The Right Way To Market Your Fictional Stories To Nigerians in 2021.

Are you a Nigerian author or an author interested in introducing your fictional stories to the Nigerian market? Well, I have the right hacks for you.

Before taking any interest in software development and product management, I grew up wanting to be a writer.

I wrote for years and very few people read my works until I started unintentionally doing things differently late 2019. From 8 readers, my stories started racking up thousands of reads across WattPad, OkadaBooks, Smashwords and very recently Amazon.

How did I do it all? Well, it all started with picking a niche to write on — I chose controversial.

I released my first ever LGBTQ+ story on Wattpad, August 2019 — don’t get me wrong, I didn’t write the story with the intent of trying to milk the LGBTQ+ community in Nigeria but as I worked on a particular project for a course on “New Gender” during my Masters degree programme at Unilag in 2019, it became glaring the unbearable extent to which the LGBTQ+ community suffered in Africa(most especially Northern Africa).

I don’t know what it was about this story but it did well with numbers even without me marketing it and so did others like it.

Very recently however, I was appraoched by a group of Nigerian writers called the “Black Female Authors” and we all teamed up to write a Christmas romance anthology “Hell Hath No Fury: A Christmas Anthology” which got us recognized as International Bestsellers on Amazon in the African Literature category. We were able to achieve this with minimal market spend.

During this project, I worked with 19 amazing women and learnt very important lessons I will now share. Marketing our books turned out to be more fun in the end and less expensive because:

• We sought out beta readers from our circle
• We held book tours via Instagram and Facebook, supporting each author with our unique communities
• We reached out to close friends who could help us blog about the book’s release
• We eached reviewed eachothers works, helping strengthen SEO around the book
• Our beta readers ended up leaving their reviews across various book platforms where our books were enlisted on and rating it, moving us up the chats
• We reached out to Bookclubs around Lagos and Abuja for book readings and hyped the hell out of our anthology (creating hype is very important, it leaves readers expectant and curious)
• Lastly, we sought out book review handles on Instagram to help review our books on their page.

p.s We got amazing and bad reviews but it showed varying perspectives on our different stories and we took the feedback from these reviews and worked on them towards our next project.

Yes, doing online marketing for your books sounds awesome but in those times when you don’t have the money to get your book out there through online marketing, you can join hands with others to help with the push.

N.B: It is also important to research your niche, I was barely lucky at the start and my no marketing strategy won’t probably work for others. It never worked for me too years earlier. Also, sometimes, start controversial — not to milk people and their stories but to give life to their struggles and all they go through.

I am a product manger fresh out of Product school looking to intern either remotely, in Nigeria, Africa or in Diaspora. If you got value from reading this article, you can check out my portfolio website, or just follow me on my social media handles via LinkedIn or Twitter.