Wednesday 15 april 2015london shoW daily
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amir Muhammad established Buku Fixi in Malaysia in 2011. It has
published 90 titles so far and is turning non-readers into readers.
He explains
I was mooching around Instagram recently and found that the
hashtag for my company #BukuFixi was used on more than 14,000
posts. I was shockedshocked!to find this was just 4,000 fewer than
#PenguinBooks and certainly more than, say #RandomHouse, which had
10,000. But were a small Malaysian company without even an
office.
Many of our readers on Instagram seem to enjoy posing our books
next to cups of latte, slices of cake, fluffy cats, or all three.
Well, bless them! Without them, we would not have been able to
publish 90 titles in our first four years.
Buku Fixi started in 2011, but I think the germ of the idea was
when I lived in New York for a few months in 1995. In that long hot
summer, I used to buy second-hand books at a makeshift stall in
Washington Square Park, in the same vicinity where perambulating
blokes would try to sell you weed. Most of the novels I bought were
in Vintages Black Lizard series and were usually written by Jim
Thompson. I loved the way the lurid spines looked so nice when
lined up on the shelf.
When I returned to Malaysia I brought the books back with me.
But during a house move, all the Black Lizards went missing! Did
the movers steal them? (If so, this was a positive sign; Malaysians
are into reading after all. Who knew?) So when I started a
publishing company for pulp fiction many years later, I knew the
spines had to look strong and consistent. Perhaps subconsciously, I
wanted to make up for the loss of those Black Lizards.
The Malay fiction market is dominated by the romance genre and
50,000 in sales is considered a bestseller. Among the blockbusters
of the past decade are My Husband Is a Religious Teacher, My
Husband Is Mr Perfect 10, My Husband Is the Sweetest and My Husband
Is a Limited Edition. If you look really hard, you might find some
similarities. I didnt want to publish romance because thats not the
sort of thing I would have read as a teenager. I wanted noir,
zombies, aliens, serial killersthat sort of thing. So I advertised
on Facebook for wannabe novelists. We launched in April 2011 with
three novels by debut writers. The name Fixi is from fiksi, the
Indonesian way of saying fiction.
It was hard to get a distributor because all three books were
written by men. One of the biggest distributors told me: Men dont
sell. There was a perception that only romance sold; the mainly
female readership would thus trust only a woman writer. (I later
found out that some of those romances were written by men with
feminine pseudonyms.) So I approached instead a distributor that
dealt mainly with leftist political tomes. It worked.
Our biggest stumbling block came when the nations biggest
bookstore chain banned our books in 2012. They said our novels
contained coarse language and might lead to teenage delinquency,
both of which I took as compliments. What kept us afloat in those
trying months was that we would sell directly at campus events.
Social media was also crucial; think of those dark pre-internet
days, when publicity meant having to be nice to journalists!
on having a spine
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Amir Muhammad can be contacted at [email protected].
21
And so our reputation, such as it is, grew. Many of our readers
are of the species known as hijabstersyoung women dressed in hijab
who have hipster tendencies. One of the joys of my job is in
seeing, on Twitter, how often these readers use the word mindfuck
to describe some of our books. So now we have helpfully included
Mindfuck as one of the genre classifications on our online
store.
Probably our proudest moment is when we managed to sell all
3,000 copies of a short story anthology in less than 24 hours. We
launched it at a very popular remaindered-books event called The
Big Bad Wolf, that bigger publishers dont want to associate with
(they think it spoils the market). But the people who go to that
sale are genuine readers (fine, theyre also a bit on the stingy
side), so why not reach out to them? But generally, I think Buku
Fixi has managed to turn quite a few non-readers into readers. We
have about a 20% male readership, which is considered freakishly
high by Malaysian standards.
When I interviewed Martin Amis as an undergraduate at the
University of East Anglia, I asked: Who do you write for? He was
polite enough to pretend this was a really unique question, so he
paused before replying: For a younger version of myself. So thats
also who I publish for (no, silly, not a younger version of Martin
Amis). I remember the joy I had in the pulpy immediacy of those
Black Lizards as well as the aesthetic kick of assembling a
collection. And then, the joy of finding friends who shared that
interesthow reading was both solitary and social.
But although consistency is good, we also like to try new
things. For example, we have started buying
translation rights; we took Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Haruki
Murakami and John Green. I just told the agents that they might as
well give us the Malaysian rights since no other Malaysian company
would ask anyway. It has so far workedthere are benefits to being
in a small pond, especially when the inhabitants of that pond are
disproportionately more likely to be on Instagram.
Many of our readers are of the species known as hijabstersyoung
women dressed in hijab who have hipster tendencies.
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I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O N E T A R Y F U N D
Available in print and digital formats on IMF eLibrary
Visit elibrary.imf.org/pwl5
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Wednesday 15 april 2015
D2_20_Amir Muhammed - Buku FixiD2_21_Amir Muhammed - Buku
Fixi
