Country Tales Is Changing The Story for African Literature
Books have long been a brilliant way of sharing ideas, communicating opinions and passing on history. Within these contexts, there’s almost always an element of storytelling. But stories themselves have a place in enhancing creativity, and building an audience for their tellers. When it comes to recent digital means to publishing stories, there are fewer alternatives to The-Everything-Store as Amazon has become the de-facto means to sell books online.
However, a home for the niche market of African writers, and their stories, seems missing. Country Tales is a startup that wants to change that narrative, and tell a better story in online publishing for Africa(ns). The startup is building a catalogue of “purely Africa literature”, comprising different genres.
The promise of Country Tales is to debut African writes who are deprived of a platform to showcase themselves and their works to gain as much traction and popularity as possible, that would push them towards their dream of becoming fully fledged authors. If you have any close relationship with writers, this is some refreshing news.
CEO Elikem expounds the idea and reason, for Country Tales, and the vision for it. New writers in Africa face major challenges when it comes to showcasing themselves and their works to a larger audience of readers. As a result, they litter their writings on Internet forums, social media, and even in the comment sections of websites that commanded great traffic. Upon thorough research, we found the stumbling block to be the unavailability of a platform that seeks to address their needs. To solve this problem, we developed this platform that not only helps them to gain traction and popularity, but also offer them other free services such as proofreading, cover art designs for each literature they choose to publish on our platform, and promoting their works for free.
Courage Elikem Agamah, Founder, Country Tales
As writers upload their books, uniquely identifiable standardised barcodes are generated which allow readers to scan and search for the books and other related content with those barcodes.
As at the time of writing, Country tales offers its services to writers free of charge. This includes proofreading, cover art design, publishing their works, promoting the writers and their literature.
For readers, it’s obviously a great place to pass the time, and enjoy some stories from writers. It’ll be great to follow and grow along with writers, as is the norm with most creators and their audiences.
The current team at Country Tales is made up of two programmers, Courage and James, who keep the website up, Samuel a marketer who work on publicity as much as possible, and an editor, Esenam, who edits and manages the web content.
Beyond visiting the website, you can also follow the startup and find more purely african literature via their social media channels, Facebook and Twitter.
For the several Africans coming online, and wanting to share their stories through books and short stories, Country Tales is a startup which will help their dreams come true. The value is even better for African in diaspora, and non-Africans who just love reading African literature.
Originally published at gharage.
