Sade Adeniran's first novel "Imagine This" has been shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book Award for Africa.
I pray she wins the highly coveted prize, because she deserves the success she has sacrificed so much for, intellectually, physically and financially.
She began writing the book in 1998 and it took her five years to complete it. She gave her family and friends to read it first before she sent it to fifteen agents and about twenty publishers and none of them accepted to publish it. She kept the novel under her bed until she made up her mind to pursue her great dream. Sade quit her job as a marketing executive for a telecom company and went to the Spanish Writers Retreat for a month to do nothing else but write. It was at the retreat that she decided to take the leap of faith and self-publish her novel.
“In a sense I approached it as a creative process, not a business enterprise,” Sade said.
She paid £100 for the ISBN and found a good printer at the London Book Fair. She spent over £2,000 to print 1,100 copies and started distributing the copies and giving it to Amazon.co.uk to sell more copies.
Sade should have given her first novel a better title, and prevent the confusion of the novel sharing the same title with other books like Julia Baird's Imagine This and Vickie M. Stringer's Imagine This.
Reviewers have praised "Imagine This" and I hope the novel wins the prize.
I wish her all the best.
