... I think non-fiction is for people who don’t understand reality! ... Only when you really understand reality should you retreat behind make-believe stories.Amir Muhammad is profiled by Allan Koay in StarTwo today. He says that he has given up film making to concentrate on his publishing career ... and his ambition if to publish 50 titles! His Matahari Books has released 6 to date, with the seventh -Taxi Tales on a Crooked Bridge by Charlene Rajendran - due out this month, and several more on the cards including one on Malay movies which he is in the process of writing.
He reckons that publishing in Malaysia isn't doing too badly and that in general, local books are outselling foreign ones :
The last Harry Potter book sold 75,000 copies, but a Malay romance novel sells more than 100,000 copies, as some claim. For non-fiction, it depends. Something like May 13 (by Dr Kua Kia Soong) sold about 35,000 copies.The much banned Amir is asked whether any politician given him a hard time over the books, and answers :
No. I don’t think they go to bookshops.Touché!
1 comment:
Malay romance sells because it's cheap fiction. It's got a very comfortable niche, there's no competition at all. Local English fiction is a lot harder to sell. Non-fiction always has a market, because we're cheaper and facts are facts after all, and don't necessarily have to be entertaining.
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