Henry Akubuiro
Godwin Iheanacho is the author of Silver Lining: the Confession (2019), a sequel to a work with a similar name, Silver Lining. Still, he isn’t done with the title. “There is also another one on the way with a different subtitle,” he hints.
We are chatting at a bar in Surulere. Iheanacho is wearing a traditional fabric made by his wife and his face is wreated with a sunny smile. “When I wrote the first draft of Silver Lining, I just kept it. I was watching a cartoon with the title, Stuart Little, from where the title came up. Since then, it has been a title I have loved, and am sticking to it,” says the author, who is also into radio drama production.
In the previous edition of Silver Lining, he added a dollop of poetry into the prose fiction. But this sequel is chiefly prose fiction. He explains about the mixture amid laughter, “One thing about writing is that every author is unique in his own way. For me, the way it was flowing to me and I was writing it down, there were things that I needed to convey with poetry to send my message across. For instance, a poem like ‘What a Woman Wants’ is used to send the message across on what a woman really wants.”
Silver Lining: the Confession isn’t 100 percent prose fiction; it is sprinkled with nonfiction to create a spicy, scribal gourmet. “There are some things you needed to say and you wouldn’t like to offend someone without letting the person know. Secondly, interacting with other people who have felt the same pain I felt during that period drove that synergy of fiction and non-fiction,” he says.
Explaining the title choice of his latest work, he goes to the church for inspiration, “I am a Catholic, and all Catholics go for confession, and, in confession, you the parishioner confessing and the priest who is representing Jesus in human form, whatever you say in a confession is not for another ear.”
Interestingly, there is a personal angle to the story itself. The author admits, “Silver Lining: The Confession is the aftermath of Goddy’s broken relationship with Chidiebere. This is how Goddy has lived his life and has started a new chapter.”
The message he is conveying is that “love or relationship on the surface level is like medicine that comes with an expiry date” and “if you are in a relationship with each other and you are not honest with each other, you just have to let it go than having the other partner have extended, unproductive years with you.”
Sometimes negative events can bring out the best in a writer, like it happened to the brokenhearted Iheanacho. Hence, “Silver Lining was a smooth ride. A beautiful angel just worked out of my life, and I was grieved and was indoors, so I had all the time in the world to write it; I was just pouring down my thought. But, for the sequel, there were days that I was lost and I would be staring at the computer, and nothing was forthcoming, then I would go back again to the introduction to start reading again to get ideas to continue.”
Iheanacho writes in the early hours, 2 am and 3 am, when everybody else is sleeping. This helps, too. “Once I start, I am unstoppable,” he says. The leading characters in Silver Lining: The Confession are youths, and they are basically the author’s target, because “they tend to mix up ‘love’ and ‘infatuation’, carried away by physical appearance and sweet words.
“I think love-at-first-sight only existed during the days of our forefathers. Now, it is not so. Majority of the youths need to be tutored that relationship is not always smooth –it is not one-sided –and they need to come out straight. If it something that is going to end in marriage, they should be frank about it, and not moving without a direction,” he adds.
The cover page of the book bears the image of the author himself kneeling before a priest. He doesn’t want to mince words about it. He laughs as he says, “The story is my story, of course. It is a way of saying that the Goddy used in the story is a different Goddy people used to know. That was part of the challenges I had trying to tell the story so that followed it and not derail along the line. It was very tough for me separating the real Goddy and Goddy as a story character.”
Silver Lining has been on Amazon since late 2012. He initially self-published the book in 2011 before linking up with AuthorHouse to do another edition, after which he reached an agreement with Amazon to have it on the portal.
One would think Iheanacho has made good money ever since, but his tale of a rip-off by Amazon would shock you. With the inability of big publishing houses in the country to sign new writers like him, Iheanacho decided to do it his way by self-publishing his work and uploading it on Amazon.
He was expecting royalties from the international online portal, but no dice, as he told The Sun Literary Review. “Royalties weren’t forthcoming, and I was wondering, ‘Is this how the Wole Soyinkas and Chinua Achebes lived their lives?’” That made him to begin to ask questions, and Amazon didn’t give him the right answers.
At the last check, when he was tracking his sales before Amazon wiped out his records, over 200 copies of Silver Lining had been sold. Unfortunately, Amazon told him he wasn’t entitled to royalties, because he signed Free Publicity contract, which entailed that Amazon would promote his book and, whatever money it made, it would go to Amazon. Iheanacho was scandalised, because he didn’t sign that kind of agreement.
“I only did book giveaway on Good Reads; I gave out five free copies. At a point in time, I was asked to do more, and I gave out additional five copies, making it ten copies, but not giving 200-and-something books out. It is impossible. Even with a gun to my neck, I wouldn’t have done that,” says Iheanacho.
At a point, he decided to let the issue die, but Amazon reached out to him and paid paltry 2 shillings. That wasn’t the kind of money he was looking for, so Iheanacho asked Amazon to take back the money. He laments, “Till date, the excuse Amazon is using for not paying me is that my bank in Nigeria is denying them access to pay into my account, which is not possible, according to my bank.
“From my point of view, Amazon needs to check their system again. If they know they don’t want their system to work, they should not allow authors to be sending their works while they are selling and keeping the money. It doesn’t make sense.”
Iheanacho is grateful that Amazon gave him the platform to self-publish, but not to rip him off at the end. “If you deny a newborn baby a breast milk, the parents know that night, they won’t sleep. I feel bad, because Amazon as big as it is, should state clearly the terms considering the fact that they are collecting 30 percent VAT on each copy sold,” he says.
Indeed, Iheanacho’s hard luck is pathetic. It is not only Amazon that has yet to pay him for selling his books, another American publishing house, AuthorHouse, hasn’t paid him a dime, too.
He tone goes bluesy, “AuthorHouse told me they don’t control other retailers, but I asked them, ‘How did other retailers get my book? Is it not through you?’ For them to have gotten it, that means they bought it. When I did my research on AuthorHouse, I discovered that I am not the only Nigerian writer they are owing.”
In response to the ill treatment meted out to him, the author had to rewrite some chapters of Silver Lining and rename it Silver Lining: The Confession. Once again, he has reached out to Amazon to sell the book internationally. He hopes that he will getter a better treatment than what seemed to be a dubious treatment the last time. The book, also, is available on Okada Books in Nigeria.