From the horse’s mouth – state of Nigerian publishing
By Yemisi Aribisala
ONCE upon a time, a Nigerian publisher entered the Twittersphere to point an accusing finger at a rival publisher. She said the horses in her competitor’s stable were deeply traumatised by their experiences there. As one of those horses myself, I knew exactly what she meant.
The stakes are high. This is the problem. That you spend so long and invest so much therefore when an opportunity to be published comes up, you rush headlong into it. There are also usually hidden fires behind you—domestic issues, financial issues…
My colleagues in the stables formed a group called “We Survived”, a hopeful banderole that didn’t represent our reality in the least. One spoke about how, after the successful publication of his first book, he’d been strung along with elaborate deceptions, projections, fairytales about his career. His publisher screamed at hIm at the first approach of the topic, bringing the discussion to a halt. We learned that this was the typical response of this publisher when things weren’t going her way — a technique that always worked. There were tears, screaming, cursing, meltdowns that degenerated into long disappearances. Periodic broadcasts of ill-health issued forth from the cave to her furious authors, who were thus kept at bay until the heat died down, at which time she emerged to do damage control. This was the fundamental MO.
She conned me into signing a three book addendum. She lied to me. She said an American publisher was asking for it before taking me on. Turns out she just wanted to trap me. No American publisher… for three years I was depressed and unproductive. Three years, till I got help via coaching. Odun meta gbako.
She becomes this mother figure who you fear and she plasters it with her feminism bullshit. She has screamed at me once and it was terrible. Till today, I’m not sure why I didn’t just hang up. It is not as if she for come from Nigeria come beat me. I asked the other author I know with the publisher about her book. I just said I needed to know the truth because too many people can’t be saying the same thing, and that’s when she said, Well… she had’t been paid for two years. She was always paid until 2 years ago. She hasn’t got anything for two years.
There is something to keep in mind when talking to a publisher. In order to conserve their limited energy to accomplish as much as possible with as little effort as can be managed, the publisher will develop an inflexible modus operandi to be used for most If not all of their authors, so that if you ask authors ABCDEFGH, the likelihood is that four of them will have the same stories to tell. The same exact ones.
The key here is to avoid presuming on any account that you are a special author and will receive special exemptions from the terms of the MO. For even if you are indeed special, you have to think of the cons of boarding a ship with a hole blasted through its hull, and water pouring in that you have no power to stop. Are you exempt or special in that sinking boat?
The publisher-writer relationship is something like a mother-child one, especially in an African country like Nigeria where there is a big to-do about developing our own grassroots publishing industry (more on this erroneous description later). The mother-child dynamics of Nigerian publishing is mixed in with a traditional cultural deference to elders. Deference to authority in general, in fact, to parents, rich people, spiritual leaders, and so many classifications of people, depending on where you come from in Nigeria or in Africa. And for how long you have been socialised into deference as the basis of culture? In this mix, “questioning” is strictly forbidden.
“Mother, may I? No, you may not.”
Mother, child, publisher, author—this dynamic is inimical to the functioning of an industry where we are selling words, and where people rely on us to challenge culture, challenge anything and everything with words.
But even bad mothers are nevertheless deity, aren’t they? Listen to Nico Mbarga’s classic highlife ‘Sweet Mother’—a hit in Cameroon and Nigeria for over 45 years, recognisable all along the West African coast, as compelling as Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria.’ Or Asa’s chart-topping ‘So Beautiful’:
Nitori ọmọ (oh, oh jiya) nile ọkọ Mama, mi o roju riAnd that is why I’m loving you Ẹ bami kira fun mama mi Oriṣa bi iya o, ko o si laiye Oya!
In other words, there is no deity as worthy of worship as mother! Nigerian authors therefore have a deeply ingrained reason to worship mother as their compromised custodians of words. To make matters worse, the child in question has a mangled ego, as a result of all the rejection from the excruciating ploughing of words.
The issue of royalties paid to book authors in the Nigerian publishing sphere should be straightforward enough, a matter of contract, governed by Nigerian laws. But in the excitement of the courtship, a writer might fail to confirm whether the publisher pays royalties quarterly or yearly, whether royalty statements are full or generalised, the exact meaning and calculation of “world rights”.
