Archive for July, 2007

In the city,

we make the walls we live in,

yet long for the spaces in between.

Photo: thanks to oceonidas from flickr.com

Here’s another strange sport - cheese rolling. This is an annual event that takes place at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucester in the UK. The participants use real cheese - the Double Gloucester, weighing in at 7-8 lbs.

—

—

Anyone can take part so if you fancy rolling down a hill with your big cheese, go to Cheese Rolling in Gloucestershire.

I discovered A Whiff of Lemongrass, a Malaysian food blog via my cousin Pey. Lyrical Lemongrass, the food blogger, is an accountant who seems to travel the length and breadth of Malaysia eating divine food, which she photographs first in exquisite detail! I am drooling already.

When Pey came to stay last weekend, we thought we’d try to emulate the food bloggers of Malaysia who all seem to carry huge cameras around with them to photograph food. But we ate the food before we managed to take a photo of it. We were happy and stuffed but would never make great food bloggers…

Some food posts on Fusion View and food blogs I like to whet your appetite on Friday:

Global Cakes

Lemon Meringue Pie

The Cooking Diva Blog

If you can recommend any great food blogs from Malaysia or anywhere around the world, please do add a link via the comments to this post.

Following my plea for help the other day about business that blog in Malaysia, I got some helpful suggestions from a range of different sources. In addition to the business blogging landscape in Malaysia, I have added a section on the political blogging landscape there, in particular in the light of the recent government iniatitive to recruit a blogging squad to counter the claims of political bloggers. I’ve now completed my article for Communication World - which is hopefully going to be useful for its international audience of PR professionals, marketeers and business communicators.

I’d like to say thanks to the following people who generously contributed their suggestions, links and views for the article:

Richard for telling me about Wiley Chin at http://www.ximnet.com.my/thelab

Sharon Bakar at Bibliobibuli

Eric Forbes at the Book Addict’s Guide to Good Books

Kenny Sia at KennySia.com

Francis Ho of Kuching Kayak, who blogs at FH2O: Kuching Kayaking

Kevin Anderson, the Blogs Editor at The Guardian, UK who blogs at Strange Attractor

Asohan Aryaduray, the New Media Editor of The Star, Malaysia

Due to space/ word limitations, it’s not been possible to include in the articlea reference to all the suggestions and links that everyone gave me but I’ve squeezed in as much as I could.

I hope to be able to share the article with you on this blog when it is published in Communication World in a little while.

This is part of my series on Enterprising Writers, where self-published or other entrepreneurial writers can share their stories and tips.   

