By Olamide Babatunde
The previous years have been fertile for creative writing from Nigerian authors and their counterparts from Africa. Their stories and narratives have continued to win international acclaims and successfully curried more local readers. Lagos itself bore witness to this at the last 18th Lagos Book and Art Festival, which held at Freedom Park, Lagos. Book lovers from all over trooped out to participate in the five-day event. Authors bantered on old titles and charted paths to new fictions –some expected to be released in 2017.
Narrators have noted everything from the mundane, divine, ephemeral to the most chaotic in their works. Toni Kan, in his latest book, Carnivorous City, tells of Lagos as a Beast and a seductress; another says “the fellow looked as delicious as food”. These are the beautifully worded descriptions of the literary offspring who have now taken over after the likes of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka who brought fame to the African writing game.
These authors are doing the nation proud and keeping readers entertained with focus on daily living in a terrorised terrain, Post Biafra war and its attending effects, love, widening gap between the rich and the poor in a multiethnic and religious nation where the scenario is how Fela painted in his Monkey dey work, Baboon dey chop chorus and the abstract, Nigerian soups and sex penned by Yemisi Aribisala in her Memoirs.
In spite of the many challenges facing the local publishing industries with Lagos and Ibadan as the major centres, the over 100 publishing houses, including the new arrivals, have served the purpose of publishing books that are up to standard despite the unhelpful economic situation. Unable to help the situation, some Nigerian authors continue to seek foreign publishers, write for its audience and secure international attention to make profits from their books.
The challenges are numerous and, for those who have their luck stuck with creative writing, it has a lot to do with numbers and knowing what the consumers want, according to Samuel Kolawole, Managing Director, University Press. In any case, these challenges are not grave in the face of inhouse editing deficiency, a plague ravaging the industry as a whole. What any writer wants the most is to speak to readers with the least interference, without the publishers wading in. This would seem impossible. In the end, like T.S Eliot said from one of his Memos. “It is not enough to publish a good and marketable book, or even a number of them; I feel that one of the best advertisements for a publishing firm is for that firm to develop a distinct character which shall become recognized by the trade and the public.”
What has become recognisable in the services of some publishing houses is the inability to bring up to trade standard manuscripts because of lack of or inefficient editors. Editors come in at various stages of a publication process, different editors with different areas of expertise and specific roles are to work with the authors to get to the standard of the publisher. A structural editor, for instance, will reconstruct poor sentences, weak scenes, characters or situations and also go on to proofread.
It is most certain that many readers would not miss any mistake made by an author. To avoid this preventable goof, authors would be lucky to have editors and proofreaders go over their manuscripts either for minor or major alterations. What ever requirements or needs the manuscript requires, it is important that three or more readers go through the scripts to ensure it is error free.
Ibrahim Abubakar, author of Season of Crimson Blossoms and 2016 NLNG winner asserts that the Nigerian publishing industry is plagued by many challenges, and one of them is the dearth of credible and quality editors. This has forced the few functional publishing houses to outsource editing to freelance editors. Sometimes they get it right and the quality of work is outstanding. Sometimes not so. Outsourcing editing has become necessary, because the traditional publishing houses in Nigeria are mostly small business being operated by people with real passion for books; they can’t afford to employ editors on a full
time basis.
To be continued