Rainforest Tears : The Website

Rainforest Tears author Paul Leslie Smith has created one of the best author sites for his book that I've seen ... anywhere on the web. (Go visit and tell me if it isn't!) You can read a synopsis, find out about Paul and how he wrote the book, and learn something about the background. There are also useful links if you want to uncover more of the history behind the fiction.

There is apparently a whizzier international version of the site in the pipeline (no pun intended) that opens up with a Google Earth type fly in to Sarawak from Europe since a lot of people know nothing of Sarawak.

The book is now being promoted by Marshall Cavendish Singapore which Paul feels is much more proactive than the KL counterpart and will soon appear on Amazon.co.uk, while Penguin Australia is also ready to take it. Paul is looking for a UK publisher, but says he is not sure how to go about finding one. (If anyone is passing by looking for a highly publishable manuscript, let me put you in touch with Paul.)

He is working on the sequel now :

Plot scratched out on paper, starting to fill in the gaps. Looking at my hopes for R. Tears at a similar, embryonic stage I am more hopeful for the sequel.

Kunal's Website

Kunal Basu (whom some of you will remember from his visit to Malaysia in April, see here and here) has just sent me a link to his newly launched website.

Deepika and I can claim that we nagged him into it as we all sat having coffee one afternoon during the Singapore Writers Festival, telling him how badly all authors need them - for promotional purposes but also so that those who write articles on books and authors can find the background information in one convenient place.

Kunal's site really is a corker, I have to admit. I enjoyed browsing through the photo album (as a child above), and reading his opinion pieces on arts and society, management, and traditional crafts.

Hope it isn't too long before we see him back here again.

Writers' Blogs

After learning that one Australian publishers is asking its authors to keep a blog, Jane Sullivan in the Age looks whether it's such a hot idea. The pitfalls course include the drain of creative energy which could be directed towards the next book; and the strain of finding something new and interesting to say all the time.

And Sullivan notes that :

There's nothing more annoying than an author banging on about their latest launch or tour or reviews and trying to be entertaining, when you know they just want you to follow the links and order their books.

She goes alone to a blogging workshop and learns that what readers really want is :

... an insight into the blogger's life as a writer, but that doesn't necessarily mean they want a blow-by-blow diary entry about the writer's day. The most popular bloggers take a creative approach.

Some of the Australian authors who have the knack, she reckons, are Penni Russon, Jaclyn Moriarty, Maureen Johnson, while the ultimate blogging author is British author Neil Gaiman (1.6 million hits a day!)

There is no doubt that blogging helps an author build a fan base. Many authors also find blogging a very useful way of getting feedback on content before they publish. (You might like to check out this very interesting piece by Tania Ralli which appeared in The New York Times some time back.)

Of course, closer to home we have some very good blogging authors ... check out the Biblioscribblio links in the sidebar!

(BTW any passing authors who don't have a blog but might like to guest blog a piece here, are very welcome to contact me!)

Preeta's Web

Preeta Samarasan, whose first novel Evening is the Whole Day is published by Houghton Mifflin in the US, and Harper Collins in the UK next month, now has her website up so you can go read all about her and what others are saying about the book.

Her creative writing teacher Peter Ho Davies compares her writing to Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, and having read (and loved ... thank goodness!) the novel, I believe that's pretty fair comment.

Review soon(ish)!

It looks as if we will be seeing Preeta back here around the time of the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival in October, and we hope to have her read at Seksan's again.

Speaking of Ubud, Eric Forbes has posted a wonderful taster for the event on his blog ... complete with picture one of my great heroes, Vikram Seth. (Swoon.)

The Industry of Missed Opportunities

Have you updated your status today? Has anyone written on your wall? Have you spent any Linden dollars? Do you have any idea what I’m talking about? You’re excused for not knowing about mobcasts, microblogging, or avatars, but the rest? In the 21st Century podcasts, RSS feeds and blogs remain as opaque as String Theory to a frightening number of publishers. Many don’t even know if their authors have blogs. And social media? It’s a mystery to them.

While they are pimping their sales forecasts, their customers are pimping their MySpace and Facebook profiles. A savvy few trade publishers are investing in social media - Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House, Simon & Schuster - but many others remain on the fence.

Advertising industry leader Steve Hatch takes publishing companies to task in his article Communication Breakdown, which appears in the Spring edition of The Deal (found via and via) for the total mismatch between publishers’ online spending and their customers’ behaviour.

Last year, he says, the British publishing industry spent only 2.4% of its advertising budget on online promotion, whereas research has shown that most book readers are also very heavy internet users.

He also talks about last year's Booker shortlisted authors and claims only one (McEwan) had webpresence.

(How, oh how, could he have not noticed Indra Sinha's author website and his incredible Kaufpur.com in which he creates an entire fictional city (below)?? I don't think it is a coincidence that Sinha himself has an advertising background ...)


Booker winner Anne Enright's name came up in as many searches as McEwan's when the shortlist for the prize came out, but she had no presence online at all and this was a terrific marketing opportunity - missed!

