Today being the 15th of October 2024 marks the third year since Hikaya was introduced into the Bakandamiya LLC realm. Indeed, this is a great milestone for us as an organization and for our dedicated community of writers, readers and literary enthusiasts.
Hikaya is a platform that puts writers’ personal development at its core value, while ensuring that readers get high quality, valuable pieces of literary works.
Hikaya has continued in its efforts to contribute meaningfully to the literary community in Northern Nigeria, most especially among Hausa writers and readers.
Brief history of Hikaya
It has been three years today since we made a decision to create this great product as a result of what was viewed as a huge setback, turned into a blessing, in our organization. Read the full story on our second year’s report here
Accomplishments
Over the years, Hikaya has achieved some really great things in terms of book publishing and making impact in the Northern Nigerian literary space. Some of our notable achievements are highlighted below.
Books: In terms of books publishing (mainly novels), which is the focus of the site, Hikaya has successfully published 213 books and counting as at today. Out of these books, 157 are free books for every registered member to read and 56 books are for paid subscribers. Around 100 of these books are completed while the remaining are ongoing. There are 3,220 chapters currently on the site. Out of the books published, there are 9 books written in English Language and the remaining are all written in Hausa language. And lest I forget, we also published a couple of non-fiction books/essays and counting.
Authors: Starting with a handful of authors, today we are proud to have more than 97 writers who have published their works on Hikaya. Most of these writers have multiple books published on the site.
Subscribers: Last year, we recorded 1,029 subscribers for the period of two years. A year later today, we are excited to have recorded a significant increase despite the economic hardship being experienced in the country. Today we have 1,637 active subscribers on Hikaya platform.
Blog posts: Hikaya has not only focused on fiction but also essays and critiques that will enhance and educate the creative minds of our community of writers and readers across the board. As a result, 49 blog posts were published over the course of these three years on the Blog section of the platform. Out of which 7 were interviews conducted with writers, 29 of these posts were essays on writing techniques and general writing tips, and 10 of these posts were book reviews.
Challenges
There’s no meaningful development without challenges, they are like fuel that powers our engine. Therefore, in this journey we have our fair share of challenges, mostly things like how to and continue to use the app by both writers and readers, given that some of our users have basic to no knowledge of technology. Overall, we consider most of the challenges we face as things that we can control and can work on to be better in the future. Alhamdulillah, nothing beyond our control so far.
Going forward
Going forward, we are working tirelessly to build a product that will serve not only Northern Nigerian literary community but African continent in the most efficient and authentic manner. We are working on building a quality that will match any similar product in the world where African stories are told by African themselves. Our aim is for everybody to tell their stories by themselves and feed the international community with our real and true stories.
We are finally using this opportunity to thank all the people; writers and readers, that showed and continue to support us from the beginning up till now. And we are urging them to continue with their support, and to others, especially in the literary community, that have not come on board yet, to please do so.
Thank you and God bless!
