How Israel Peters’ Passion for Reading Led Him to Build A Literary Ecosystem

Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera
 
The impulse which drove Israel Peters to community building came from reading. Peters loved to read. As a researcher whose interest lay in the arts and academics, he had found reading to be an activity he enjoyed and something he engaged in for the sake of self-improvement. Every year, he would set targets for himself, how many books he wanted to read and he would try to meet the target. And in 2016, Peters came across a post from Strive Masiyiwa which inspired him to take things even further. “Prior to that time,” he told me, “I just loved learning about business, about growth, entrepreneurship, and all of that from him. And on this particular day, he posted about how if you want to go very far in life, you have to learn to read, read fast, read wide, and read consistently. You know, that was like, I was very much inspired and fired up. Then, I told myself, going forward, I’m going to read like never before, and I’ll do it consistently…”

Also, this time around Peters decided to take it a bit further by including others in his plans.  “It has happened to me before, but I wanted it to be different, and I thought to myself, I wouldn’t be the only one experiencing this. Evidently, I just said, and there’ll be more people who are interested in this. What if I call them together? And then we started on this journey. They joined me on this journey. I can recall I posted it on social media that I’m doing this, I’m starting a reading journey or challenge like that. And it would be great if people could join me, so we do it together. You know, so as I started, and I think it was April, I started it first of April, thereabouts, and low and behold, people joined.” And the community known as Read To Impact Initiative (RTI) was born. As the curator of the group, every member wrote down their goals as well, and he kept up with each of them to see their progress. This new found group had put him in a sort of curatorial position where he was overseeing his own reading goals and in charge of supervising that of others as well.

By 2022, the community past its hey days, had gotten to a stage where its members were no longer served by the mode of operation with which they began. They needed a new model to give space to the community and encourage further growth.  To do this, they decided to pull the old group down and form a new group on Facebook this time around as opposed to a whatsapp group. And under a year they grew to 800 members. This time, members began forming networks among themselves, exchanging books and the ones in close geographical proximity meeting up with each other. The community had grown, and the exchange of books and ideas continued. But this time, it seemed to the members of the community that they were just recycling the same books and needed a fresh stream to drink from. And one of the solutions they arrived at to combat this problem was to publish books, to publish the kind of books members of the community loved to read. This was precisely the situation of things which led Peters to publishing. “Then I didn’t understand the complications of publishing and distribution, so I just felt like we can also get on the publishing side. Instead of just gathering on the love for books, let’s just also get on the publishing side and see if we can also produce and make available the kind of books that these people would ideally want to read.”

In January 2022, Peters began Gemspread Publishing. And the aim was to publish academic as well as career oriented books. But feedback within his community made him understand that it was easier to penetrate the Nigerian market at first by publishing literature. At the rubicon of getting into publishing he also began to realise the intricacies of the publication process, and so he hired someone with experience in literature to help start the publishing firm. They began with digital publishing, producing their first anthology, “A Hot Lagos Afternoon” in 2023. Peters and his team built a social media presence by promoting their activities and later on began a writing competition.

By 2023, Peters was in the UK doing his masters degree in publishing. He had been inspired by his ordeal in community building and his foray into publishing to pursue a degree in it and subsequently apply his learnings to Gemspread. The publishing house began publishing hard copy books and the magazine was rebranded as Makeke Magazine and the competition became more frequent. The magazine is first a digital magazine and free. It is also distributed to liber in Nigeria and Ghana. The aim of the magazine is to promote creative writing for emerging African writers. “The idea,” according to Peters, “was beyond just a rewarding platform, but something that is a safe space where creatives may begin to build very successful writing careers from. Because, for example, if you win an addition, it boosts your confidence and you believe more in yourself. You want to explore more platforms, more avenues as well, you know. And then it can be a credential for you as a writer, that you won this competition, and who knows, from there, maybe you get so good or you can even get another publisher who is interested in fleshing out that work for you into a book, or on that basis, someone another publishers that I’m going to give you audience to want to work with you or publish your book.”

Creative industries like the ones built by the likes of Israel Peters often exist in the fringes of the creative industries. Gemspread Publishing or Makeke Magazine for example are not among the most popular in the country because they are the efforts of obscure literary cults to fulfil the creative needs of a section of the creative demography. In this case, the reading and writing needs of members of the Read To Impact Initiative. This is good because it provides opportunities, but then there is also more work to do to make sure the ecosystem is a part and parcel of the production of quality literature. However the efforts by entrepreneurs like Israel Peters is highly recommended for growth.

Gemspread Publishing and Makeke Magazine have both grown to become an ecosystem of sorts, where writers discovered by the magazine can potentially be published by the publishing house. One such sensation is Ikechukwu Henry, and the author of “Days We Long For,” Oluwabunmi Adaramola.

The community has, under the leadership of Israel Peters, grown and become widespread enough to organize an annual distributed festival model that is held across Lagos, Enugu, Accra, Yaoundé in Cameron and Juba in South Sudan, and even in the UK. This model of celebration of community is a pioneer of its sort in Africa. And Peter’s strides in community building put him in the league of other young community builders in the literary scene like Ruona Idjenughwa and Ejiro Edwards, Otosirieze Obi Young, Carl Terver and the likes. An examination of the chain effect that his strides have given rise to is a path that has inspired and given rise to a commendable number of creatives.