Not Him- a story about rape

This week I have my story about rape up at FunDza Literacy Trust's Mobi website. It's called Not Him. The thing that's great about FunDza is that you get immediate feedback so you can tell if the readers are engaging with the story. I think this is quite important with this story in particular. It's about a young woman who out of the blue get a date with the golden boy of their township, Bonolo, but things go wrong on the date and her life is very nearly destroyed.

Chapters go out each day and at the end of each chapter the writer asks a question. I purposefully asked questions to find out how the readers feel about some of the issues around rape. The FunDza readers do not hide what they feel- at all as you can see if you check their comments. I was happy to find that despite the fact that the media gives the impression that,  for example, people believe that women wearing miniskirts provoke men to rape them, it appears the readers at FunDza don't buy that line at all.The story goes for seven chapters and I'm curious to see how the readers will respond at the end.

I think, too, FunDza stories show that you needn't be moralistic in your tone when writing fiction, to get kids to engage and come to decisions about what they feel on a controversial topic.

The Department of Arts and Culture is No More

As of 1 April 2014, the Department of Arts and Culture no longer exists. According to the Public Relations Officer (PRO) in the Ministry of Youth, Sport and Culture, Mr Kristian Mmusi, the Ministry has been re-organised to improve efficiency and “to improve delivery of services, particularly to the outlying areas of the country”. But have no fear, according to the PRO, “The Ministry will continue to run programmes such as the President’s Day Competitions, Constituency Art Competitions, Exhibitions and the Arts and Culture Grant”. The only one on that list that makes any difference to writers is the arts and culture grant. And how will these proposals be dealt with now? 

“Arts project proposals will be dealt with appropriately by the Financial Requests Assessment Committee and the Grants Assessment Committees in line with MYSC priorities for development of the arts. Specific offices have been assigned to look after this function just like other functions of the Ministry mandate.”

And to top off the entire exercise with a pretty rotten cherry, the PRO added- “In any case MYSC programmes mostly centre around the young person and therefore staff should be able to deal with issues.” I’m an artist, a professional writer, but I’m 50, so how do I fit in? In their world there is nothing like an artist over 30, right? We’re invisible, not important. 

Right there, actually, is where the government’s approach to the arts goes wrong. The fact that the arts are thrown in with the youth and sports shows that the government believes arts to be a hobby, something to keep the youth busy until they move on to more serious things. They give lip service to the fact that the arts can diversify the economy, but they don’t mean it. They have no policy to implement that. They pour money into the President’s Day Competitions -but are they making any real impact? Do the winners move forward? Do they develop and become sustainable? Are they professionalising? What actually is the point of the Competitions except to throw a bit of money around? You see the groups on President’s Day, they compete, they win, they get their money, and go back home until the next year. 

I find nothing wrong with people doing art as a hobby, that’s fine, but I don’t think the government should aim their policies toward that objective. If the government believes the arts are meant to be a hobby, as their recent actions suggest, then be honest about that. Say it. Don’t talk about the arts diversifying the economy when everyone can see that it is only lip service and that their actions say something else. 

The Department of Arts and Culture was not perfect, but at least it was a step in the correct direction. The PRO says that the former structure in the Ministry was hierarchical and top heavy, he says there was duplication of efforts. I can’t comment on that. I’ll accept that was true, but couldn’t that problem have been addressed without scrapping the Department of Arts and Culture completely? 

And though he says that the new Programme Officers will have enough knowledge to cover the issues that will arrive from sports, the youth, and the arts sector, I find that hard to accept. Even when the officers were only responsible for the arts, the field was just too wide. They needed to know the intricacies of the publishing industry, the writing world, the music industry, the world of dance and painting and sculpture and acting… only to mention a few. That was more than enough, and as I’ve said in the past in this column, I had hoped that the move would be toward having more specialised arts officers: experts in each of the disciplines. People who knew what was happening with writers in Botswana, in Southern Africa, and the world, so as to help our writers find their way to professionalism and actually earning a living through their art. Now, as far as I’m concerned, that hope is gone, never to be seen again. We have taken a huge step backwards in my opinion. 

In my perfect world, Arts and Culture would have its own ministry headed by a person who truly cared and understood the arts and knew that the arts are the practical expression of culture, the place where culture is stored. They would understand that artists need training, and schools, and programmes need to be set up in our institutions. They need professional advice. They need to get grants to travel to residencies and festivals to see how others do things. If our arts were truly supported and developed, it would bring people to our country, it would sell our country outside its border. It would feed our souls and our economy at the same time. 

