Oh ABNA, ABNA! Wherefore art Thou ABNA?
O ABNA, ABNA! Wherefore art thou ABNA? Deny thy father Amazon and refuse thy new name Kindle Scout. Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be an unpublished author. I was so heartbroken Amazon substituted the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award with the Kindle Scout program I understood how Juliet felt when she breathed these words. Discovering ABNA was the highlight of my writing career. For once there was an open invitation by a real publisher, a once in a blue moon opportunity for a writer based in Africa like me. I scoured through the winning synopsis and the winning books and thought I stood a decent chance of getting to the second round if not to the semi-finals and the grand finals. So I sat down and rewrote my 20K short story into a 50K novel and edited until I could edit no more. English is not my first language. God gave me my first language which my mother couldn't understand. So she taught me Shona, and that is my second language. Learnt my third language, good old English, according to the British Cambridge Syllabus all the days of my school life. I don’t regret it. There is a beauty about the universal language. Like making me understands hundreds of friends from different countries and submitting a book to ABNA. But when I learnt ABNA is dead and there lives Kindle Scout which I couldn't take part in, I rued the day my mother accepted my father’s proposal instead of waiting for an American tourist to swipe her off her feet Mills and Boon style and carry her off to America. So I have no valid American bank account, no American social security number and no American tax identification number and my love affair with ABNA is over. Just like that. It is difficult to get a literary agent and subsequently a publisher, but the journey is a million times more difficult if you are in Africa and you wish to write for the world. I voiced my objections to Amazon and a PR official promised to forward my objection to the right people. They should have kept ABNA in place until Kindle Scout is ready to be a fully-fledged international program. How can you replace an international all – encompassing program that brought the whole hopeful writing world together with a program for one nation; more or less? All I get are repeated emails to evaluate whether the PR official has assisted me and I keep clicking assistance is excellence, response is not satisfactory and Amazon’s policy on the issue is poor. Anyway, ABNA or Kindle Scout, it is Amazon’s decision to make and who am I to object? So ABNA is gone and my heart bleeds (Sigh).
