A Fair Cop

A new police car - with an advert for crime writer Peter James - will soon be patrolling the streets of Sussex, UK.

The Hyundai Getz was sponsored by his publisher, Pan Macmillan, and James and whose Roy Grace novels are set in Brighton.

James has developed a close relationship with the Sussex Police while researching his books and regularly goes out on patrol with them, visits crime scenes and attends post-mortems, so this is an appropriate way of giving something back.

The launch party for his latest novel, Dead Man's Footsteps, sounds fun too, it :

... will be themed around a scene of crime, complete with tape, tent and waiters in sterile white "scene of crime officer" suits.

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.)

An Alternative Bookfest!

Here's something that has needed to happen for a long time. I'm lifting the whole of Amir's post:

The day after the launch of New Malaysian Essays 1 (a 2-hour event where over 200 local books managed to be sold), I spoke to Zulhabri Supian (who works at Gerakbudaya) about the possibility of organising a longer event that focuses on local books. This idea was strengthened when, a week later, I found out that several Malay fiction books were rejected by a large distributor; although no reasons were given, the fact that none of them had 'Cinta' or "Kasih' in the title may have been a contributing factor. So this is what we came up with; do join us!

The 1st KL Alternative Bookfest (KLAB) will be held on the weekend of 3-4 May, 2008 at The Annexe, Central Market.

Held less than a month after the mammoth Pesta Buku KL (where you can buy as many text-books, romance novels and religious instruction manuals as you want), it will be held simultaneously with the very popular Art For Grabs event – but in a different room.

KLAB is ... basically a gathering of small, independent publishers who would like a popular venue to sell, launch and discuss books. We seek to fill 10-15 tables. Each table can be taken up by one publisher, or it can be shared between various people who each have books to sell.

There are many happenin' Malaysian books now being published; the trouble is, not many of them are readily available in the main bookshops. This is an opportunity to bring these books to the public, and to make the whole process fun lah.

4 tables have already been filled up; they are by Gerakbudaya, SIRD, Silverfish, and Matahari Books. We seek 6-11 others. We are in negotiations to bring one publisher each from Singapore & Indonesia too.

The events we plan are:
- Book launch by Hishamuddin Rais
- Discussion of new books, with the authors present
- A 'book give-away' where people can simply get rid of books they no longer want, for free. This will physically take up one corner of the room, where people can just leave the books. The idea is to make interesting books available even to those who can't afford to buy 'em. The remainder of the books will be donated, most likely to The Ricecooker Shop
- Bilingual poetry slam, where the audience gets to vote for favourite performers (to be coordinated by Ted Mahsun)
- And more!

Details:
The fee per table (for both days) is RM100
The event is from 12-6pm both days.
Deadline to receive entries (including payment) is April 26
Payment goes directly to The Annexe

Interested? Contact zulhabri at gmail dot com.

Celebrity Literatis!

Andrew Leci is interviewed by Anu Nathan in Starmag's ReadsMonthly supplement about his first novel Once Removed.

Now Andrew is a bloke I feel I know very well, even if I have never met him, because he's a sports anchor for ESPN and in our house, there's nowhere to run from the rugby matches on TV! (Let me tell you that I can hold my own in any conversation about the sport, but I actually only watch it for all the wrong reasons ... which I'm sure you can guess!)

Once Removed though, is far removed from the sports pitch and is the story of a British expat at large in Kuala Lumpur of the 1970's.

I am not going to be winning any Booker Prize for this one. I wanted to write something that would maybe provoke thought about the way we see expats and the way expats see us ...

And as Anu points out he seems:

... blithely oblivious to the fact that, in many eyes, he’s an expat himself ...

But actually, I must interject, this is what does happens to us long-term mat-sallehs!

I didn’t want it to be an expat book but it sort of turned out that way. Yes, it does reinforce a stereotype. But I think the whole point is that you have to question those stereotypes.... That’s what makes it interesting.

(Rehman Rashid's reviews the book today in the NST.)

I must say that I find it a little strange that Marshall Cavendish (after having tumbled to the fact that coverage on local blogs were the main factor behind the initial boom in sales of Kam Raslan's book Confessions of an Old Boy) haven't made a conscious effort to harness blog-power when promoting other books!

Send out at least a press-kit at least (and a copy of the book would be nice!). Make sure that you have a website set up to promote the book! (Raman of Silverfish and Philip Tatham of Monsoon Books are a lot more clued up!!)

Anyway, elsewhere in ReadsMonthly there is some other much good stuff. Award-winning filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad writes about a favourite book: Rumi's Bridge to the Soul. This I think is beautifully said and delightfully disingenious:

This year, 2007, marks Rumi’s 800th birthday. The motley entourage that gathered on the day of his funeral indicates the sort of pluralism that is now frowned upon by certain quarters. Me, I’m too ignorant to take sides here. There are mighty arguments for and against pluralism, no doubt, and the proponents of each will present a seemingly airtight case. And yet, all it takes is one tiny pin prick, does it not, for us to be able to breathe again?

(I'm amazed and delighted to see that Yasmin has 5,000 books at home!)

Ted reviews of Clive Barker's Mister B. Gone, and Martin Spice is kinder to John Berendt's City of Falling Angels (now in paperback) than I felt like being.

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.)

