Archive for August, 2007

This is a cross-post from my social media blog, ZenGuide

I am delighted to report that my associate Silvia Cambie and I have been commissioned by business book publishers Kogan Page to write a book on New Trends in International Public Relations, aimed at business communicators, PR professionals and marketeers.

I will be focusing on the impact of social media on business communications and how PR practitioners can incorporate social media into their communications and marketing strategies. Silvia will be focusing on all the other key issues for practitioners such as corporate social responsibility, crisis communications and current hot topics and trends affecting international public relations.

We both have a strong interest in cross-cultural issues. Silvia is Italian and has lived and worked across Europe, speaking several European languages fluently. As for me, I have links with Malaysia and the Far East as well as being now based in London, UK. In today’s globalised world, PR practitioners are increasingly needing to work from a cross-cultural perspective so Silvia and I will be exploring the relevance and impact of cross-cultural issues for business communicators online and also offline.

I’ll be letting you know more details about the social media and cross-cultural issues I’ll be researching in the next few weeks. Silvia and I will both be blogging about our research and the progress of the book on our respective blogs and we hope very much that you will all be able to help us by adding your comments or sharing your experiences and thoughts with us. I will certainly give credit in the book to anyone whose contribution I use in the book.

My dilemma is whether I should blog about this book primarily on my social media blog ZenGuide, because obviously, it’s all about social media - or, on my cross-cultural blog Fusion View, because obviously, it’s also all about cross-culture. If I blog about the book on both of them, will it get confusing if different people comment on one or other of the blogs? Would it be better to choose one of them and then stick to it? But Fusion View has a great international, cross-cultural community there already and I really would love to hear what everyone has to say there. But my cross-cultural readers may not be so interested in social media as such? But if I blog about the book on ZenGuide only, will I lose the cross-cultural dimension by focusing on my social media readers? You see my dilemma. What do you think?

For those of you waiting for my third novel…. hmmm, it looks like that is going to be delayed while I try my hand at non-fiction with this new book project!

Further information

Silvia’s blog X-Culture is at www.chandacom-xculture.com.

Pic: thanks to health.state.ny.us

bkprj

Earlier this summer, I had dinner with Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng and blogger Kak Teh in a restaurant near Queensway. We had first met in February this year when he came along to the LitBloggers Event I was speaking at in Kuala Lumpur. This time, Twan was over in the UK for a book tour promoting his first novel The Gift of Rain. We chatted about the state of Malaysian literature and compared notes on our experiences of having to do the circuit promoting our respective books. He confessed to being disappointed by the level of publicity he had been getting in the UK - although I tried to reassure him that being featured on Radio 3 is pretty prestigious.

Twan’s novel has recently been long-listed for the Booker, which is fantastic news. I’m thrilled for him personally and also, it’s great to see a Malaysian author recognised for this prestigious prize. From a publicity point of view, I don’t think Twan will have any problems in the future!

During my few weeks away from blogging over August, I spent some relaxing and delightful days with my family in Delft, Holland. Every time I go to the Continent, I am always struck by how civilised and stylish many of the cities there are - a great contrast to the chaotic, sprawling, hectic and stressful metropolis that is London.

Delft is tiny - the centre is probably not much bigger in than my South London suburb. Like many Dutch cities, it is the canals that dominate. The streets alongside are too narrow for more than the occasional car so pedestrians and cyclists are king. Unlike the cyclists in London who are all decked out in Lycra, helmets and goggles and who will find any excuse to pick a fight with cars, trucks and pedestrians, routinely swearing, shouting and waving fists, the cyclists in Delft are in their ordinary clothes, the breeze blowing through their hair and give pedestrians right of way, stopping to help lost tourists and generally, taking the time to stop and chat with friends they meet on their way.

It was delightful to sit at canalside cafes and chat without having to shout above the sound of traffic and breathe in fresh, cool air (in London, sitting at a streetside cafe gets you lungs full of CO and you can barely hear yourself think from the noise). It was a joy to hear the sound of church bells wafting over the city (in London, they are drowned out by traffic noise). It was relaxing to stroll along the streets while cyclists wove around you (instead of being shouted and cursed at as per London).

We took a cycle ride ourselves out to a farm which had a restaurant and cafe. Outside of the centre, the roads and streets are specially adapted for cyclists with cycle lanes and special traffic lights at major intersections. In the country roads, there are much fewer cars than in the UK, with most people preferring to hop on their bicycles for errands. We saw older ladies in smart skirts and high heeled shoes pottering along country lanes on their bikes with their groceries in one arm.

