Going Home to Africa
Going Home to Africa - The Book
I'm often asked why I wrote the book and to be honest it was in response to the many requests I had from my followers to share more of my story and travels. Little did I know at the time that it would take me longer to write about it than it would to actually do it. From starting to write in November 2019 to publishing in April 2020 it was indeed a mammoth task.
I had to write the story, and after setting out the structure I simply threw it all down into my computer. The initial story was well over 200000 words, it seems I had a lot of story to tell and even then there were things I later realised I had forgotten to include. From there I personally read and edited the story twice. This was essential as I found that there were obviously days when I was tired or distracted and what I wrote was mere nonsense. There were two proof-readers and my fabulous editor who also read it several times. Frankly by the end of it all I was thoroughly sick of it.
Nonetheless, I chose to self-publish because I didn't think anyone would be interested in my tome and it seems that only the really famous authors make any money with publishers, all the smaller authors I had spoken to were earning pennies on the book with their publishers taking a huge chunk and on top of all of that they were still expected to do their own marketing. That decided me on self-publishing, I am reasonably technologically enabled and know something about marketing, but it seems not nearly enough about book marketing and I set out to become an author.
I chose Amazon print-on-demand, although their terms and reputation were not great they offered worldwide access to followers. I also decided to print books in Zimbabwe as most people here don't have access to Amazon and shipping costs would be extreme. I'm delighted to say that the book launch went well. I even did a Zimbabwe book tour and when crazy COVID calms down I am looking forward to doing one in South Africa.
To my delight, especially as a first time author, the reviews have been amazing and you can see some of these here on the website (a compilation from Facebook, Amazon and Goodreads).
I'm now working on Book 2 which will be entirely different, it will be called Being Home in Africa and it will talk about returning to a country that I was absent from for 38 years and what it is like to return. Watch out for that one in 2022.
To find out more about the book find it on your local Amazon or here on www.goinghometoafrica.com.
Copyright
© Dot Bekker
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