Booksellers and publishers say more readers are turning to local authors as they increasingly seek authentic, relevant stories.
Local book publisher, Anivesh Singh, started Made in Chatsworth in February 2020. A year later it had morphed into Made in Durban. In that time Singh and his friend, academic Kiru Naidoo, have activated an almost cult following of consumers eager for local literature. Singh has published 30 Durban authors and promoted scores more.
“It has been phenomenal,” says Singh. “You would have thought that social media and the internet would have killed books, but it has been the opposite. We changed the name to reflect more variety because there is such an authentic and attractive offering and people are yearning for that.
“There is huge sentimentality about local politics, history, people and places. People see themselves in these stories and relate to them. Reading is definitely not a dying culture. I see people building their own libraries. When I ask them why, they say ‘it’s just for me and my children’. Books offer something that Google never can, a legacy of ‘curated’, thoughtfully selected information that passes from one generation to the next.”
How Does She Do It?
Sensational Cindy Norcott did it again late last year. She wrote another book, this one entitled How Does She Do It?
Norcott is an entrepreneur and one-woman tsunami who launched a recruitment company 27 years ago and has since become a sought-after motivational speaker, business trainer, coach and mentor. And in between all of that she started a non-profit organisation, The Robin Hood Foundation, which runs more than 120 charitable outreach projects.
If you haven’t met Norcott, who previously wrote How To Be Unstoppable, you might imagine her as an A-type achiever who talks it up and blathers on. Gratefully, she’s far from that and her latest book (in spite of the pluggy title) is testament to Norcott’s humility and down-to-earth appeal. She is a mensch who writes revealingly about criticism, notions of success, mindfulness and lazy parenting. How Does She Do It? is a fun, hearty and accessible guide to life and business.
Tapping Into The Times
Author Nathi Olifant is a gifted storyteller with the common touch and an exceptional capacity for rich detail. He recently released The Fugitives, a sequel to his popular debut novel Blood, Blades And Bullets – Anatomy Of A Glebelands Hitman. The books are pacy thrillers that Olifant wrote by drawing on a wealth of experience as a journalist, including interviewing a hitman serving a life sentence.
Enterprising Olifant is a husband and father who started out at The Witness newspaper and ended his journalism career at the Sunday Times before becoming a government communicator. In between, he started a transport firm and then Inkabi Publishing. His crime fiction delves into the underworld of taxi hitmen, rogue cops and ruthless women. His sequel, the second of a planned trilogy, goes into issues of crime intelligence and political duplicity, strong themes in contemporary South Africa.
Q: Blood, Blades And Bullets took 20 months to write. Did you have the plot down before you set out?
A: While I had a clear picture of what I needed to do, the twists and turns and new research meant that the trajectory changed when I had written about 30%.
Q: What was the step change like between journalism and fiction?
A: Luckily for me I took a creative writing course in 1998 which included journalism. First, I was a short story writer for Drum magazine and the defunct Pace magazine around 1999 before I abandoned fiction for a career in journalism.
Q: Your books are a hit. Your published teasers on FB that shot off the charts. How many books have you sold?
A: It took me by surprise. The teasers helped a lot and being self-published gives me that freedom. While by world standards 5 000 books sold as just “vapour”, but in 13 months it is a big deal for a South African crime fiction first-timer.
Q: Your foreword was written by Dudu Busani-Dube whose self-published books have been turned into a Showmax series. What vein of gold have you and Dube tapped into?
A: No one had tapped into the taxi mafia and how they hold the country to ransom. The taxi industry has created a lot of downstream economy, but also an industry of hitmen. You have crime bosses whose mission is to always recruit new blood, groom them and turn them into monsters. There’s a lot of relevance locally and if you can properly research it, you can hit that sweet spot called authenticity.