The one weird thing about Dutch cycling for us is the brakes - they are in the pedals and not on the handlebars so you have to back-pedal to stop. Eeks! It takes some getting used to and is particularly nerve wracking as you wobble towards a canal and are trying frantically to brake with non-existent levers on your handlebars…. I’m relieved to report that none of us fell in though we had a close shave one time!

You’ll need the sound switched on for this video.

The magic is in the funky rhythm - made up entirely of stop-motion or freeze-frame shots.

Some people have amazing patience! But I suppose it’s still easier - and takes less time? - than actually learning the drums and piano properly…

~~~

~~~

Apart from Film Mondays, Fusion View is winding down over August as I will be taking a break from sitting at my PC to potter about the garden and also to take a holiday trip while the sun shines. Fusion View will be back with regular posts in September.

If you’re a regular Film Monday fan, you’ll have guessed that I love acrobatics - here’s another one, filmed around London. It’s brilliant to see familiar tourist locations (South Bank Centre and Trafalgar Square) as well as the more mundane parts of the city being used in such beautiful and graceful ways.

~~~

~~~

Apart from Film Mondays, Fusion View is winding down over August as I will be taking a break from sitting at my PC to potter about the garden and also to take a holiday trip while the sun shines. Fusion View will be back with regular posts in September.

This looks like a video game but it’s two guys doing amazing moves through a cityscape.

Don’t try this at home…

~~~

~~~

Apart from Film Mondays, Fusion View is winding down over August as I will be taking a break from sitting at my PC to potter about the garden and also to take a holiday trip while the sun shines. Fusion View will be back with regular posts in September.

Yo, dude! You need the sound enabled to enjoy this music video of clean-cut preppy types rapping.

—

—

It turns out that this is a very clever viral video from Smirnoff to advertise their new Raw Tea drink - see www.teapartay.com

