Alice Clark-Platts, who writes our monthly column on self-publishing, also runs The Singapore Writers’ Group (SWG). Here she discusses SWG’s forthcoming self-published anthology of members’ work, which has the working title Rojak.
Andrew Fiu is the best-selling New Zealand author of Purple Heart, a conventionally-published memoir detailing his
Samoan boyhood and how he overcame a chronic heart condition by undergoing six
life-threatening open heart surgeries. Today, Andrew is a writer and educator
and is planning to climb Mount Kilimanjaro for charity.
Andrew visited Singapore at the end of last year. While here he
got in touch with SWG, and he offered to come and give us a talk on writing and
facing adversity. Out of that meeting came an introduction to Michele Gray, founder of
the Australian design and self-publishing agency 27iD, who offered
to help SWG publish a book of short stories.
SWG is
a real melting pot of different nationalities, people who have lived in
Singapore all of their lives jumbled in with people who have arrived off the
plane and come straight along to a meeting - that has happened! A good term for
it is rojak – the Malay word for an
eclectic mix. Hence we chose our book's working title; the anthology will certainly be rojak-like in its mix of authors, and in its ideal of promoting a global community
of writing and expression.
Through
her company, Michele has helped over two dozen authors tell their
stories. She is an editor, a book designer, a website developer; she sets up an
author’s Apple and Kindle accounts and advises them on how to market their
eBooks. Some authors also want a print
edition of their book. Michele can work with them both to publish print editions through CreateSpace, a distribution
service for independent publishers and self-published authors, and also to
market the print edition alongside their eBook on Amazon.
Michele is a huge believer in self-publishing. She told me: “Self-published
authors have the same shelf space on Amazon and the iBookstore as Penguin
Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, etc, but their royalties are better and
they no longer have to vanity publish and store boxes of books in their garage.”
She pointed out that once an eBook is created it can
be sold over and over again with no on-going printing costs: “Frankly, there’s never been a better playing field for self-published authors
– it’s better now even than only five years ago.”
As always in the self-publishing sphere, marketing is crucial. Michele advises
her authors to put a marketing plan in place and to use a variety of strategies
from blogging to social media to gain a following. She tells them to take small
steps at first: “It’s a bit like Goldilocks finding the right bed – not too
big, not too small - but eventually they will find their comfort zone.”
However, she reminds her authors there’s
a lot of competition out there, and that, like everything else, promoting a book takes
time and hard work.
One of Michele’s favourite books is Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which holds that life is a
story and that you can choose your story. Michele is helping twenty authors in
the SWG to do that very thing. She helps writers tell their stories and she
says she couldn’t ask for a better way to make a living.
Useful links from around the web
You might like to take a look at these useful sites seen elsewhere around the web:
The Creative Penn run by Joanna Penn, hence the spelling - resources to help you write, publish and market your book.
Libiro - a new eBook store exclusive to indie authors.
Alice's next column will appear on Wednesday 26th March. If you are a self-published author, or are otherwise involved in self-publishing, and you would like your work to be featured, then please contact asianbooksblog@gmail.com.
