Tunde Leye writing in the Scoop:
One of the major problems I see in Nigerian writing is prize-centricity. This is organizing the production of our writing around various prizes. We write to meet submission deadlines for prizes and not periods when sales of books are projected to be great. It is more important to many of us writers in Nigeria to have an xyz prize winner tag attached to our names than making sales of a hundred thousand books. We have reduced the story of success of the African writer to a single one - that of winning literary prizes.
...We have popular authors whose books are unable to deliver sales of fifty thousand copies, even when those books have won prizes. It is an anomaly, made possible because we haven't built our own publishing, preferring to outsource the publishing of our brilliant authors to foreign publishers. We must roll up our sleeves and focus on tackling the challenges to our publishing - distribution, quality assurance in printing, proper editing, varying our stories and focusing on our vast market. We must focus on selling African authors first in African markets, across borders. We must take advantage of technology to reduce the costs of distribution and where we can deliver the content via these platforms. We must collaborate with the arts that have already grown into industries, our music industry
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