Thanks to Jason Calacanis for sharing this via his Twitter feed!

~~~

Apart from Film Mondays, Fusion View is winding down over August as I will be taking a break from sitting at my PC to potter about the garden and also to take a holiday trip while the sun shines. Fusion View will be back with regular posts in September.

Last Sunday morning, I had a conference call with my sister (in London) and my parents (in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) using Skype. My sister and I were using Skype on our computers on the voice call, occassionally exchanging short chat messages when the sound quality warped. My parents were on speakerphone in KL and I had conferenced them in using SkypeOut (they don’t have a computer). The sound quality was patchy at times and the whole conversation took a longer because we had to repeat ourselves from time to time.

But it was brilliant to be able to have all of us on the call at the same time. And it cost be about 30-40p altogether for the SkypeOut part of the call.

It made me think about how difficult it used to be to speak to my family from England when I first came over. Mobile phones had not been invented yet and all we had at school was a call box in the cold, dark cubby hole under the stairs. The school discouraged us from calling home more than once a week - in case the contact with home made us more homesick and unhappy with our lot at school. So once a week, the girls would queue up on the stairs to call home.

I don’t think I called home once a week because of the cost of the call. It was a coin-operated phone which we had to feed with a ton of coins. The only way to do it was to call reverse-charge and back in those days, reverse charge calls were even more expensive. I’d queue up and call my uncle in London instead. It was nice to chat to him as a family contact but it wasn’t the same as speaking to my mummy. (I was 12.)

Later on, after I went to university, I think overseas calls got a bit cheaper and I’d call once a month or something like that - reverse charge - from my digs in Oxford. We had one payphone that we all shared. I don’t remember using the phone much with my friends - we used the “pigeon post” system where we could send written notes on bits of paper to students in other colleges via the University’s internal mail system, or we would just turn up at someone’s room or at their digs and hope they’d be in. (The mobile phone still hadn’t been invented then).

When I started work and had my own place, I remember being careful about making non-essential calls after lunch or in the evenings as calls in the morning were more expensive. I was the first among my friends, being a techhy type even then, to get an answering machine. It was at least a year or more before some of my friends could even get over the strangeness of it and leave a message. And when I got a fax machine, I’d say, “Fax me the directions of how to get to your place” and they’d just laugh at me. (And yes, we were still waiting for the mobile phone to be invented).

I went off on a cycling holiday in Spain in the late 1980s with a three other friends - back in those days without mobile phones - and at one stage, we had to split into two pairs because of illness and bicycle problems. One friend and I would cycle the rest of the way and the other two would take the train. We pulled out our maps and poring over the route, we agreed that we’d meet again at our end destination, Santiago de Compostela. I made a list of the three hotels in our guidebook and we would aim to meet at the one at the top of the list first. If the other pair was not there, we’d work our way down to the other two. And if we came to the end of the list and we couldn’t find each other? That option never crossed our minds. I can’t imagine doing that trip now without at least texting or Twittering each other every hour!

These days, we text and Twitter and Skype and chat online and call without a second thought. I’ve got my mum signed up to receive my tweets on her mobile phone and she’s getting the hang of texting. On some call plans, it’s actually now cheaper to call her in Malaysia than to call a UK landline. I’m now looking into signing us all up on Jajah.com to get free landline conference calling this coming Sunday - hey, why spend 30-40p if we can do it for nothing…

Photo: thanks to porticus.org

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

Caro Fraser is the bestselling author of the Caper Court series, who guestblogged here on Fusion View last year about her novel A World Apart. She has since been writing her new novel, A Breath of Corruption, which she will be self-publishing later this year. She writes here for the first time about why she has chosen to go down the self-publishing route after a successful career along the traditional publishing path.

Caro writes:

As an established author with twelve novels under my belt, I never thought I’d find myself going down the self-publishing road. But two years ago I had a bad experience with a major publisher, involving distribution problems and a resulting fall in sales, and it was proving hard to find a publisher for my new novel, Breath Of Corruption the seventh in the Caper Court series of legal novels. The previous books had all sold well, and since I knew from the huge number of contacts from my website that there was a market for it, self-publishing seemed like the logical route to take. On looking into it, I discovered that at the more expensive end of the self-publishing market, the bulk of the work is done for you, while the cheaper options tend to be more time-consuming. I needed something which left me free to write, so, on a recommendation, I opted for Troubadour Publishing.

For a set fee in the region of £2,500, Troubadour offer a full publishing service, covering typesetting, cover design, author proofs, ISBN registration, and inclusion on Amazon and W H Smith Internet Bookshop. The rate varies depending on the number of copies you decide to have printed, but I worked out that unless I went for the top print-run of 2,000 copies, I would hardly break even. Besides, I’m not looking at selling all those copies straight away. As for storage of all those books, Troubadour charge a monthly fee of £20 for bulk storage of over 500 copies.

On top of that, Troubadour offer a marketing package (£350) which covers an initial marketing campaign, sending out review copies, arranging media coverage and distribution via agents. They’ve also given me my own web page to publicise the book, which links to my website.

Because the novel is part of a series, I wanted to maintain a certain image, so I commissioned a designer, Helen Chapman, who had worked on previous jackets in the series to design the cover. That cost £800 – money well spent, as far as I was concerned, as her work is wonderful, and gives just the right tone and feel to the book.

The overall cost may seem like a lot (I saved £260 reading my own proofs!) but as an author with a track record, it’s important that my end product should be of a high quality. I need to get the book into bookshops, after all, so it has to be of a standard consistent with my previously published novels produced by the big publishing houses.

So far, the corrected proofs are with Troubadour, as is the finished artwork for the jacket, and publication is set for some time this autumn.

I’d like to think there’s a chance that sales will take off, and that I can show the world it can be done without the backing of a big publishing house but, as I said, the chances are that I may not break even on this venture. So why am I doing it? Well, because the book is there, and because there’s a market for it, and whatever else we writers are in this game for, it’s to be read. The feedback I get from my readers when they know there’s a new Caper Court novel in the offing makes it doubly worthwhile.

It’s also been an interesting and productive experience so far. Being with a big publishing house, one is cushioned against the hard realities of actually publicising and selling one’s work. I used to complete a novel, send it off to my agent, who then sent it off to my editor, and I’d more or less forget about it till publication. Self-publishing means having to do a lot more work – getting out there, speaking to bookshops to persuade them to stock the book, and generally self-promoting myself in a way I’d never have dreamed of five years ago. I think that’s a healthy thing. I’m even starting my own blog on my website in a few weeks, as a way of keeping in contact with my readership, letting them know about my new work and other ventures. So for me, self-publishing has extended the creative process, brought me closer to the realities of marketing my work, and it also means I’m engaging with my readership in a closer and much more satisfying way. What it means in terms of sales and maintaining my profile, I’ve yet to discover.

I you want to follow my fortunes, and find out how it all goes once the book is published this autumn, you can go to my website www.caro-fraser.com . Once the blog is up and running in two or three weeks’ time, I’d welcome feedback from readers and other writers.