Closing for Christmas

Merry Christmas! Merry reading! 
Best wishes for 2016!

The blog is closed from today, Monday 21 December, until Tuesday 12 January, when we'll be back with details of the Asian Books Blog Book of the Lunar Year Award, for the Year of the Sheep / Goat / Deer.

The Sunday Post

A rojak* of items that caught my eye this week…

Tales of Two Cities: Hong Kong and Singapore

Tales of Two Cities: An Anthology of Short Stories by the Hong Kong Writers Circle, and the Singapore Writers Group presents four faces of each city: the changing city; the historic city; the mystical city; the capricious city.  There are twenty three stories in the collection, which has been co-edited by Alice Clark-Platts, and S. Micky Lin, from the Singapore Writers Group, and Edmund Price and Harmony Sin, from the Hong Kong Writers Circle.  Here, Alice Clark-Platts gives a glimpse of how the collaboration worked.

Indie spotlight: Christmas marketing opportunities

Indie spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. This month our regular columnist, Siobhan Daiko, who is herself an indie author, explains how Christmas presents many marketing opportunities, to those with a book to sell.

Just quickly

I wrote an account of viewing snow in Singapore, for the UK Telegraph. If you're interested, click here.

The Sunday Post

A rojak* of items that caught my eye this week…

Lion City Lit: Swag

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Lion City Lit explores what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise. Here Jo Furniss introduces Swag, the new online literary magazine she's launching. Its events calendar,  which brings all relevant listings together in one convenient place, is already live, and is packed with ideas. From January, the quarterly journal will feature author interviews and new writing.

So: over to Jo…