Interesting thing about royalties – when I was there, I realised they were calculating them wrong and I fixed it. So to hear that you still aren’t getting paid means it is deliberate.
The Nigerian publisher might fail to inform the author that one-offs like readings, performances, or reuse of published material will not be paid up front, even when the money is collected almost immediately. The Nigerian writer’s earnings from these one-offs will often be paid only at the end of a full year. In a situation where the earnings are desperately needed.
My first draft of this piece went to a reader in the industry who had some understanding of the day-to-day running of a major Nigerian publishing body. He offered two main criticisms. One was that the abuse of writers by publishing houses was a global phenomenon of long standing, and therefore probably unremarkable. The second was the possibility that my piece might be misread as some kind of hatchet job. Did the fact of global abuse negate the necessity to speak on what was happening locally, I asked? Or was it one more insidious reason for killing the right to question what was going on?
The bogus Peter Pan syndrome of Nigerian publishing is the first point of note. When a new publisher enters the Nigerian literary scene, she brands herself with words synonymous with birthing; later will come other words having to do with patriotism and salvation, but at first we will have grassroots, pioneering, trendsetting, uplifting the non-existent or fledgling status quo, the everlasting words that herald the arrival of yet another autocrat. Words that erase 200 years of Nigerian publishing (a fact) and settle for a candle in Paddington Bear’s darkest Peru (condescending fiction).
New publishers it seems never arrive to build on an existing rich Nigerian literary tradition with dozens of noteworthy wordsmiths breathing and buried. Rather, it is always a ‘New African literary renaissance.’ The renaissance isn’t a period that has ever begun or ended in African publishing. It is a recurring knee-jerk theme routinely applied to news on ‘Africa’. An eternal buzzword, part of the con as one arrives at a Nigerian publishing house clutching one’s first draft. The con may make you lose your head because you really believe you are, in truth, something new and fresh.
But soon after settling down into the publishing house, the fresh, new writer gets restless, and starts wondering whether he has been foolish in signing away his rights; wants to throw off the yoke, get an agent, join a union. When he discovers he is being condescended to and taken advantage of, the MO steps in with the familiar techniques of maternal emotional abuse. What will the African continent’s renaissance do if you bail on it!
Is there in fact an ‘African literary scene’? A European one, a North American one? A ‘literary scene’, that is, in the way that ours collapses a whole continent into a flat pack box? North, South, East, West, of the culturally diverse and enormous continent would certainly provide genuine and useful distinctions: Country by country, still more useful, still more factual. One can’t even conflate the 1950s Onitsha Market literary renaissance in Nigeria with the one that took place in 1981 Kano, but the publishers’ dysfunctional teat is still forced into the mouths of Nigerian writers who are forced to swallow the fake story that they must represent a whole continent with their words, something that, let’s be honest, could only really be believed by narcissistically abused children. Generation after generation this condescension is repackaged, marketed and distributed. It has become the dragnet of every Nigerian publishing house.
How the f**ck did we all fall for this?
I’m not sure where the misrepresentations sell better, at home or abroad. The word ‘African’ excites and intoxicates people in the Northern hemisphere, with many agents in the United Kingdom and the United States of America being complicit in looking for the first or next best African writer. (I did not want to be presented as the first Black African writer to win a particular international prize, but I had no say in the matter, and it emerged that buyers and bookshops did in fact want to hear these ‘marketing’ terms.
A leading Nigerian publisher complained to me that her author had been mismanaged by foreign agents to the point where the author believed he was the best thing out of Africa. The foreign agents wanted access to his rights outside the continent, and were ready to do and say anything to get them. But I could feel no sympathy whatsoever for this Nigerian publisher, who was no different, but who had lost on the basis of administering a less effective ego massage.
What’s sad is this person has been trumpeted internationally as a saviour of Nigerian publishing, a saviour of publishing in Africa, someone that helps people find their voice. Sad.
There is no new renaissance of African or Nigerian publishing happening, only new and improved smoke screens being erected. Nigerian publishers are the ones who arrive out of the womb as mutant monopolies with fangs and ravenous sucking reflexes. One Nigerian publishing house rises and falls, leaving writers thronging to get out of the rain into the newest one.
