Stephanie Wolters talks to Adewale Maja Pearce, co-founder of The New Gong publishing house, about the challenges of African publishing

So, in 2005, we found ourselves with two manuscripts -- my business partner Dulue Mbachu’s novel War Games, which I was editing professionally and which I really liked, and my collected essays, which were supposed to be published by a small British publishing house that got nervous about one or two things I said about Ken Saro-Wiwa and wanted to censor me. So Dulue said: “Well why don’t we do what we always wanted to do and launch?” So we did.

No writing in the Commonwealth has probably won more prizes than Nigerian literature, but almost all of it is being published abroad by Nigerians living abroad.

What are the problems with printing in Nigeria?
All the equipment is available, but people don’t pay attention to quality really. In Nigeria we … wonder why people are so concerned about page direction, or uneven print quality … you simply don’t have quality control in Nigeria. It plagues every facet of Nigerian life.

So we went ahead and we do it ourselves -- typesetting, editing, putting it into PDF and sending off to the printer in the US.

How do you sell your books outside of Nigeria?
We understood that if we wanted to sell internationally, the key was amazon.com in the US. That is the ultimate bookshop and we discovered we could buy space and sell through them, but to do that, we needed our books available in the US. So we got on to the net, and then started investigating printers in the US and discovered it would not cost much more than printing in Nigeria.

How do you find your authors?
Some through the Association of Nigerian authors, and through internet sites such as Wole Soyinka’s, Poetry Potter. Also through the print media.

We have excited interest among writers who see it as a new initiative and something they have been waiting for for a long time.

What is your main market?
The biggest market is the US, which is why we were anxious to sell though Amazon. Initially we have focused especially on African studies programmes at universities. There are also a huge number of Nigerians in the US, and, of course, ordinary Americans, especially African-Americans.

Is South Africa an important market?
We have sold some books in South Africa. We are planning to go to the Cape Town Book Fair. What we are interested in is collaborating with South African publishers. We have to grow and people have to see, because we are still so small. We see South Africa as our most important market outside the US.

Adewale Maja Pearce is a writer based in Lagos and was the editor of the Heinemann Africa series. The New Gong website is: www.thenewgong.com

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