A website would have cost her publisher about the same as a half-page ad in a magazine like The Bookseller or Time Out, Hatch says. And it would undoubtedly have reached a lot more people and, more's the point, globally.

Right now I'm doing my prep for an author I'm due to interview in a few days time and bless him, he has a great website with his bio, synopses of all his books, reviews, and pictures I can use. It makes my job as a journalist so much easier and I don't have to waste precious interview time when we meet asking him to fill in the gaps for my ignorance.

My point, as it was last time I brought this matter up, is that our local authors and publishers too shouldn't be blase about their online presence (or lack of) if they want to sell books.

Maybe authors like Enright aren't too comfortable getting their hands dirty with the marketing side of what they do, so this makes it even more important for the publisher to step in.

Just as a matter of interest, how many local publishers or bookshops are attracting fans and advertising events on Facebook??? None that I've noticed.

How many local authors? One or two. (Amir Muhammad and Sufian Abas (left) for example.)

A marketing opportunity missed and one that cost precisely (*gasp*) nothing! There are many thousands of Malaysian Facebook users many of whom confess to being addicted to the site.*

Second Life is also a great way to sell products and services. I got chatting to a woman who had opened a shop on Book Island (yeah, it is pretty surreal) to sell her services as a "book doctor" i.e. a freelance editor of fiction manuscripts, and she said that she had acquired more than enough real-life clients now to make a very lucrative living.

Authors and publishers are also discovering the site as a venue for showcasing their work and even holding virtual readings. I've even attended *ahem* one or two myself.

Interested? You can check out this very interesting post by Ronin Kurosawa on the Booksquare blog.

(*I'm not, I'm not ... just hang on while I make my move on Scrabbulous.)
(Picture at top is a screenshot of Book Island lifted from Booksquare.)

FilmMaker Takes Short Story Award

Award-winning filmmaker Miranda July has just won the world's most prestigious short-story prize, writes Richard Lea in the Guardian, the 2007 Frank O'Connor for a collection described by Chair of the judges Pat Cotter as:

... a book of original genius

Her collection is called No One Belongs Here More Than You ... and I know you won't be able to stop yourself buying it if you visit the website she has set up to promote it. (Honestly, you have to go and check it out!)

The shortlist for this year's prize is here.

The Blog Book Tour

Dina sent me this link to a New York Times article by Karl Jessella about how savvy publicists and authors are doing tours of blogs rather than tours of bookshops and other live venues:

Bloggers have written about books since, well, the beginning of blogging. But a blog book tour usually requires an author or publicist to take the initiative, reaching out to bloggers as if they were booksellers and asking them to be the host for a writer’s online visit. Sometimes bloggers invite authors on their own. In an age of budget-conscious publishers and readers who are as likely to discover books from a Google search as from browsing at a bookstore, the blog book tour makes sense. Although a few high-profile authors have had their books sent to bloggers — James Patterson recently promoted a young-adult book this way — most of the authors are lesser-known and less likely to be reviewed in the mainstream press. ...

Felicia Sullivan, senior online marketing manager of Collins is quoted as saying:

If I had to choose, I’d rather have an author promote themselves online. ... You can reach at least a few hundred people on a blog, and save time, money and the fear of being a loser when no one shows up to your reading.

The article also says that some blog-tour producers have even paid (shock horror!) bloggers to review books.

An author tour on my blog does seem an interesting idea, provided that the guest-blogged content is relevant and interesting to my readers in Malaysia (who make up two-thirds of my readership). I offer my space.

One Booker long-listed author has already taken up my offer.

I am approached all the time by authors and publishers from the UK and US. Sometimes I'm happy to put up a note about a book, if it is one that I think will interest my Malaysian readers. I would not want to write for money though ... I blog for love and not to be bought. I want to read what I want to read (or what's the point?).

But it would be nice to run some more competitions with book prizes if anyone is interested in sponsoring that!

(Photo from NYT shows author Amy Cohen making a guest-appearance on blogs.)

Kam the Cover Boy!

Kam Raslan is today's cover boy in Starmag, interviewed by Dzireena Mahadzir. The book is doing very well indeed for a locally published work of fiction. (I believe that it has sold about 4,000 copies to date and is still on the best-seller lists.)

The secret of its great sales? According to the publisher (Marshall Cavendish) the blog-coverage has a lot to do with it! Yipee!

But Kam has also worked incredibly hard to promote the book through readings in bookshops and writers' gatherings (the most recent being the readings Bernice organised at No Black Tie last Sunday) and he's about to launch the book in Singapore. (The bookshops down there seem to feel the book belongs in the social anthropology or history section!)

His new website has been brought into being by Reza and Chet, and I'm sure you will agree is excellent. (As I was saying, every author needs web-presence.)

Kam's response in the article to a question about whether non-Malays were equally well able to relate to the book interested me:

... Kam says the book isn’t just popular with the Malays. ... “One of the reasons why non-Malays get annoyed with Malays is because there is actually something very attractive about the Malays – they are graceful and gracious people, very likeable and civilised.

