels: change, civil society, Nigeria
posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:40 AM
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