StoryDrive Asia

The Singapore Book Publishers Association and Frankfurt Book Fair are jointly organising the 2017 StoryDrive Asia conference on 13-14 November, at the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore.

The two-day conference is aimed at authors - published and unpublished - publishers, marketing managers, editors, rights and license managers, and service providers. It will cover topics such as copyright and licensing, e-production, sales, new marketing strategies and trends, international business, new technologies, future ways of storytelling like virtual reality and augmented reality, and cross-media sales.

Indie spotlight: Soulla Christodoulou

Indie spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. This month our regular columnist, Tim Gurung, chats to Soulla Christodoulou, author of the women’s fiction titles Broken Pieces of Tomorrow, and the forthcoming The Summer Will Come, about her experience of self-publishing.

What kind of heart? Guest post from Alison Jean Lester

Although she is an American now based in England, Alison Jean Lester has variously studied, worked, and raised children in China, Italy, Taiwan, Japan and Singapore. Her first novel, Lillian on Life, was published in 2015, and her second, Yuki Means Happiness, came out in July.

Set in Tokyo, Yuki Means Happiness concerns the relationship between Diana, a young nanny newly-arrived from America, and her charge, two-year-old Yuki Yoshimura.  As Diana becomes increasingly attached to Yuki she also becomes aware that not everything in the Yoshimura household is as it first seemed. Before long, she must ask herself if she is brave enough to put everything on the line for Yuki, and thereby confront too her own demons.

So, over to Alison Jean…

Backlist books: Mahabharata retold by William Buck

Backlist books is a column by Lucy Day Werts that focuses on enduring, important works from or about Asia.

This post is about The Mahabharata, specifically a short prose retelling by William Buck. The 2,000-year-old Sanskrit original is the longest epic poem in the world, consisting of over 200,000 verses or 1.8 million words. If you combine The Mahabharata with the much shorter Sanskrit epic The Ramayana, you get more words than there are in The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Bible, and the complete works of Shakespeare combined. Even the short version of The Mahabharata bristles with more heroes, fair maidens, and helpful, mischievous, or jealous gods than you can shake a stick at. Nevertheless, let’s shake that stick.

See below to find out what you need to know to decide whether you should read The Mahabharata, or what you should know about it even if you never do!

Elaine Chiew on contemporary voices: The Wangs vs The World by Jade Chang

In the first of her new columns on contemporary voices Elaine Chiew uses The Wangs vs The World by Jade Chang as a springboard to discuss road trip fiction.

The novel sets off, so to speak, when Charles Wang, an American-born Chinese for whom the American dream has turned into a nightmare, decides he wants to take his family on a healing trip to China, but first they must survive a road trip through America.

So, over to Elaine…

Jo Furniss on dystopias

All the Little Children, the debut novel from Singapore-based, British expat Jo Furniss was published at the beginning of this month. In the previous post, Jo explained how living in Singapore has helped her writing career. All the Little Children is a dystopia.  Jo here reflects generally on dystopias.

All the Little Children, guest post by Jo Furniss

When a family camping trip takes a dark turn, how far will one mother go to keep her family safe? That’s the question British-born serial expat Jo Furniss addresses in her newly-released debut novel All the Little Children. Jo previously lived in Switzerland, but is now based in Singapore. She here discusses how living in the City-state shaped her writing, and how she interacts with other local and regional writers. All the Little Children is a dystopia, on Thursday Jo will follow up this post with a second one exploring the whole idea of dystopias.

Jo trained as a journalist, and worked for numerous organisations including the BBC and The Economist. In 2015, she founded SWAGLit an online literary magazine for writers in Singapore.

All the Little Children is set in Britain, and features working-mother Marlene Greene. Marlene hopes a camping trip in the forest will provide quality time with her three young children - until they see fires in the distance, and columns of smoke distorting the sweeping view. Overnight, all communication with the outside world is lost.