I recently contributed a novella to digital romance series Drumbeats, from Kenya’s Storymoja – but why are large publishers in Uganda still sleeping? Fellow panelist Melissa Kyeyune runs small press Khamel, and already makes 500 dollars a month for her own books. Yet e-publishing offers a greatly reduced financial risk when putting out a book, and a potentially huge market – which some publishers are already tapping into. The major Ugandan publishers profit from supplying print books to the education system digital books, which they cannot sell to the government, mean nothing to them. So why haven’t mainstream Ugandan publishers embraced digital books? I built my writing career on digital platforms, so when they asked me to participate in a panel discussion on the rise of digital literature and publishing, at the recent Uganda International Creative Writers Conference, I begun asking questions about the book business today. Statistics say that there will be 334 million African smartphone connections by 2017.
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