By Laju Iren
Not many Nigerians will write a book. Majority of those that eventually do will find it very difficult to publish. And those that do publish? Many of them will not get their money’s worth. A writer himself, Okechukwu Ofili became frustrated with the book publishing industry in Nigeria and founded Okada books, an e-publishing systemthat allows authors turn their blogs/stories into books in 15 minutes or less. Learn more about this and his thoughts on Nigeria’s tech-system in this interview.
Please tell us about Okada Books?
It’s a pretty cool system adapted for the African market which allows authors accept payments from users’ Phone Credit. Our 101,000 plus users currently dwell at okadabooks.com.
What inspired you to start the company?
My very first book ‘How Stupidity Saved My Life’ did very well in Nigerian bookstores back in 2011. But the problem was that it was so difficult for me to get the money from my booksales. The bookstore would always have one story or the other. There was a point that I was owed over a million naira by one of the major books stores. I had to go on a social media campaign before I was finally paid the money owed. There and then I resolved to simplify the process of distributing and selling books in Nigeria.
What challenges have you faced on your journey?
Power and Culture.
The former is obvious, our developers work rate is cut short by the unpredictable sporadic nature of Power supply.
But beyond that my greatest challenge to growth as a company has been culture. The deeply conservative culture of the publishing space. Publishers and traditional authors are very slow to transition to new technology and see companies like okadabooks as a soil to the purity of writing. They won’t say it but we face these challenges in our daily encounters with established authors trying to convince them to adopt our platform.
How did you overcome these challenges?
Our strategy has been to find new authors that are not entrenched in this purist culture of traditional publishing. We find that these authors are more flexible to platforms like ours. In fact, our betselling authors are consistently people without paper back books, the ones that have not been in touch with traditional publishing. They tend to be malleable to our platform and this has seen them generate mass sales.
Please share some success stories
There is a paticular story I love to share about Musa Ajayi.
He is a guy who writes Romantic Hausa novels and lives in Nasarawa State where he sells fruits. He has been so successful on our platform that its easy to say that our most active users are Hausa. His story excites us because the only reason he came to okadabooks was because Amazon.com did not accept books written in Hausa, but thankfully okadabooks did and the rest as we say was history.
What, in your opinion is the future of software development in Africa?
Very promising. As long as we can fix the power issue and get leaders that get technology , then the sky is the limit. Because Nigeria has the talent and we do have the problems that need to be fixed by tech.
Does Nigeria have an enabling environment for tech start ups?
Please share your experience. No. From taxes to power, doing business in Nigeria is tough. The country is not created for tech entrepreneurship. It is more adapted for large scale Dangote type businesses. So the people that succeed tend to do so externally, with external money. That is not to say that there are no internal successes, I mean we have Jobberman, but we need more. For our population we need more.
What is your take on the Nigerian tech-o-system?
Young, but like a baby it is growing fast and soon we will be walk, and then run and soon we will be able to feed and cloth ourselves. We might even solve the problem that is the greatest threat to our industry in NEPA.
Photo: start up pic (211112)
The post Okada books: How one company is ‘recycling’ the publishing wheel appeared first on Vanguard News.
Originally posted by Adeshola