Who are we? What do we do?
eGHOTA is a groundbreaking direct publishing platform that caters to the needs of creators across various mediums. As a purpose-driven organization, eGHOTA is committed to empowering creators, promoting cultural diversity and bridging the accessibility gap for Indigenous language users, to knowledge, new or old. Our Focus is on promoting endangered languages of the peoples of Africa, First nations of Canada and all of the Americas by writing in them.
eGHOTA is a profit for purpose business with the priority to preserve, promote and expand indigenous languages globally. Every penny left after operating expenses and statutory deductions are funneled into other relevant language and learning initiatives for the preservation, expansion and education in indigenous and currently vulnerable and endangered languages.
Language preservationists.
Today many indigenous languages have become extinct and several others are listed as endangered and or at risk of extinction. The extinction, endangerment or vulnerability of these languages are not the priority of established publishing organizations all over the world and if nothing is done about it a lot of the world’s languages cultures, traditions and history will be lost as everyone around the world continue to learn and use dominant or colonial languages.
​
At commencement we selected genres of focus relevant to the pertinent discuss of our time, to choose already published works from, and translate into endangered and widely spoken indigenous languages for publication. Our understanding of the size of this task, we approached established Publishers within Canada and Africa to share our thoughts but as profit focused businesses that must account to their stakeholders, they showed no interest in partnering with us to create this indigenous language(s) within catalogs.
Overcoming this hurdle meant the creation of eGHOTA Books, an independent publishing house to translate and publish selected literary works into indigenous oral based languages of the people of Africa, the first nations of Canada and the rest of the Americas as an initial focus. We believe that documenting these languages in books and other forms of literary works will help preserve and expand these languages. Our strategy was simply to partner with translators and subject matter experts in these languages to publish our selected titles taking advantage of established platforms like Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), IngramSpark, Apple Books, Google Play Books etc and their global reach and retail partners.
How it all began.
It started like this:
We began approaching authors and publishers to seek translation rights to selected works but we experienced pushbacks from authors and publishers asking us to approach them through already established publishing houses though this was our initial strategy, hence the creation of eGHOTA as an Independent Publishing House. At this time many of our founding members simply quit but we continued to push publishers with titles we deemed necessary to translate while working on some titles in public domain. Our first original series called “Paragraphs & Quotes" (P’s & Q’s) is a short series of quotes by positive societal figures past and present.
Fortunately...
Fortunately, we got positive and encouraging feedback from some very important authors and publishers on our list e.g., Yuval Noah Harari - Sapienship, Om Swami – Vedic Sadhana Australia, Don Miguel Ruiz - Amber Allen Publishing, Eckhart Tolle – New World Library, Thomas Erikson – Enberg Literary Sweeden, Thibaut Meurisse – Self Mastery Publishing, Howard Gardner – Baror International, Scott Allan - Scott Allan Publishing etc. who gave us a listen , understood our task and offered us very flexible advance arrangements. After several rejections from established publishers like Simon & Shuster and Joost Elfers Books who basically told us they can’t and or won’t speak to us at all if we couldn’t offer substantial upfront advance fees as a form of protection of their literary works.
​
Soon after we began preparing our first originals for publishing through the established Direct Publishing Platforms and we ran into another hurdle. We realized that established platforms only supported dominant languages (Amazon - https://shorturl.at/huIM6 , Google -https://shorturl.at/ijsF5 ), meaning we couldn’t publish our eBooks in indigenous languages. At this point it would be easy for us to pack it all up and move onto other endeavors but instead we dug deeper and arrived at the decision to solve this problem by building our own technological solutions gradually. This has led us to rebrand ourselves as a Publishing Tech Company.