I have to talk here about the smell of desperation that marks the writer in search of a book deal, in Nigeria or anywhere. The publishing scene is rank with the scent of writers with low self-esteem: brutalised by reams of ‘No, thank yous’, years of isolating work, emotional wounds, scathing memories of denigrating side-eye from people who won’t acknowledge that writing is a profession, people who have craved for so long to have their work taken seriously that their objectivity is almost completely eroded. They are unaware of how they smell. Thus weakened, they limp into the presence of publishers whose own hunger for glory and unchecked lifetime control over people’s work and creativity have turned them into exploitative agents.
You know how they always look for weak vulnerable people… but I know when I first met her, I needed confirmation badly… that I was not just a loser in life because that is how I felt then.
Nigerian publishing adds an additional and unique feature to the mix: witchcraft. Who wants to be the Nigerian writer to bell the cat! To talk about witchcraft in the same sentence as an African country? Except that witchcraft is now a thing in the worlds across big waters from us. A good thing. A feminist thing. A WLM thing. An underdog rising to unorthodox power thing.
There are self-professed witches in markets in Glastonbury with stalls and banners. But it can be a marketing tool too, witchcraft. Wherever one finds a market, there one finds witches, anywhere in the world. Witches should really be unremarkable. Advertising is a kind of legitimised witchcraft provided there is agreement that manipulation and the twisting of truths are intrinsic parts of the craft.
I like the fact that we don’t glamorise witchcraft in Nigeria. We acknowledge that witches live next door to us. We understand the cultural necessity of witches and their presence in old and new power structures. But we also have a moral conclusion about them. They aren’t going to be on the front page of the The Guardian Lagos promoting themselves as fresh power adaptors. Yes, we distinguish between white and black ones, but a witch is a witch is a witch in Nigeria.
We understand and agree locally that witches can and do harm, and that they kill people as part of their job description. White witches claim to kill for good! Even when unbelievers argue that witches are incapable of such deeds and are only imagining they can perform them in order to feel powerful. The mindset that one can kill and harm with witchcraft is the core of the problem, not whether the capacity is “real”. The fact that a person legitimises manipulation, intimidation and the spiritual overpowering of others bears the taint of witchcraft. Where that person who calls herself a witch does not agree to the autonomy of others but feels they are entitled to get what they want and will do anything necessary to enforce their will.
One publisher told me that when she had problems with her authors, she cursed them. More specifically, she had curses put on them. She said she didn’t curse them alone because the more witches, the more potent the curse. She employed her sisters and her family members, she said, to ensure the robustness and durability of the curses. When she told me this, I felt there was a threat in the telling, a gloating.
Yemisi Aribisala
I signed a boilerplate contract with a publishing house that had no brick and mortar address. They still don’t. The phone rings and no one picks it up. To prove that one has sent them a letter one must photograph the letter, then send the proof by email. Otherwise they deny receipt. As it suits them. It never occurred to me at the beginning of my relationship with this publisher to say, “Can I visit your office? I want to know where it is.” I’m not saying that businesses cannot run without a room with a receptionist, people working at their desks during office hours, and a water dispenser —but perhaps I am in fact saying that, because of the unique context of our country, Nigeria, and how easy it is to do so many things as and when it suits us, without watchdogs, regulating bodies, agents and unions in place to check malpractice.
…To their embarrassment their office in London neither has staff to receive mail from overseas, nor does their phone number work. $500 which our contract stipulates is 50% mine has not (supposedly) been collected nor passed on since October 2019. We are in 2023, and still going…
Nigerians love adages. It takes a village to raise a child is a social proposition that shouldn’t apply to an adult writer trying to get his book published. If someone would give me a kobo for every time someone said this to me, as a soft elbowing to persuade me to get in line… But there are Nigerian publishers that function like villages with elders, chiefs, serfs, customs insisting that you must kowtow to people and call them Aunty and Uncle. In the process of selling your book, you might have to answer to the publisher’s mother and father and brothers and sisters and other extracontractual relations. You become entangled in the publisher’s personal life, and they entangled in yours. The business is perhaps being run from the publisher’s sitting room where they live with all of their extended family.
When the publisher takes issue with you, it isn’t professional, it is personal to all of these people in her house. But when you have a problem with how the business is handling your money, it isn’t personal now, it is business. All of these conditions power the mother-child dynamics. You also, instinctively and foolishly at first, bring the publisher into your own home and personal affairs until the relationship becomes an invasion.