But it’s not supported. It’s all just a Wizard of Oz type scenario, pull back the curtain, and despite our wishes, there’s nothing there. 

(This appeared in my column It's All Write for 23 May 2014 in The Voice Newspaper) 

The Truth About Amazon

I self-published three ebooks at Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) on the 28th May, 2012. The three books are from my Kate Gomolemo Detective Series: Anything for Money, Murder for Profit, and Claws of a Killer. There is a lot of hype around the money people are earning with their books on Amazon. I think it’s time to get some honesty out there so that people enter with their eyes wide open.

First, there are some issues that work against writers from Botswana (actually all African countries) publishing at KDP.

1. Amazon will keep 30% of all of your royalties for United States tax.

2. No matter what price you set your book at, Amazon will add $2 to it. The reason apparently is that it costs more for them to do business in Botswana.

3. Even if you have chosen the 70% royalty option, this only applies when the customer buying your book is living in a country on Amazon’s list. Botswana is not on the Amazon list, no African country is. Therefore, even if you chose to get 70% royalties and you set your price in the prescribed price range ($2.99-$9.99) you will only get 35% royalties on books bought by readers in Botswana, and any country not on the Amazon list and that is most countries.

4. Amazon pays writers in Botswana with foreign cheques, which is a huge hassle.

Here is my experience so far.

1. I have sold 817 copies of Murder for Profit, 690 copies of Anything for Money and 760 copies of Claws of a Killer.

2. Because a lot of those books were sold during promotional periods during the first few months when I attempted to do some marketing, they were sold at no charge. You can set you price at zero to try and get people to download and read in the hope of generating some hype.

3. All the books were priced at $2.99 so I could get the 70% royalty rate but still keep the price low enough to encourage people to buy. Amazon sold them at $4.99 which included their arbitrary $2 charge on each book. So Amazon got the $2 plus their share of the royalties, this is not negotiable.

4. If my ebook was sold in a country where the 70% royalty was working, I made $2.07 on each book sold at $2.99. That’s quite a good royalty actually. This didn’t happen often though.

5. The total money my three books have earned at Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing is $81.16 (USD), 10.24 British Pounds, and 13.62 Euros. I have received nothing. Before any money is released, you must reach a certain threshold. The threshold is $100 (USD) and 100 British Pounds or Euros.

6. I was quite keen to do marketing for the first few weeks, but since then I’ve done nothing. So I guess my bad sales are partly to due to that.

7. I think it might be a good idea to sell series like I did in this case. I found in a month if only three books were sold, it was usually one of each title. This led me to believe that one person bought all three ebooks. This may be wrong, but it happened so often I think it might be the case.

From my experience, it seems difficult to make money with KDP especially if you are publishing from Botswana. Yes, perhaps you could make money selling your books this way, but you’d need to really understand book marketing and devote a good amount of time to it.

I think it may be better to put your ebooks at multiple platforms; meaning put them at Amazon, but also put them at Smashwords, Apple Store, and Barnes and Noble for example. Some of these other places offer better deals and in any case, KDP is only for the Kindle readers, so if you only put your ebooks there you’re missing out on other types of e-readers

I do believe self-publishing ebooks can work for people with the will and the right set of skills and, of course, a good book. But, like most everything, it is not an easy way to publish your book, as some people may have made it seem. Yes, putting the book up is not that difficult, but that is only the beginning of the job.

(This first appeared at my column in The Voice newspaper, It's All Write, here)

End of April? Really???

Okay this year is flying by far too fast. Is it really the end of April?

So what's been going on? The shortlist for the Caine Prize was announced the other day. here it is:

• Diane Awerbuck (South Africa) "Phosphorescence" in Cabin Fever (Umuzi, Cape Town. 2011)
  Read Phosphorescence
• Efemia Chela (Ghana/Zambia) "Chicken" in Feast, Famine and Potluck (Short Story Day Africa, South Africa. 2013)
  Read Chicken
• Tendai Huchu (Zimbabwe) "The Intervention" in Open Road Review, issue 7, New Delhi. 2013
  Read The Intervention
• Billy Kahora (Kenya) "The Gorilla's Apprentice" in Granta (London. 2010)
  Read The Gorilla's Apprentice
• Okwiri Oduor (Kenya) "My Father's Head" in Feast, Famine and Potluck (Short Story Day Africa, South Africa. 2013)
  Read My Father's Head

No Nigerians this year, just like the year I was shortlisted. Already I've heard complaints on social media. What's nice about this list for me is that I know a;ll of these people except one ( Efemia Chela) either in person or as Facebook friends.  Best of luck to everyone!

