Communiqué 88: The publishing company behind Femi Otedola’s bestselling book
With a catalogue including global icons and local voices, Narrative Landscape, a Lagos-based press, is reimagining Nigerian publishing.
Why this matters
It signals untapped demand in African publishing. Narrative Landscape’s record-breaking sales show that when the right story, author, and infrastructure align, Nigerians are willing to buy books at scale challenging assumptions about a weak consumer market.
It offers a blueprint for creative entrepreneurship. Starting with low-risk, revenue-generating services before reinvesting in traditional publishing illustrates how African founders can bootstrap their way into more ambitious ventures.
It highlights the value of owning distribution. By building its own logistics pipeline, Narrative Landscape proved that publishers and by extension, other creative businesses can bypass broken systems and deliver directly to audiences, securing both trust and scale.
1.16,000 copies and counting
The Otedola family is no stranger to record-breaking feats. Temi Otedola’s debut film, Citation, ranked among Netflix’s top ten globally within weeks of release. DJ Cuppy earned a spot on Forbes Africa’s 30 Under 30. But in August 2025, it was the family’s patriarch setting the pace, and this time, not for a billion-dollar business deal. Three weeks after its release, Femi Otedola’s autobiography, Making It Big, had sold 16,000 copies in Nigeria and another 4,000 in the UK, a milestone that few non-educational books have ever touched in the country’s history.
In a market where selling 10,000 copies over a book’s lifetime can confer bestseller status, Otedola’s numbers looked closer to a music-streaming debut than a publishing launch. The force behind that rollout was Lagos-based trade publisher, Narrative Landscape Press. It wasn’t the first time in 2025 the publisher had tested the limits of Nigeria’s book market. Just months earlier, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fourth novel, Dream Count, saw its first Nigerian print run of 25,000 copies sell out within days of its release.
Those weren’t isolated wins. Narrative Landscape has built one of the most enviable catalogues in African publishing, with a roster that includes Oyinkan Braithwaite, Chude Jideonwo, Yvonne Orji, Lupita Nyong’o, Marlon James, Wole Soyinka, and Nikki May. Together, these authors provide the publisher a rare mix of global star power, literary prestige, and commercial appeal.
That Narrative Landscape Press sold books in such volume was striking in itself. Nigerians rarely buy books at scale, held back by economic pressures, the lure of free or pirated copies, and a fragile publishing ecosystem plagued by high costs and poor distribution. Which is why these successes matter; a signal that when the product, the author, and the publishing machinery align, readers are willing to spend. And for the last few years, Narrative Landscape has been at the centre of that alignment.
2. Bookstrapped beginnings
Narrative Landscape Press did not begin with a splashy debut novel or a star-studded launch. Its origins were far more pragmatic. After years in the publishing industry, co-founders Eghosa Imasuen, author and former COO of Farafina, and Anwuli Ojogwu, former editor at Farafina and co-founder of the Society for Book and Magazine Editors of Nigeria, knew they wanted something different. “There are still not many trade publishing companies in Nigeria; there’s room for others to emerge, because there are writers to sign up. We loved publishing and wanted to create another publishing house,” Ojogwu said to Communiqué. The idea was less about a grand vision than about contributing to African literature and building a professional publishing outfit in a market that had space for more players.
However, starting a publishing house in Nigeria is capital-intensive, and the founders did not have significant capital. In 2016, they began with a more pragmatic approach: publishing services. Sometimes called vanity publishing, it meant helping authors and institutions produce their books to professional standards, including editorial work, design, print production, and distribution, but with the clients footing the bill. This differed from traditional trade publishing, where the publisher assumes the financial risk of editing, producing, and marketing a book, with the expectation of recouping its investment through sales.
Early clients included Parrésia Publishers and the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library, both of whom paid for Narrative Landscape’s production expertise. The revenue from these projects kept the company afloat and helped the team build the capital base needed to move into traditional publishing. By 2018, they were ready to take the leap.