Well, I always felt like the publisher was my person. We all felt like that. Every one of us. I felt so happy to have her in my corner.
I told my guy that after hearing all this, I have realised something terrible about myself. E be like say I be the kind person wey fit dey cult. I go just dey one camp dey follow guru like fool. So easily brainwashed, I did not even ask anybody else.
Before I met the prolific Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole in Edinburgh at the Edinburgh Book Festival, every single thing I had heard about him from Nigeria to the Western Cape had been negative. With hindsight, I believe we weren’t meant to sit and talk for any significant period of time because of the possibility of comparing notes about our mutual publisher. Throughout our meeting, there was a representative of the publisher present in the room, at all times. It isn’t a well known fact that Teju Cole’s first insightful and brilliant book titled Every Day is for the Thief was first published by Cassava Republic Press.
We were scheduled to meet for dinner and then an unplanned roam through the city. He walked into the restaurant impeccably dressed, with a coral rose in his lapel. He made me laugh, bought me a mojito in a dingy nightclub slippery with sweat and other unidentified fluids. The mojito was stolen from the fringes of the dance floor where I had placed it. He hugged me tight to say goodnight…
So charmed was I, I made a call while waiting for my flight home, from the airport lounge in the morning. I called the publisher who had spent months grooming me for the meeting, intending to regale her with how much I liked Teju Cole, and what a complete contradiction he was to what I had been sold. It was actually a question I was asking over the short length of the phone call. I waited for an answer to my question. It never arrived. Realistically, a writer cannot be the most important writer of their generation right at the very beginning of a career, but many writers have been told by their Nigerian publisher that they are. A Nigerian writer with promise will be offered all kinds of bizarre accolades, so much so that they will end up ashamed to talk about what they once heard and believed, later on when they come to their senses. The more vulnerable the easier it is to ingest the copious amounts of bullshit.
A publisher once wrote me these words: ‘I quite understand but this lack of confidence wahala is too much. You are for me, easily the best writer in Nigeria. I’m not just saying that to perk you up either. Teju Cole is only just fit to clean the undersides of your shoes, and Chimamanda could at the very best be the person who sits outside your gate looking for some kobo to drop every blue moon if she smiles sweetly enough…’
The publisher was buttering me up to persuade me to cover a spectacularly disturbing piece of satire on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, written by El Nathan John. The incident was informally called ‘cocoyamgate’ in the Nigerian literary sphere, and took place in 2013. During an interview with Aaron Bady at the Boston Review, Chimamanda had referred to El Nathan John as her boy. It was clear the words were used affectionately, with absolutely no guile. But El Nathan John took offence and responded with a crude satire filled with sexually denigrating reflections in a blog post in which he compared Adichie to cocoyams. The response titillated the Nigerian literary scene and blew up into a mess that proved hard to clean up, mostly because of the feeling that Adichie was not likeable and that her ‘preening’ had earned her the knocks. Even though truthfully the blog post was undeserved and breathtakingly unfair.
The undercurrents of El Nathan John’s aggression were difficult to decipher at the time, because of all the noise surrounding the affair. But then there was an email from a Nigerian publisher in my mailbox around that time with (more of) the following words:
‘…Not sure if you’ve done anything on the cocoyam before, but it might make for quite a funny post (with absolutely no contemporary references to think of, of course!) What do you think? Could you rustle something up quickly that we could put on our [insert publisher’s name] blog/FB yada yada? It would be a very-early teaser for The book…’
The leading Nigerian publisher had made a spurned advance to Adichie. They put a few earwigs in El Nathan’s ear and lit a fire under her just for the fun of it. The Nigerian publishing landscape is unique because there is so little accountability. People are easily dehumanised in the competitiveness of the landscape. I had my own personal issues with Adichie, but El Nathan John’s satire on cocoyams was rotten and inexcusable not only in the way that it justified dealing unconscionably with people one doesn’t like in a pretend professional capacity, but because the satire was incredibly sexually denigrating. The literary landscape did not put out the fire but fanned it instead, for attention. We let it burn. I wanted no part in a follow up. I declined quietly. I was confused and ashamed.
