Conversation with Wena Poon

Photo by Sarah Coldheart

On Friday night, I was at the Arts House with Raven Azure and Sarah Coldheart (of Seriously Sarah fame) for Conversation with Wena Poon, a pre-Singapore Writers Festival event organised by the National Arts Council and the Singapore Book Club.

Wena is the author of Lions In Winter, which is an excellent collection of short stories that I highly recommend. Born in Singapore but currently residing in the US, she’s also been listed for both the Singapore Literature Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. You can find her website here.

Besides Wena, Malaysia-based editor Sharon Bakar was also there as part of the session.

I arrived a little late because of traffic, but I made it there before they actually started. Cue a rather sheepish me rushing to the seat that Azure and Sarah had been kind enough to save for me.

The event was supposed to be at earshot Cafe, but they had to upgrade the venue to the Play Den due to overwhelming response.

Anyway, everything that Wena said was very true. She hit the nail on the head almost every time, covering a variety of writing-related topics, but more on that later.

The basic gist of it all was: write whatever you want, but you’ve got to know your market if you want to sell.

Wena is a lawyer by training, so a lot of what she said reminded me of marketing classes. It’s all true, though.

She’s really big on print-on-demand, which is not vanity publishing; rather, it’s exactly what it says – when people order your book, it gets printed and sent to them. It’s much cheaper for both publisher and author, and in many ways more advantageous than going through a traditional publisher.

Either way, you’d end up doing almost all the publicity yourself, unless you’re lucky and have a publisher who is really keen to promote your work. She made a very good point, which was that we’re in the generation where being wired (or being wireless, rather) is common. We can use the many aspects of the Internet — Facebook, Twitter, websites, viral marketing — to our advantage.

There was also a chart about how the writer, public and publisher sees the whole process of creating, producing and marketing a book. To a writer, publishing is almost all the work, while writing takes less effort. To the public (ie non-writers), writing seems like the most difficult job of them all.

The reality, however, is that the writing and publishing are nothing compared to the cost and time investment that goes into marketing and after-sales support of the book.

After her 45-minute talk, it became a dialogue with Sharon Bakar. There was much discussion about how Singapore and Malaysian writers should join forces to become an unstoppable literary power network and stuff, because of our geographic proximity and how the markets (and writers) are very similar.

Because we’d started late and everything, the Q&A session was cut a little short, but one thing of interest was that there is a publisher in Singapore with the POD machines in Singapore. It was pretty obvious everyone was interested and suprised.

At the end of the session, we went outside to the corridor, where they had a table set up for book sales and autographs. I bought both Lions In Winter and Biophilia, the first of her highly entertaining sci-fi/fantasy/adventure series that I really liked. I got her autograph on both, and I really look forward to getting the Biophilia omnibus comes out. It was a good session, all in all.

Wena will be back in October for the Singapore Writers Festival, so look out for that! You can check out Azure and Sarah‘s take on the event at their respective blogs.