I spent most of my high school years in an all-girls’ boarding school in Uganda, East Africa. The country was just coming out of years of civil war and the economy was in tatters. It was hard to get hold of interesting reading material, and fiction was a luxury.
Our school library was full of dusty, crumbling tomes covering subjects like philosophy and political theory. But nobody wanted to read that. No, we all wanted to get our hands on the romance novels some girls would bring from home. These were a hot commodity.
Books Were Split Into Precious Pieces
Often, the girls would rip the paperbacks into three or four separate pieces, which would circulate separately around the student body. You couldn’t always count on getting the chunks in order, so you’d often have to make do with starting with, for example, part three of The Duke’s Promised Bride, follow that up with the opening chapters of Trapped with the Tycoon, then the fourth chunk of Winter with the Viking Jarl. (All these are made up titles for illustration only and not meant to reference any actual books!)
Girls leveraged their social clout and pulled all manner of strings to get a place in a reading loop. I didn’t have any books to earn myself a precious spot, but I had an “in” with a classmate with whom I shared a desk. She knew all the right people and would get the best pieces of the best books and funnel them on to me, on the condition that I read them quickly and passed them back to her.
Those days of book famine are a distant memory. I now have access to more books than I could possibly read in a lifetime. We are blessed with so much abundance. I no longer have to make do with scraps of books. My eReader is stuffed with great titles I am yet to read.
A New Chapter: Launching My Own Bookstore
Now that I’m an author, I understand that in the 21st century, books cost much more than a reader’s money. They cost time, which is also a very scarce commodity. My books are probably not being torn into chunks and shared out among readers desperate for something, anything, to read. But I’m deeply grateful for every reader who spends a few hours with one of my stories.
This gratitude is partly what inspired me to launch my own online bookstore. My goal is to connect more directly with readers and provide them with easy access to my work. It’s a full-circle moment for me—from scrambling for torn pages of novels to creating a space where readers can find whole worlds waiting for them at the click of a button.
I hope you’ll stop by and visit my little corner of the Internet, where I’ve collected all my work. Maybe you’ll find something to enjoy, much like a young girl in Uganda once devoured those treasured scraps of romance novels.
Bless you Milla! You describe so aptly the plight of children in developing countries who do not have ready access to books. This is also true of the Bible in forbidden places. I’ve heard many stories of one bible amongst hundreds of people and how they circulate the pages… sometimes one page leads to conversion, such is the power of the Word.
I’ve heard such stories, too, Tempe! God bless the people who are working hard to get the Bible available to people–both translating and printing and distributing. Thanks so much for your comment, and God bless you, too!
What an unusual and interesting story, and well done for opening your own online book store.
Thanks so much, Julia!
Hi Milla, Your story is fascinating. It’s easy to forget the blessings we have with so many books (and other forms of entertainment) readily available. Before ebooks, I always had access to a library and my grandmother’s extensive romance novel collection.
I love your online store and purchased two books there last week – an ebook that I downloaded via BookFunnel and an ebook I preordered (your March 2025 release). 😊
I’ve had mixed experiences buying ebooks from online stores, the main issue being actually getting the ebook to upload into the Kindle Cloud. If that process is too hard, I quit buying and quit downloading free ebooks. I keep track of my online store ebook purchases in my BookFunnel app, although I usually read them on my Kindle.
Aw, thanks so much, Narelle! I really appreciate the support.
I have no idea how the Kindle cloud works because I sideload all the “direct” books I buy onto my Kobo, using Calibre. It takes a couple of steps and is probably not the most effortless process, but I’ve been doing it for years now and am used to it.
I do have a Kindle, which I use to read KU books, but I’ve never tried to put a book on it in any other way than via Amazon. I should probably try to put one on my Kindle from Bookfunnel just to see what the user experience is like!
It’s really easy. I use my iphone where I have the Kindle App and BookFunnel App. I save the ebook to BookFunnel and, instead of waiting for the email (alternate option), I click on the BookFunnel code which brings up the option to save the ebook to BookFunnel. I open the share window on my phone while in BookFunnel and send a copy to Kindle (which goes to the Kindle Cloud).
Thank you so much for sharing your fascinating story! (And for clarifying you’d made up the title names because curiousity would have gotten the better of me 😉)
Your store looks so beautiful and I loved how the prices were in Aussie currency! That often frustrates me when I visit author bookstores. So I really appreciated that you have that conversion feature added to yours!
Thanks so much, Dienece! You made me laugh about the titles. Somebody should totally write those books, haha.
And I’m relieved to hear my store adapts to local currency!
We never had the lack of books but I did use to share books with friends. The Sunday School use to give a book each year at the Sunday School Anniversary. They would often buy a set of books and split them to give to each in the age group. One year it was The Narnia series. It’s not so bad when you get book one but when you get book 4 or 5 it can be frustrating. I was really good friends with another family and they both got one of the books as did a few others so we would share the books to read the whole series. (I ended up with my own series). The same happened for other series too. I also remember being given books from a lady in the church. She daughters had grown up and outgrown the books and I got the Cherry Aims books, Sally Baxter reporter books (friends also had a few of these so we could swap) and a few in the Peggy series.
I haven’t bought on a author page more because of the cost of exchanging the dollar with international fees. (I also haven’t really looked). I do tend to have gift vouchers so often have a balance at amazon au so know I already have the money there to buy the books.