Lydia Teh is Malaysia’s bestselling author whose latest book Honk! If You’re Malaysian hit the top ten book charts, largely due to her dynamic marketing campaign. She is published by Malaysian publishers but although she is not a self-published author, I think a lot of her tips can benefit a whole range of writers looking to create a buzz around their book.

~~~~

Lydia writes:

Like a first baby, first books are special. I cherished high hopes for Congratulations! You have won. When my publisher asked me how many copies I hope to sell, I quoted an astronomical number. So far it has sold only a fraction of that figure. Castles built in the air vanished like soap bubbles.

When my second book, Life’s Like That - Scenes from Malaysian Life was published, my aspiration was tethered closer to the ground. I waited with bated breath for more than a year before my publisher could tell me how many copies were sold. Fortunately it chalked up a respectable four-digit figure which was considered a best seller (in the local context, anything above 1,000 copies is best-selling.) Personally I felt that the book’s performance was less than stellar, and it never made the top ten charts in our bookstores.

In Malaysia there is no national best seller list like the New York Times’. Here bookstore chains compile their own lists. Within the same chain itself, different outlets chart their own top ten.

Having played the role of a starving author for two titles, I was eager for my third book to jump from the warehouse into the best seller lists. And it did. From the week after its release up to now, seven months later, Honk! If You’re Malaysian has hit the top ten lists of most of the bookstores in Malaysia including MPH, Popular, Borders and Kinokuniya. Initially, it only aced the local chart but later it gave the foreign titles a run for their money too. To-date 9,000 copies of Honk! are in print.

Obviously I have done some things right this time which included these PR strategies :

1. Blog Buzz

After submitting my manuscript to the publisher, I ran a contest on my blog to search for a book title. I’m not good with coining spiffy titles and I figured that the contest would create a buzz for the upcoming book. Within a week, 241 titles were suggested by bloggers. One of it was the catchy Honk! If You’re Malaysian which described my book succinctly. It was love at first sight.

When the book was released, I organized another contest for bloggers to write a review of Honk! or provide a link back to their blogs. My aim was to spread the word about the book in the blogosphere.

A blog is truly a godsend for stingy or poor authors. It enables us to establish a web presence without having to fork out huge amounts for the design and maintenance of a website. It is also an effective and interactive tool for communicating with readers. I use it to post announcements on book signings and media appearances.

2. Press Buzz

If you want to sell lots of books, courting the media is part of the deal. If nobody knows about your book, nobody will buy it. You’ve got to shout to the world, “Hey! My book is out. Buy it!” And nothing spreads the word faster than extensive media coverage.

My stint as an encyclopaedia sales rep has thickened my hide a little. Since becoming an author, my skin has tripled in thickness (but it still has room for expansion.) I made cold calls to the media, asking them to interview me and write about my book. An author can’t afford to be bashful if she wants her book to sell like hot buns.

Since the publication of Honk!, I have been interviewed and featured more than two dozen times on radio, TV, the print media and the internet. Honk! has also appeared in the Singapore press and the World Journal published in USA.

3. Store Buzz

Publishers and book stores organize book talks as part of their marketing support for authors. Usually I’m apprehensive about conducting such events as I believe that only foreign authors, celebrities or well known public figures can draw a good crowd.

Still, an author has to do what she’s got to do to promote her books. I didn’t like to badger friends and family to attend my talks, but I did rope in my children, nephews and nieces to help out as ‘honkers.’

Armed with home-made sandwich boards and roti (bread) horns, the type used by hawkers to summon customers to their mobile stall, the kids traipsed through the mall to announce the book talks. Only one mall allowed us to do that, the others turned us down as they didn’t want their customers to suffer undue disturbances. The bookstores did let us blow the horn inside the store though.

Despite this innovative technique, attendance at my talks was poor. Some friends, writing buddies and bloggers turned up but I couldn’t always depend on them for support. I must get Joe Public to come. Two of the book talks were held close to Chinese New Year. On each occasion, I bought a box of mandarin oranges as prizes to award members of the audience who responded to my question of “name a Malaysian trait.” At another event held during a Bookfest on a weekday afternoon, the crowd was sparse. Fortunately I had bought some postal stamps to give away as tokens for a quiz I had prepared. That helped to pull in a decent crowd.

Though I didn’t sell lots of books during the talk itself, I would still do the rounds for the sake of store publicity. Bookstores promote the event on their flyers and website, they put up posters in the shops, they order a larger quantity of books and most importantly, they give the books a prominent display. Good visibility at the store helps to increase sales, and for that I must thank my publisher, MPH Publishing, for making five standees to attract customers’ attention.

So if you have a book to sell, go on and buzz your book to success.

~~~

Photo: of Lydia’s team of “honkers”, thanks to Lydia Teh.

You can check out Lydia’s blog at http://lydiateh.wordpress.com/. Her media gallery showcases all her media and press activities and she has also blogged about her personal appearances and book event. Following the great success of her marketing campaign, Lydia is currently taking a breather from blogging to concentrate on other matters.

Film Mondays here on Fusion View just get more and more bizarre! Here is a jaw-dropping video of Chinese acrobats - with the star of the show being a young boy who hops with his head.

You have to see it to believe it.

—

—

I am grateful to the blog One Inch Punch (”Powered by East Asian Inspiration”) for first sharing this clip.

Cousin Pey came to visit today from Bath and arrived to torrential rain and flooding. When she called me on her mobile, I was watching the sheets of rain storming down to the drama of thunder and lightning in the dark sky. Rivers of water poured down the street. She was drenched by torrents of water streaming through the roof of Victoria Station and the concourse was awash. Trains were being cancelled all around her.

But miraculously, she found the one train that got her to my suburban station in South London and the rain eased.

By the time we finished lunch, the sun was shining. We went for a walk in the park in our T-shirts, squinting in the bright light. In all respects, it was a pleasant, sunny summer’s afternoon.

It was only this evening when Pey spoke to her husband on the phone that we realised that the rest of London and the rest of the country had not had such a normal afternoon. We rushed online to see the floods that had brought large parts of the rest of London to a standstill (click on the photo for a link to the BBC site with loads more pics of flooding):

The question is: with all trains cancelled between London and Bath, how is she going to get home tomorrow?

