Indie Spotlight:John Hudspith

Indie Spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. This month our regular columnist, Siobhan Daiko, who is herself an indie author, interviews her UK-based editor, John Hudspith, about his work.

As well as editing manuscripts, John also offers advice on such topics as overcoming writer’s block, creating an epic, and the eBook eruption - he is a one-man, one-stop service for indie authors wherever they live.  Meanwhile, he too is an indie author. His first novel, Kimi's Secret won a highly coveted YouWriteOn book of the year award in 2013. The second novel in his Kimi series, Kimi’s Fear, is out now.

Indie Spotlight: Nicki Chen

Indie Spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. This month Siobhan Daiko interviews Nicki Chen about her debut novel, Tiger Tail Soup: a novel of China at war.  When the first bombs fall, An Lee is pregnant and her husband is missing. He won't be home for another seven years. It's up to An Lee to protect her family. Surrounded by the Japanese military, An Lee struggles to survive, enduring hunger, loneliness, and fear. Then, on December 7, 1941, the enemy invades and occupies their little island on the coast of China, and An Lee's strength is put to the test…

Indie Spotlight: Translation opportunities for indie authors

Indie Spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. This month Siobhan Daiko explains how to get indie titles translated.

Indie Spotlight: Malika Gandhi

Indie Spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. This month our indie correspondent Siobhan Daiko talks to Malika Gandhi, who was born in Mumbai, and who writes historical fiction making cross-cultural connections.

Can you tell me something about your debut novel, Freedom of the Monsoon?

The novel is set during the struggle for independence: the British Raj needs to go and the Indians must have their country back. It lets readers re-live the determination of Indians fighting against the British, by following five individuals as they face fear, love, sacrifice and hate.  

Indie Spotlight: Siobhan Daiko

Indie Spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. This month our new indie correspondent Siobhan Daiko introduces herself, and talks about her own writing.

Indie Spotlight: Fran Pickering

Indie Spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. This month Raelee Chapman speaks to Fran Pickering the indie author of the popular Josie Clark East-West fusion murder mysteries. Josie is an English expat sleuth living in Tokyo where these mysteries are set.

Indie Spotlight: G.L. Tysk

Indie Spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. This month, Raelee Chapman talks to indie author G.L Tysk.

G.L Tysk was born in Chicago to Hong Kong Immigrants and her novels focus on early American whaling history and its impact, 19^th century colonialism, and Asian and Pacific Islander immigrant culture. Her first novel The Sea-God at Sunrise is based on the story of John Manjiro one of the first Japanese people to live and work in America. It took four years to research and reached the quarter finals of the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. It has also been well received on Goodreads with above 4 out of 5 stars as an average rating.  G.L Tysk’s new novel Paradise, the sequel to Sea-God at Sunrise, was released in February 2015.

Indie Spotlight: Juan Rader Bas

For this month’s Indie Spotlight, Raelee Chapman chats with Juan Rader Bas, who describes himself as a Fil-Am Kicking Scribe (Filipino-American, martial arts devotee & writer). Juan Rader Bas’s debut novel, Back Kicks and Broken Promises, was self-published with Abbott Press.  It is a coming of age novel about an adopted 17-year-old Filipino who finds self-expression and fulfilment through martial arts after moving from Singapore to New Jersey. Juan took time out from his busy schedule as a public school teacher, parent, martial artist and writer to discuss the indie process and his new writing projects.

Indie Spotlight: Monica Li

Indie Spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. Here, Raelee Chapman talks to Singaporean indie author Monica Li about her first novel The Dragon Phoenix Bracelet.

The Dragon Phoenix Bracelet is an historical novel that follows a family through the turbulent political history of twentieth century China. Tell us about what inspired you to write this novel. Who would you say the target audience is, and who are your literary influences?

Indie Spotlight: Professor Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof

Indie Spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. Here, Raelee Chapman talks to prolific indie author Professor Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof, from the Cultural Centre, University of Malaya

Professor Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof  used Partridge Publishing Singapore, an imprint of Author Solutions LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, to publish two works on culture/theatre and three creative literary works in 2014 alone. I asked him about his play The Trial of Hang Tuah the Great, and his short story collection Tok Dalang and Stories of Other Malaysians.  Both express his identity, and his concerns, as a Malaysian writer who writes in English, and both are must reads for fans and students of Southeast Asian literature. These works, and all Professor Ghulam-Sawar Yousof’s other titles, are available from Amazon, and are listed too on the Partridge website.

