Terra Cotta Beauty: Journey to Publication

It was a very interesting journey for me. I had been writing short stories for about seven years, primarily because I was a little bit nostalgic for life in Lagos (especially in the winter when the temperatures were frigid). About two years ago, I realized that I had close to twenty stories that I had written and I thought it might be a good idea to put them all together in a book. I did not want to go through the whole rigmarole of having to search for an agent and get a publishing deal, so I started to explore options available for authors who would like to self-publish. At same time, I was working on the stories to see which ones I thought could be in a collection and I narrowed them down to seven. I also wanted there to be some connection between the characters so for some stories I modified the plot a little or changed the ending to create some sort of cohesion to the stories. The self-publishing option worked perfectly for me. I chose CreateSpace which is run by the folks at Amazon. I liked the services that they provided because it was not too demanding and they have a suite of services so you can choose which package works for you, plus they also cover the marketing side of things which if you are author who is self-published and navigating the waters for the very first time, it can be pretty daunting.

Excerpt from a 2014 interview.