Photos: from bbc.co.uk/london

This is the last in my series on the influence of food in my life. Having cried over English school food and introduced my Uni friends to nasi lemak and laksa, it’s time to bring the English over to tropical Malaysia for some real treats…

When I’ve brought my English friends back to Malaysia for a holiday, they are always taken by the hospitality and friendliness of my extended family and my Malaysian friends. Uncles and aunts and cousins always make a point of inviting us all out for a huge slap-up meal, making sure that the UK visitors try the tastiest and most exotic dishes. My local friends take us out to the pasar malam for hawker food that my guests have never experienced before. The challenge seems to be to offer the wildest and most unusual foods to the mat salleh. My great-aunt had the dubious honour of being the Malaysian that gave my first boyfriend fried pig’s fallopian tubes. Some cousins brought a huge pile of the stinkiest durians for a group of my friends from law college. Other family members came up with a plate of chicken’s feet fried in soy sauce. My UK friends have all gamely tried everything, winning the hearts of the Malaysians - and their respect. One French girl I brought to KL was sniffy and picky about what she ate and point blank refused to even taste some dishes. No-one liked her. And eventually, I found, neither did I and she was dropped from my address book.

The food highlight experience for my visiting Western friends used to be a trip to the wet market in Pudu. My mum used to do all her grocery shopping there until traffic and parking made it impossible. When she first got married to my father, my father’s mother took her to the market and introduced her to all the stallholders there, saying, “This is my daughter-in-law, treat her well. If you cheat her, you have me to answer to.” Once every few weeks, my mum would put on her oldest clothes, take off all her jewellry and put on her marketing shoes and head to Pudu market early in the morning. So we would wake our visitors before dawn and all pile in to the back of her car, groggy and half asleep still. At the market, we would follow her to the chicken man and watch as she chose the chickens for him to garotte and throw into a drum of boiling water to loosen the feathers. My friends began to pale. Next, we passed the cute puppy dogs in cages - and no, they are not pets, I would say to our visitors - making our way to the beef butcher, careful not to slip on the blood from the decapitated cow on the slab. Now, my friends were turning green. My mother would then buy vegetables and fruit and spices and head back to pick up the chickens and some chunky roasted pigs trotters for breakfast, the smell of spices and fruit and raw meat mingling in aircon. An hour later, back at home, we would be showered and sitting down to a breakfast of pigs trotter congee while my English friends looked ill, asking weakly for some dry toast. “If you eat meat, you should know where it comes from,” my mother would say. “At the market, you know it’s fresh and just killed for you.” And even as they nodded, I would see my friends pining for the shrink-wrapped sanctuary of a Tescos.

Of course, Malaysia is more than its food and Malaysians abroad and at home have achieved impressive and astonishing things in the 50 years since independence. But for me, food and meals have brought people together for millenia. To sit together around a spread of food, whether at a table or on the floor or on a mat on the bare ground, people and cultures have met each other at the deepest level since civilisation began. At a meal, in past centuries, they left their weapons and differences outside. These days, we don’t carry weapons but most of us try to leave our differences outside at meals with friends and family. We share and eat each other’s foods and also our personal stories and cultures. Even a lunch of baked beans on toast told me in more than words about the UK I had come to back in 1975 in the same way that an abundance of durians told my UK friends something about Malaysians and their sense of humour and pride. In the simple, natural act of sharing our food with others in the countries we travel to, I feel that Malaysians abroad have shared - and continue to share - what is truly valuable about who we are: warmth, generosity of spirit, joy in the good life, graciousness and common humanity.

Photos: scenes from Pudu Market - my photo album c. 1995

lffd

Following on from my series last week on The Writer as Entrepreneur, in conjunction with Mslexia magazine, I received this email from self-published children’s book author Chrissie Gittins.

If you are an Enterprising Writer, check out my invitation to share your enterprising story and get in touch to showcase your story on Fusion View.

~~~~~~

Dear Yang-May,

I was very interested to read your article on self publishing in Mslexia
today. I self published my two children’s poetry collections as
mainstream publishers are reluctatnt to take on newish children’s poets -
though they use my poems in their anthologies. Both my collections were
shortlisted for the only prize for a children’s poetry book - the CLPE
Poetry Award, and the second was also a Poetry Book Society Choice for the
Children’s Poetry Bookshelf. ’I Don’t Want an Avocado’ has sold
5,800 copies so far since October, and I’m about to reprint ’Now You
See Me, Now You …’.

I thought you might like to hear about this little-known world of
children’s poetry. I’m also booked to talk about self-publishing at the
Lancaster Literature Festival in November - I shall go armed with your
article!

There are more details about my books, should you be interested, on my
website - www.chrissiegittins.co.uk

Best of wishes and thanks for a great read,
Chrissie

~~~~~~

Chrissie’s website lists a great number of her other books and activities and if you’re in the UK, you can catch her at one of her many events around the country. She’s certainly very dynamic and energetic in managing her career as a writer beyond the written word - through radio, personal appearances, involvement in the Arvon Foundation and running poetry workshops.