The truth is, the spice of life is art — from movie making, music, dance, poetry, storytelling and the kindred relations. While other kindred industries seems to have found its feet quite well, surviving on writing books is a win - win game, it's never a guaranteed key to overflowing wealth even if the name is there (as it always is). It's not a total judgement that writers are pauper but virtually, every well to do writer has something else in the professional bud asides from writing. You might not agree with me, truth is meant to be relative.
Recently, I was speaking with an author and I realised how name doesn't interpret ebbing troupes of publications. I don't want to argue on the readership state of Nigerians, some things are not worth countering points over. I can see how far we've gone, how far we've come and how far we are to go is no longer determined by our mindset but things bigger than that. But it all starts from us.
It all starts from us when you stop going into a writer's inbox to write free blurbs and reviews. It all starts from us when you stop going into a writer's inbox to write you poems and essays freely. It all starts from us when we stop asking writers to edit our unpublished manuscripts freely. It all starts from us when we realise that all writers could be millionaires if only we value our writings as much as we value ourselves or maybe, even more. But do we even know the conscious gap that guides these things? Maybe, that answers the riddle of a widely read writer that releases an online anthology with no price attached and a writer who's just building his audience that attached a thousand on his first online anthology. We will learn not by mistakes but by the fact that we are repetitions of history. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe this is just another scribbling of an overfed writer, maybe.
I don tok my own sha o.
©Yusuf Balogun Gemini.