I wrote an African sci-fi novel and nobody’s reading it. Can you guess why?
I wrote an African sci-fi novel that not many people have read. Its unpopularity has nothing to do with the fact that it’s African-based and everything to do with the simple fact that people don’t discover books the same way they discover other media on the internet.
A relatively unknown film director can create a movie, upload it to YouTube and if it gains traction, can gain millions of views. Similarly, an unknown musician can do the same thing with Spotify or many other music streaming services. When it comes to books, however, an unknown author can’t self-publish a book and expect to get as many eyeballs as a video or a piece of music. Nevertheless, if that unknown author made an audiobook or wrote a blog post that gained traction, then that piece of content could almost become as popular as the video or piece of music. Most people nowadays would rather watch a video than listen to something, would rather listen to something than read, and would rather read for a short amount of time than read for hours. Short videos are the medium of choice and books are the least preferred medium.
This is not to say that there aren’t people who read self-published books from unknown authors. There are loads of books of a certain genre that do really well, romance books, romance fantasy books to be specific. If I wrote a book about a woman who falls in love with an, attractive elf man and put said attractive elf man on the cover of my book in a seductive pose, jackpot. But I’m not that kind of author.
So what does that mean for an unknown author like me? To be honest, I don’t know. The first book I’ve written and self-published has only been read by a handful of people. Each one has told me the book is good and is excited for me to release a sequel. This book took 4 years of my spare time to write and in total made less money than a YouTube video that took me about 30 minutes to make, so financially it doesn’t make sense. So I want to give this book another shot, and instead of putting the whole book out there, I split it up into smaller chunks for people to read?
I don’t know if this is going to work but I’ll try it out anyway. I’m going to put my whole book here on Medium for FREE, well free for Medium members. You can read as much or as little of it as you want. I’m going to split all the chapters into bite-size chunks for people to digest easily and in order not to spam people, I’ll release a tiny bit of it every day.
If you enjoy what you’re reading and want to support me you can buy the whole book from Amazon, or you can give me a tip on Ko-fi.
Start by reading the first part of the first chapter here ->
Happy reading.