Indie Spotlight / Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries by Tim Anderson

Tim Anderson

It can be a hard slog being an indie author.  To keep self-published writers inspired our indie correspondent Raelee Chapman chats to Tim Anderson, a native of North Carolina, whose self-published memoir about his time living and working in Tokyo, Tune In Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries, published in 2010, was picked up by AmazonEncore and republished to a wider audience a year later. It has now been translated into Thai.  

The original cover

Why did you choose to self-publish Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries and which company/tools did you choose for this path?

I actually went the self-publishing route after a few years of my agent pitching the book, getting close to closing a deal, then getting the dreaded "not right for us at this time" response. One editor told us that, because David Sedaris had just released a book featuring a chapter set in Tokyo, she was going to pass, since that one chapter in that one book had obviously saturated the market with the one comical story set in Tokyo that could be told! So I started on the next book, but couldn't shake the feeling that there was an audience for Tune in Tokyo and I wanted to try to find it. I used the CreateSpace platform available from Amazon. I chose CreateSpace because the process seemed pretty straightforward, and it pretty much was!

Indie Spotlight: Timothy Brennan

Indie Spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. This month, Raelee Chapman talks to Timothy Brennan, whose eBook Lucky Rice won the 2014 eLit Award for Best Multimedia Produced eBook.

Lucky Rice: My Story is Your Story is a fictional philosophical conversation about nature between the book’s main character Mr. Tim, and a Balinese rice farmer. The eBook is interspersed with stunning photography of rice paddies and beautiful digital sketches, hence its inclusion in the multimedia category of the eLit Awards.

Tim was inspired to write Lucky Rice to relay some of the philosophical answers he had found to life’s big questions to his five adult children. He chose fiction as his form as it enabled greater freedom of expression than non-fiction.

I asked Tim why he chose ePublishing, and how he would describe the process from start to finished product.

“I felt the traditional path to publishing is too congested, but ePublishing sidesteps this problem. Right from the start I chose to write Lucky Rice in Apple Corp's iBook Author. It's the only authoring software tool that allowed me to integrate word, audio, images, video and digital drawing. Looking ahead I see the reading experience in 2020 will be with iPads and smart phones. In the next few years special headsets such as Google Glass will heighten the reading experience. This is the marketplace I want Lucky Rice to be in.”

Tim’s editor recommended he compete in the multimedia category of the eLit Book Awards, 2014. Tim reacted to winning with modesty: “I was surprised Lucky Rice won because it's a global competition and there were so many other great books involved. Receiving professional recognition has been a great boost.”

Perhaps because of this recognition, Lucky Rice was this year accepted as the first eBook ever to be launched at the Ubud Writer's Festival.

I asked Tim how well the book went down in Ubud: “Lucky Rice was really well received. Everyone seemed to like the book and the multimedia format. For someone like me, launching my first book at the Writers Festival was a lot of fun. Being thrown into the literary world was a new experience.”

Tim’s next goal for Lucky Rice is to have it translated into some of Asia’s regional languages.  Currently it is being translated into Indonesian.

Tim jokes: “Someone along the way once told me there is only one thing more challenging than finishing your first book - wrestling a crocodile! I would agree!” However, he is already working on the sequel to Lucky Rice. This will see the main characters reconvening after twenty years.

Lucky Rice is available on Amazon and iBooks. For more information see: http://www.myluckyrice.com/

If you would like your book to be featured in Indie Spotlight, please e-mail Raelee Chapman at asainbooksblog@gmail.com.  

Indie Spotlight / Publio Publishing

After success in Hungary and the United Kingdom, indie outfit Publio Publishing is now launching self-publishing services in the Asia Pacific Region. Founder and publisher Alcser Norbert told Asian Books Blog: “Publio’s aim is to introduce self-publishing to more and more countries, thus creating the opportunity for talented individuals to publish their own books. From children’s stories to scientific works, we welcome projects covering any topic. In addition to selling books in electronic format as eBooks through both the largest online bookstores such as Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes and Noble, and also through country and region specific online bookstores, we also distribute printed books. Promotion forms a great part of what we offer. Thanks to our well-tailored marketing services we aim to make our books available to a global audience.”

Learn more by clicking here for a YouTube video, here for written information about Publio’s new Asian operation, and here for the company's so-called self-publishing creed.

Indie Spotlight

Alice Clark-Platts is no longer writing her monthly column on self-publishing. Instead there will  be regular Indie Spotlight updates on self-publishing.

For now, indie authors might want to click here for an  interesting piece from The Bookseller - the trade magazine of the UK publishing industry. It explains how The Bookseller is in future going to preview indie titles.