Sade Adeniran (12, Nov 2007)
Living the Dream
When Literary Agent Toby Eady developed flu hours before the Women Writer’s Network November meeting it seemed as if the chances of finding a replacement were nil. Then Sade Adeniran, WWN Board member and author of ‘Imagine This’, a novel about a young girl growing up in a small Nigerian village, stepped in to give an inspiring talk on how her novel came to be published. Helen Pearse reports.
Sade Adeniran began writing at a young age as a way of communicating with her emotionally distant father. “I discovered that if I wrote letters to him I could make him listen and get across what I was trying to say more easily than if I spoke directly to him,” she smiles. Her first piece of professional writing came in the form of a play for Radio Four called ‘Memories of a Distant Past’. Then came the novel. Sade began writing ‘Imagine This’ in 1998 whilst working full time as a Marketing Executive. The book took five years to finish. Every year for five years she would take the whole of December off work and write non-stop.
“Friends and family read the book. I sent it to fifteen agents and about twenty publishers. I always got a response – not an out and out rejection. So I just kept the novel under my bed. And then I realised that I had to live my dream. I quit my job and went to Spanish Writers Retreat for a month to write. It was there that I made the decision to self publish,” Sade explained, “in a sense I approached it as a creative process, not a business enterprise.” Sade bought herself an ISBN for £100 and visited the London Book Fair where she found a printer. It cost her over £2,000 to have 1,100 copies printed. The book began selling through independent bookstores and via Amazon, but Sade cautions against setting the price of a book too low, “my price didn’t factor in postage or the fact that Amazon take 60% of the cover price.”
The book now seems to be taking on a life of it’s own via word of mouth and reviews on the internet. Claire Christian from the Friday Project was very complimentary, and publisher Kirsten Clarke was impressed by a review written by former Waterstones’ buyer, Scott Pack, on his blog. Agents William Morris and Robin Wade have also expressed an interest in representing her. In the meantime Sade has been hard at work giving talks in local libraries and promoting her work world wide. ‘Imagine This’ is being considered as reading material at a University in Nigeria.
Sade is currently working on her second book and to help with getting the word out, is hoping that ‘Imagine This’ gets shortlisted for something. “It was little things that kept me going,” she recalls, “like a friend calling at 3am having finished the book and telling me ‘this is amazing!’ Little things like that make up for everything else.”
‘Imagine This’ by Sade Adeniran is published by SW Books
ISBN 978-0-9555453-0-6