There ... But Not There

If you want to sell your book, you have to promote it. But, it seems, the author's tour may be a thing of the past.

Ian McEwan is doing a tour of the US to promote his latest book On Chesil Beach. Only ... he's not going to be there himself.

Bob Thompson in the Washington Post reports that independent booksellers Powell's Books has come up with the idea of making a high-grade film (part of which is viewable with the article) of the author reading from and talking about his book, and of building events around that. McEwan's film will be shown at 54 other screenings around the country, mainly, but not exclusively in bookstores, with discussion being lead in some cases by other local novelists.

Wouldn't it be great if McEwan's film, and other author films when they are made, could be shown in bookshops here? We are so starved for author visits, and Malaysia is an awful long way to fly someone to read to us.

Another way for an author to appear without actually appearing is, of course, by video link. We enjoyed a run of those at the British Council a couple of years back when a tiny group of hardened bibliophiles were able to interact with Toby Litt, Beryl Bainbridge and David Lodge.

And nowadays an author can even sign books from half a world away by using the LongPen - (something I thought was a hilarious joke when Margaret Atwood came up with the idea!)

Which is how Norman Mailer (incapacitated by "age, asthma and athritis") will be appearing ... but not appearing ... at the Edinburgh Festival this year and signing books for his fans. And Atwood will be interviewing (again by video link) legendary Canadian short story writer Joyce Carol Oates who will also sign books.

In fact a whole list of famous authors have used the LongPen saving (as the promotional website for the device reminds us) over 30 million tons of carbon emissions!

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!

Vidlit Replayed

A miracle of blogging is that when you write about someone, they frequently show up as if invoked from across the world.

I wrote some time back about "book trailers" (like film trailers, but for books) and mentioned the pioneers in the field, Circle of Seven Productions. You had some mixed feelings about this as a way to promote books. Now here's the CEO of the company, Sheila Clover English giving her take, and over turning some of my own preconceptions about their use:

Book Trailers are used by small press and aren't as expensive as you might think.

They are tools, like anything else in your promotional or marketing arsenal. If you use them correctly they can and do work. Since we've been making them since 2002 we have some stats and data on sales.

There are really two types of book trailers, if you're going that route.
1. Is a commercial. It is an ad, a little sexier than a print ad. It can be put on TV and spread around the internet. It is given to book clubs and booksellers.

2. Viral. These are the ones that are more exciting. They don't look like ads. They're kind of like music videos, which are ads to sell CDs. These are put online and people pass them around and take them to put on their own sites.

If you can have a book video that is both, you can utilize it in so many more places.

Print ads and traditional marketing tools reach out to established readers. A group that, sadly, is shrinking. The videos are really to expand a demographic. People have evolved into visual creaters and the book industry now has a way to gain their attention through that medium.

When I first came up with the concept of book trailers is wasn't just a marketing idea. My company joined the American Library Association and we now work with schools and libraries on a "Back to Books" program that is geared toward teaching young people that books are entertainment not limited to the size of a screen. We're trying to "hook" them early into realizing that books are as exciting as tv, movies, video games or music videos.

Unfortunately, our more philanthropic side was overlooked for an opportunity to make a big "splash" in the media and get some free online advertising through video. Of the dozens of publishing houses we worked with on this concept no one would give us the time of day until our clients started hitting NY Times and USA Today on a consistant basis.

Not only does this concept work, when done correctly, but it could be a wonderful opportunity to make books exciting to a group of younger people, or perhaps remind others who don't read anymore, that books are fun, sexy and exciting.

I hope one day that the industry will see the big picture. The one where we don't try to outsell the other publishing house or the other authors, but one where the industry can bring in new readers and compete against video games and tv instead of each other.

Thanks for letting me ramble.

Sheila Clover English
CEO, Circle of Seven Productions

Your Creative Side

A sort of postscript to my last couple of posts.

If you feel madly creative and are at a lose end, you might like to try out one of the following projects:

create a storyboard for a one-minute trailer of the book of your choice. (If you can't draw - like me - you can just describe it. If you want to go one better, make the video!)

or:

tell us about the "not book" you'd like to see on the market (or better still, draw the cover).

I will put the best efforts up on this blog so that you will gain eternal fame and fortune. And okay, I will rummage out a prize for the entries the readers like best.

(Doncha just love blogging where you don't have to ask an editor's permission to do these crazy things?)

VidLit?

Need an attention grabbing way to publicise your book? It seems that just as film trailers create interest in the latest movies, book trailers on the internet are the latest ploy in fiction marketing. According toElise Soukup in Newsweek :

Publishers and authors are increasingly commissioning trailers for books—some with dramatizations by actors that could easily be mistaken for movie trailers—that can be viewed on their Web sites and even aired on TV and in movie theaters.

The concept was initially pioneered in 2002 by Circle of Seven Productions (which cleverly trademarked the name "book trailers" so everyone else has to refer to them as "book videos").

The first mainstream publisher to have jumped on the bandwagon appears to be HarperCollins Canada. (Check out the video for Gautam Malkani's novel Londonstani and see if it tempts you to rush out and buy the book!)

The Book Standard recently announced the winners of a contest in which film students created videos for three new Bantam Dell titles. (I found the trailer for Stuart: A Life Backwards horrendously Pythonesque, though.)

Anyway, think the idea will catch on??