24 Jan 2017

In recent years, social media has been used by people to market their skills.

One social media user who happens to be a writer also tapped in the opportunity by writing short stories on Facebook to establish a market for her soon to be published book.

Atsile Harminder (29), who hails from Francistown and started writing for Facebook early last year has since shared three complete screenplays which included Family Secrets, Memoirs of Malaysia and Ghetto Love Stories.

The three screenplays attracted loyal readers from with each story having over 8 000 followers.

With so much experience with free mass writing on platforms like whattpad.com, authonomy.com as well as blogging, one would have thought that Facebook would have also been part of the platform that Harminder used before as opposed to only starting early last year. According to Harminder she avoided writing for Facebook users because she felt the audience wanted love stories, which had since bombarded social media as compared to crime stories that she was passionate about.

‘’I started Facebook writing beginning of last year, I’ve always avoided it because I felt it wasn’t the right audience for me mostly because majority of the books on Facebook are love stories, and I love writing crime, so I believed the audience wasn’t ready for my kind of writing,” she said.

To her surprise, when she posted out of boredom the first episode of Family Secrets, which is about a filthy rich family in Botswana, plagued by secrets, deceit, lies, murder, love, and family bond she instantly got so much likes and shares of the episode with majority of people getting inquisitive about her work.

“After I gave birth to my son and was taking some time off from my freelance work, I decided to give it a try and surprisingly the response was overwhelming. I must admit I did not expect such positive response, basically I was wrong about the Facebook audience,” she noted.

With the audience that she has since established through Facebook, Harminder is optimistic that her published book that is expected to be launched next month will have market not only in the United Kingdom where the publishing company is but also in Southern Africa.

“I have a book that I’m publishing with a company in the UK and the story has not been shared on Facebook. I got the contract before I started writing for an audience in Southern Africa, so I had not initially planned on releasing the book here but now that I have an audience, I have decided to release the book as an eBook in Botswana first, and if I get a publishing deal with local publishers, we will publish hard copies locally,” she explained.

She has encouraged upcoming writers to be creative with their writing because she had since realised that with the advent of social media writing, more people were keen on reading.BOPA