I got into book publishing through a few small mistakes in 2016–2018, and I can’t believe that today I’m preparing to build a book publishing and retail startup: iZwily.com (formerly VentureBooks OS).
First, some context that will make the rest of this story make sense: I’m based in South Africa.
Let’s rewind a bit further. In 2012, I published my first book, Forget the Business Plan: Use This Short Model. The American author James Altucher became an inspiration for deciding to write the book. In one of his crazy blog posts, he said it’s okay to write a short book — he suggested that even 20 pages is fine. The essence was that a book does not have to be long. So, I embarked on the writing journey and completed my first book. It ended up being 50 pages long.
Quickly, I discovered hundreds of authors who wrote fictional, viral, diary-like posts on social media. Since then, I’ve discovered thousands more, both online and offline, who have thousands of fans — real traction, not just potential.
Soon, I moved from being a self-publisher to acting as a kind of angel investor in books, and then formally becoming a publisher. We went on to pioneer a fictional genre called diary chronicles
after we founded Bula Buka Publishers. This work was even acknowledged in a University of California (UCLA) paper written by Professor Stephanie Bosch Santana.
Since then, we’ve discovered many publishing opportunities and possible solutions — but financing them out of my own pocket was always a challenge.
In 2019, I had the opportunity (I approached his team) to license and distribute David Goggins’s first book, Can’t Hurt Me. That book has sold over 5 million copies internationally, and thousands in South Africa, even though it retails at three times the local price because it’s imported.
In 2020, we approached Grant Cardone’s team.
We ultimately lost out on distributing both of these books — and several others — for reasons our future publishing operating system will solve easily.
Every time I see Can’t Hurt Me online, it hurts a little.
I can’t share the reasons why, out of respect for private business conversations. But iZwily will enable us, in Africa, to work with authors who have the best books in the world.
iZwily is foundationally a marketplace + ERP for book publishing and retail. It will be able to generate automated royalty reports and statements and run payments for retailers, publishers, and authors.
Later features will include AI contract management and other features such as ads in books.
It will give the next “David Goggins” the opportunity to be published and distributed in Africa — and all over the world — effortlessly, at the push of a button.
iZwily is a solution to the problems that caused us to miss these opportunities: it solves financing for books, and will distribute them to bookstores in Africa and anywhere in the world.
The founding question behind iZwily is: How can we publish and distribute thousand of these amazing African books in a single year at a fraction of the cost and time — cheaper, quicker, and smarter for the author or publisher?
We have an immediate pipeline of authors who can sell hundreds of thousands in one year, and publishers with thousands of titles.
In short, it’s a book publishing operating system designed to disrupt Africa and scale globally.
We’ve just begun raising a seed round through our venture studio, Startup Picnic. Please get in touch if you’re interested in investing in iZwily or if you have media queries. Oh, and a shout-out to Grant Cardone’s office in 2015 for allowing us to publish his articles on Startup Picnic. By the way, Startup Picnic started as networking picnics for entrepreneurs.