And then there is this which grew out of a joke I made on Facebook. We all have a sense of humour right?? Billy Kahora has been shortlisted twice for the Caine Prize and highly commended once and he's a lovely interesting guy. So yeah...okay. And I like his gorilla story quite a bit too. :)

I have another story up at FunDza. It's a story about xenophobia called Them and Us. 

And that photo up there? That's Mr K on Easter Sunday. We climbed the mountain near our house, he's looking down on Mahalapye in the distance.

Moving Forward at Kalahari Review

Kalahari Review is our Botswana based, Pan African, online lit mag. I'm proud to have my story, Moving Forward,  published there today. Moving Forward is a short story I wrote at the Caine Workshop I attended in South Africa. It is included in my short story collection, In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata and Other Stories, but only in the print edition.

It's sort of an odd situation because the ebook and the print book are published by different publishers and the print book came out after the ebook. I wrote this story after the ebook was out.  I liked the story a lot and wanted it included with my other stories in the collection all set in Botswana so decided to include it when the print edition was being prepared.

If you want to read the story you can find it HERE.

A Video from a Fan of In the spirit of McPhineas Lata and Other Stories

I was directed to this video and it has made my day!



Please go and check out some of her other fabulous book reviews HERE at Siyanda Writes!

Whatzup???

I'm back home and settled after Time of the Writer. It seems to get longer and longer for me to get back into my routine after travelling, but I am back to work, and that's good. I always thought of myself as someone who was not necessarily born to write, I'm a generalist by nature. I finally got to get back to proper writing (not columns or blogs or Facebook or emails) last week and I couldn't believe how great I felt. So perhaps I'm changing, perhaps I'm becoming one of those people who must write to feel okay. That's an interesting turn of events...

So what's going on?? If Not for This, my book about a couple caught up in the Herero genocide in 1904, has had some positive feedback. May we all cross fingers that this book gets a nod and finds a fabulous publisher???? Thanks!

What else? I have a new story up at FunDza. It's a romance called Missing Chances. If you'd like to read it you can find it HERE. The readers there seem to be enjoying it. It is such fun getting immediate feedback like that!

My romance novella, There's Something About Him, has just been accepted by the Nigerian publisher, Kachifo. It will be included in their new imprint for popular fiction called Farafina Breeze. I'm very excited about this for a few reasons. One, it's the publisher that publishes Chimamanda Adichie's books in Nigeria (Yay!!!) . The other thing is that I've had a plan at the back of my mind that the best way to get our books distributed around the continent (for us published on the continent) is to find a publisher in each area, i.e. Southern Africa, East Africa, and West Africa. I would love to have a network of publishers on the continent to which I could routinely submit my manuscripts. I'm crossing fingers this may be the beginning.

My young adult novel set in USA during the bicentennial year is currently "cooking". When I was in Durban I was explaining to the kids how I use all sorts of scientific-y words for my process such as "cooking", "fiction pressure" and "growing legs" but they shouldn't go off thinking that they mean anything to anyone else. HA! Cooking is when the story must sit until you nearly forget you wrote it. That's what's happening now with Bicentennial Summer.

I have a story coming out in Drum Magazine this Thursday (10th April) called Pelo's Call for Help. A ghost story--Boooooo!

That's about it. I'm trying to keep myself in the office at the moment instead of sneaking in the house to watch the Oscar Pistorious trial- it is very addicting!

Reflections on 17th Time of the Writer

So I've been back from Durban now for about two weeks, enough time to reflect back on my experiences at the 17th Time of the Writer. (that up there was the view out my hotel window in Durban, by the way. Yeah, I know, tough life.)

1.  I met lots of new writers I never knew before. People like: the child prodigy, Chibundu Onuzo author of The Spider King's Daughter; Satyajit Sarna, a beautiful, young writer from India, Niq Mhlongo- the template for crazy men everywhere ; Kgebetli Moele, who may have the driest sense of humour on planet earth; the beautiful Hawa Jande Golakai who enjoys digging about in dead bodies,  the writer with the loudest laugh in the world- Prajwal Parajuly; a new friend I hope to visit next time I'm in Kenya the beautiful storyteller Mshai Mwangola, and the intimidating-ly girly Angela Makholwa (if you get past the scary perfect girl outside- she's fabulous). I also got to spend more time with writers I knew a bit, like Sarah Britten and Zukiswa Wanner. A fun time was had by all, especially by ME!!