So when non-Malays see Malays acting ugly and aggressively, it’s a double disappointment. So I wanted a character who, in many ways, embodies the very civilised traits and qualities that non-Malays find attractive.”

Still, non-Malays see their own versions of Datuk Hamid, and many have told him so. “There are a lot of Indian and Chinese Hamids too, because back in that time, due to the education system, people had the same values and tastes, regardless of their race.”

It was really nice to see the family photos accompanying the piece.

I think Kam looks like his father (Mohamed Raslan Datuk Abdullah, who was tragically killed in a car accident in 1971), and I love this photo of the brothers together as kids in London 1969. (From left to right, Karim, Johan and Kam.)

Beyond the Author Website

We were talking not long ago about author websites, the need for them and what we want to see on them - bio ... author photo ... book cover ... and extract ... reviews ... perhaps an essay or two.

Tom Cox in the Times looks at authors who go beyond the basics to exploit the full potential of the web with interactive websites which provide add-ons for their readers, among them author Jasper Fforde sees his site (which brings him about 2,500 visitors a day!) as:

... a kind of after-sales service for readers who only see a new Fforde book ever year. ... I also see it as an extension of the books — allowing readers to dive back into that world for a little longer. ... a reader-writer contract that I hope will induce people to keep reading me year after year.

Other sites Cox likes:

www.jkrowling.com Designed to look like Rowling’s wrapper-strewn, pen-cluttered desk, this is an interactive delight, and the only place for reliable Potter news.

www.iainbanks.net For the buzzing forum, in which Banks is referred to respectfully as TMH — “The Man Himself”.

susan-hill.com Veteran author and publisher sounds off in her regular blog.

www.nickhornby.co.uk Music, football, books, and plenty of top-five lists to please the anoraks.

jeanettewinterson.com Lots of fresh content (including a monthly column), stylishly packaged.

Website Wonderings

After my little rant about author websites the other day, it's nice to see that novelist Tan Twan Eng now has a very nice site up for The Gift of Rain (due out in the UK March 8th).

Do come and meet him, and cheer on his first public appearance (outside law courts, I suppose!) on Wednesday night at Central Market Annex. And cheer on our other Malaysian authors too Kam (no website yet) Raslan and Dina Zaman . (These guys should have no stage fright left after all those readings at Seksan's.) 'Tis as good a time to shout Malaysia Boleh! as any.

But while on the subject of web presence and the lack thereof, would love to ask why local publisher Maya Press does not have a website? There is a website for another company with the same name, ironically.

I picked up a collection of Shirley Lim's poems from Silverfish the other day. Listening the the Singer. The book is beautifully produced - nice layout, good paper, gorgeous cover. The poems I know I'm going to enjoy and I have it by my bedside to dip into.

But when I wanted a pic of the cover so I could enter it into LibraryThing (geeky me!) couldn't find anything about it online. Couldn't, as I say, find anything about the publisher, even.

The picture you see here is only on the internet because I scanned it in.

Now Maya Press have some excellent local books in their range - do check them out when you drop by Raman's place. But it makes me wonder why the company is so slow to promote its efforts? And is this fair on the writers it represents?

Shirley Lim doesn't have a website either, though she is mentioned on plenty of others (including this). When we heard her speak at Silverfish some months back, she talked about how hard it was to sell copies of her novels. A decent author's website might help her reach a wider audience.

Talking about Dina as I was, she was on Al-Jazeera yesterday. She called me to tell me but I was so blur that I went and forgot and now feel very guilty. Her book is going to attract a lot of international attention, I think.

*Pic nicked from author's website. Since he's a lawyer specialising in intellectual property by day, I have to pray that that he doesn't mind too much!

A Little Rant About Author Websites (Or Lack Thereof)

I think that every author needs a website. Nothing big and elaborate. No bells, no whistles. Mothing that would cost you an arm and a leg and a left ear.

Just a space with a short and current biodata and a photo or two. A single page is enough, with perhaps a link to another page or pages for the book(s).

A website - not a blog: although I love author's blogs, of course, I often need information in a rush and I don't want to be sidetracked or have to wade through more material than I need.

And if you want to get really elaborate with your website, you could add a book extract or two ... perhaps an essay about a topic close to your heart or some stuff about how you write or how your book came about ... perhaps some reviews.

As a blogger, as a sometime writer about books, as a reviewer, as an organiser of events, I am so frustrated when I look for information on an author or a book and there is none or when I am looking for an author's photo to download and find nothing online.

Local authors are not much better. I come across recently published books and cannot find anything about them online. It makes me ask myself if the author, and in many cases the publisher, is serious about promoting the work.

But as I write this I also realise that I need a web page apart from this blog and never seem to get round to it, though Chet registered a domain for me some time back. I have no right to preach ... or maybe I am talking to myself as much as to you.

So which author sites do you think are the most effective? Nominate them and then we'll take a look when I'm not so frazzled.