I Wrote a Book!
Writing was the easy part if I am being honest.
I have been writing for a long time;
poems and letters; in diaries and then blogs more recently.
Somewhere in me, there have always been stories..
About a year and a half ago
I decided to write a childrens' book because my child asked me for a story that I realised didn't exist.
We are from a tiny part of West Africa.
The lives we live there,
Don't really exist in childrens books.
Our adventures
Our mishaps
Our nature
And our culture
All rarely found in books.
About a week after we came back to Sweden from a trip to Gambia, my daughter asked me a simple question:
"Mum can we read a book tonight from Gambia ..where we can see the plums from Grandma house..?"
I looked and I looked and found it no where..So I decided to write it.
It is true that I had been thinking about the lack of representation in media and books for a while but that moment really hit me hard.
I wanted to share some of my childhood with my children.
I wanted them to take a piece of their heritage back home to sweden.
But the majority of the books I found showed Africa in relation to war , villages or jungles and wild animals .
There were so few comedies or adventures.
Stories with our traditions or history. They were largely absent.
This interest in stories or the lack of stories, became a passion that I have been working on for almost two years.
Like I said, writing was the easy part.
4 stories poured out of me, like I had been formulating them in my subconscious for a while.. new ideas also started floating in my head waiting for me to unpack them.
Some stories, I knew would appeal to a wider audience as they were not so context specific.
But I felt I had to start with the simplest one, the one my children asked for, and so Mangoes & Monkeybread
born.
Once I started with the process, I realised one of the main reasons our stories are not in books.
The publishers..the gatekeepers aren't open to new storytellers like us.
So I decided to go for it on my own.
I had to learn new programs and software.
How to edit
How to format
How to find illustrators
Writing Contracts
Printing margins
Taxes liabilities
Marketing
The list goes on and on.
But I managed..bit by bit..
Yesterday, finally I published the first book Mangoes & Monkeybread on Amazon Kindle as an Ebook❣.
Thanks to a fundraiser, the print version will also be available in a few weeks ❗❗
Last night we read the book in bed on our kindle and my kids reacted like Santa had arrived in person!
They were so incredibly happy and excited..giggling all over the bed.
All I could do was sigh a deep breath of relief and satisfaction.
I cant wait for them the hold it in their little hands..
And if I am perfectly honest, I cant wait to start on the next book!
In the mean time, have listen to the free audio book in english below!
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