The good news is Biblionef South Africa saw my post about their search for indigenous language books and contacted me. Not sure how we’ll work it out, but the executive director would like to meet.
Wow! It feels great to know that your words touched someone enough for them to pick up the phone and call not once, but twice. (I was stuck in meetings and didn’t know!)
Biblionef is based in Cape Town, and I’m attending a conference there in August, so I hope we’ll manage to squeeze in coffee etc. Before you leave, please visit their Web site and if possible, please donate some books?
HAVE TO ASSESS THE NEED FOR THE PARENTING GUIDE PROJECT
The bad news (for me) is Ramon Thomas, South African online enterprenuer and dating guru beat me to the punch and wrote the parents’ guide to cellphone and social networking safety.
His guide is much smaller than I envisaged my book being (12-pager), and but for now, it provides the basic tips that parents need. So there may still be room for my project, but we’ll see.
To download a PDF copy, click here
To read more on Ramon’s online safety campaign, click here
The weird thing is I know Ramon, but through my job as a journalist. I never mentioned my book project to him, and obviously he never thought to mention his project to me. Our conversation by necessity centred on business-to-business IT issues.
I’m going to write him a quick email and ask him for an interview for the blog. We’ll chat about the guides I’m told he’s bringing out and some online safety tips for parents.
Anyway, it’s not all gloom and doom on the project. The mutual acquaintance who told me about Ramon’s guide says a collateral book project is coming up and gave me contact details of the person in charge of the project. So, something may still come out of this.
Lessons I learnt today:
a) The seeds you plant now will bear fruit later. So keep writing and sending out material even when you don’t see an obvious return. Your time will come.
b) If you have a good book idea, and you procrastinate on it, someone else will write it for you. Three months from now, I suspect even the collateral project would be all signed off and my business acquaintance would have had to say:” Sorry but you’re too late! Maybe next time.”
2 comments:
Am trying to email you but my email is not going through; permanent failure. Please see to that. Thanks.
Maybe we can collaborate. I've gather a ton of stories from parents, teenagers and also interviews with international experts. I want to write a book on the impact of technology on all different types of relationships like romance/dating, family, friendships and the workplace. Let me know if you are interested.
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