2. I visited a prison where I listened to juvenile offenders read their writing and I gave them a few pointers. It was amazing how quickly they went from being "juvenile offenders" to boys in a classroom. I couldn't help thinking how adults let these boys down, that somewhere in their past was a young toddler learning to walk, a boy riding a bike for the first time, off to his first day of school. Just a boy with hopes and dreams and then what went wrong? Okay, yeah, people have personal choice, but why do some people's choices seem to be between two bad things? Why are there no good choices? And for kids who decides those choices? Who creates the conditions that put them in places where only bad choices are on offer? It's us, it's adults, but they're paying the price.

3. I went to a government secondary school, Adams College, and had my belief that all a school needs is motivated teachers to be successful confirmed again. The experience re-filled my spirit. I loved the school, loved the staff, and adored the motivated kids. The only down side was my continued sadness that in Botswana I never get invites to speak at government schools. I saw how much the kids enjoyed it and how much it matters to them to meet a "real writer".

4. After our talk (I was with another writer new to me- Praba Moodley) at Chatsworth Education Centre, two young girls came up to me. They are both writers and they gave me the addresses to their blog/ website. There are some seriously good writers coming up if these two are anything to go by- which is great to know. Here's the blog and here's the website. I just thought they were fab! really entertaining.

5. My panel discussion (each writer has one during the evening sessions) was on Friday with the lovely Khulekani Magubane, one of the kindest, loveliest people I've had the pleasure of meeting. It was on children's literature. My fear of public speaking which I have been battling since I entered this writing gig, is slowly dissipating so that's a relief. I think the discussion went well. I was lucky to have one of my publishers, Helga from Oxford University Press, in the audience, and she thought it went well, so I think it did.

6. Time of the Writer is the best literary festival I've ever attended. First it is organised like a military operation. Second, they treat writers like kings and lastly, there is no hierarchical structure. I've been to festivals where the big names are all that matter and the rest of the writers are just the plebs in ther wings. Sort of made me decide I was done with lit fests. Being a writer mostly published in Southern Africa and not known much outside here, I fall into the pleb group which can be a problem for your mental space when you live in a tiny country like Botswana where you are used to being a slightly big fish in a very miniscule pond.  But I'm back to liking lit fest- thanks for that, TOW!

So now I'm home and life goes on. Ups and downs and in-betweens. 
The writing life, the writing life. :)

My Opening Speech at 17th Time of the Writer

We were asked to give a 4-5 min speech at the opening of the 17th Time of the Writer on the theme- Freeing our Imaginations, taken from Binyavanga's wonderful videos.

Here is what I said.

For writers a prescribed imagination is death. But sadly, in Africa, from every corner, there are threats trying to curtail what we can think, who we can be- and therefore -what we can write. Even the simple act of saying- I want to be a writer- is smashed down and destroyed. A writer? Be serious. Go be a doctor, an engineer, a nurse.

In Botswana, where we have no programme for writers in the entire country, the vice chancellor of our only university at the time, was once presented with a proposal to start a creative writing programme. He said- what does Botswana need writers for? This is a perfect example of how the lack of imagination in Africa is killing us. How the colonisation of our minds is still strong and vibrant- and deadly.

The need to conform in every way is very strong in our societies. Those who step away from the expected path are brave indeed, to fight against such a wall of resistance takes courage and stamina. But that is exactly what we most desperately need. Sadly, we clamour to walk the same disastrous, worn paths of the colonisers. Even when we see where they are heading, the fateful end, we insist it is where we must go, too. Why?

(Read the rest at our Botswana artists website- Diamond Selektion - here)

The Vanishings Will Not Be Published

It is unfortunate that I must announce that my book, The Vanishings, will no longer be published. The ebook was put up at Amazon by the publisher, Black Crake Books, but has now been taken down. The publisher was unable to meet his contractual agreement so I've had no option but to break the contract.

I apologise to anyone who was hoping to read the book. I am not sure yet what will happen. Perhaps I will look for another publisher, but that will have to be attended to in the future.

I will keep you posted.