‘I am going to reach out to one person I know that left but she was so self-deprecating that I don’t know if she is over the spell. When I asked how she did it, she said it was because the publisher got tired of her madness and let her go.’
Keeping one’s balance as a writer in the Nigerian literary sphere requires navigating scandals small and large fashioned for distraction. A pretence of political correctness. Fake afro-optimism. Skirmishes exploding every day in the lawless war zone that embraces social media and real life. Messages received at odd hours warning you about what side you ought to be on. Everything happening loudly all the time, so you aren’t aware that the stakes are being controlled by a handful of people vying for a whole country’s worth of talent.
A Nigerian publisher asked me if I knew about Boney M and the fact that they ended up broke even though their handlers were still benefiting from their music replays on radio till today. I admitted I did not know their back story. The publisher said, well it was always a good idea for a writer to have a side hustle since it was almost never possible to live off the earnings of one’s book. She repeated the assertion many times over the course of our conversations about publishing. I had no idea there was a point to the repetition. Or that it was meant to be a professional advice. If your authors made enough money or had enough to hand, they might sue you.
The cultural distances between London, Cape Town, New York and Nigeria will seem impossible to navigate from Lagos or Ibadan or Calabar as a Nigerian writer ready to meet a global audience. The Nigerian author will willingly hand herself over to the Nigerian publisher as protégée. The publisher has long been communicating with that world and acting in their own interest rather than that of their authors.
They were all cracking these jokes about one of their published authors- and I didn’t get the jokes. The publisher started to talk about how her sister had told her: ‘look at that person who is representing your brand, etc, etc… what a shame for you.’
The Nigerian publisher might define a new morality for the Nigerian writer preparing to meet readers abroad… It is the most depressing thing to see
There is nothing like a gentleman’s handshake. Shacking up is better than the commitment of marriage: you can put your back to the mattress and spread your legs but don’t sign anything. Shrewdness beats honour. All these white people are racist in any case and they hate you, but they won’t show it. Publish your book first in Nigeria for patriotic reasons and for the national pride of doing so. Ignore the markets and cultures in New York, London, Paris; we will act as translators for you. In any case just be yourself…you know… African. In order to sell your book, you must go from prestigious bookshop to prestigious bookshop crossing hot legs in sexy boots. And if it doesn’t happen that way you are a failure…
Walls constructed with the use of words by a Nigerian publisher to keep foreign agents from gaining access to publishing rights outside the country turn the writer who was a local champion at home into a wild animal in need of a leash in the streets of London.
I was suicidal and it took me years to get back my mental health and my confidence.
As carried away as I was when my book was published in Nigeria, there were certain extra-contractual points I attempted to clarify. Could we agree that writing was my first priority? I was surprised by the publisher’s response. Not really, I couldn’t. I had an obligation (written down in the contract, signed by me) that I had to sell the book as arranged by the publisher. Yes, I knew about this clause and had agreed to it, but could I say, for example, that the joy of the craft must not be stolen and the peace of mind and time to write must be protected? No, there were no such guarantees given. I had to be available at the publisher’s demand to market the book. Could we agree that my book would make a basic livelihood and pay for my necessities? No, of course, not. We had already had that discussion, about me looking for alternative sources of income since I couldn’t depend on my book’s earnings.
We agreed though, publisher and I, that the industry is inequitable and all kinds of factors put you at a disadvantage and there are no guarantees that your book will do well, or that you will make a million or even a thousand pounds.
Writing in Nigeria can be especially difficult because of the lack of dependable electricity. And because writing is still often classified as a hobby and not a true profession. The real contract is this. So, much life spent sitting alone, putting down words like ploughing a field in hope. Sometimes, the reader cares about what you’ve written and people make a great big fuss about it, and a lot of times people don’t care. The effort isn’t diminished by the reception if your book doesn’t do well, but above all else writing should count. When everything else disappoints, the money is an outrage, and there is no desire or power to go and grin at people in bookshops because you are exhausted and you are human, the love of the craft is all you really have. How much is that worth?
* Aribisala, essayist, writer, painter, and food memoirist, is the author of Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex, and the Nigerian Taste Buds, which won the John Avery Prize at the André Simon Book Awards 2016. ‘This piece was first published in Flaming Hydra, February 2025′