When Narrative Landscape decided to step into trade publishing in 2018, Nigeria’s literary scene was in the middle of a renaissance. A new generation of writers was breaking through internationally: Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen had been named a finalist for the Booker Prize; Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday would go on to win the Betty Trask Award; and Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay With Me was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.
On the home front, literary festivals were expanding the ecosystem. Building on the success of the Ake Arts and Book Festival, launched in 2013, Lola Shoneyin had created the Kaduna Book and Arts Festival in northern Nigeria and founded Ouida Books, another ambitious publishing house. The energy around Nigerian literature was palpable, and Narrative Landscape wanted to be part of shaping that moment.
3. Trade publishing secrets
To launch the trade publishing side of the business, the co-founders turned to their longtime friend, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who had just ended her relationship with her former publisher, Farafina. The new house acquired the Nigerian rights to all of Adichie’s works and reissued them with striking Ankara-inspired covers, the result of a partnership with Dutch textile maker Vlisco.
Alongside Adichie, they also secured the Nigerian rights to Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer. The book went on to become a New York Times bestseller, selling over a million copies and being translated into more than 30 languages. These acquisitions reflected a dual strategy: signing both emerging voices and established names.
But when it came to choosing titles, Narrative Landscape’s guiding principle was authenticity. “We’re particular about ensuring that African stories are represented in the voices that should tell them. What matters is the craft and the way it reflects our culture and resilience. We want readers, whether in Lagos or abroad, to encounter something that feels true to who we are,” Ojogwu said to Communiqué.
That commitment to authenticity was matched by something equally important: trust. In Nigeria, publishing is as much about community as it is about business. Unlike in the West, where relationships are often mediated by agents, writers here tend to build personal relationships with their publishers. Narrative Landscape leaned into this dynamic, going beyond straightforward negotiations to cultivate relationships where writers felt their work would be safe. For high-profile authors like Lupita Nyong’o, Marlon James, and the late Binyavanga Wainaina, that sense of trust, rooted in shared values and personal connection, was the deciding factor.
4. Distribution nightmares and non-fiction dreams
Trust and authenticity gave Narrative Landscape its foundation, but scaling the business meant confronting one of the biggest challenges in Nigerian publishing: distribution. For publishers, the surest way to achieve scale is to get a book onto a school curriculum. That’s how A.H. Mohammed’s The Last Days at Forcados High School sold over 2.4 million copies, and Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s Independence moved over 1.5 million copies. But for authors who are not as fortunate, the reality is a fragmented web of distributors who often delay payments or default entirely.
To work around this, Narrative Landscape built its own direct-to-consumer distribution system, striking a partnership with Konga to leverage its logistics network. Taking control of distribution has become a core part of its business model. When Chimamanda Adichie’s Dream Count launched earlier this year, it was this system that enabled the publisher to meet demand faster than established bookstores.
Narrative Landscape first solidified its bona fides with fiction, but increasingly its focus has shifted toward non-fiction. This pivot reflects a broader trend: for the past two years, according to the Open Country Mag bestseller list, the top-selling books in Nigeria have been non-fiction titles. “Nigerians are becoming more interested in non-fiction personal stories—not just of global figures like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or Steve Jobs, but of their own leaders. When these stories feel authentic, readers connect with them deeply, which makes the genre a viable investment,” Ojogwu said to Communiqué.
Narrative Landscape is positioning itself to capitalise on that momentum. In 2024, co-founder Eghosa Imasuen published Challengers, a retelling of the founding story of the VFD Group, and later this year the publisher will release Chude Jideonwo’s fourth book, How Depression Saved My Life. Both point to a new chapter for Narrative Landscape Press, one rooted in non-fiction storytelling that meets readers where their interests are growing.
In 2016, when Eghosa Imasuen and Anwuli Ojogwu set out to build Narrative Landscape, they were clear about its mission: to publish high-quality literature and to make money. Almost a decade later, the company appears to be doing exactly that.
Thank you for reading Communiqué! Help us give Africa’s media and creative industries the coverage it deserves by making a donation here.