Category: 
Tuesday, January 29, 2008Recently, I came to know that my book (translated from I Am Gifted, So Are You book by Adam Khoo) has become one of the best-selling books in Vietnam since Dec 2007. I must say I’ve learned a lot from my journey with this book.
I’ve learned that no matter how good a book is, it won’t sell itself. If you publish a great book but just leave it for the book distributor, it’ll hardly sell. Especially, if you’re a first-time author, they’ll just leave your book at some corner in their bookstore.
Although I put lots of efforts in achieving the highest quality for my book, I knew I must do something about marketing and sales to get it to the audiences.
What I did was first to setup a website for my book. On that website, I posted the full table of contents, many excerpts from the book, and gave away soft-copies of the first 3 chapters generously. Thus, my readers can check out not only just what my book is about but in some details as well. From there, they can make a good decision whether the book is for them or not.
In addition, I also prepared lots of complementary materials for my readers and answer all their questions either on the website or by email. Even for some students who asked me questions that are not related to my book, I still sincerely gave them the answers within my knowledge.
Although my book became one of the best-selling within only 2 months after published, there were some failures too. I failed to market the book directly to the schools in Vietnam due to the red-tape (my brother is still working to find a way to). I failed to establish a small retail shop for my book due to my location research (and I lost some money for this poor decision). Anyway, I learned my lessons and my book still became very successful.
However, that success wasn’t easy. It took lots of effort and input from my family and me. It’s also not possible without our supporting readers. And that a journey I’ll write about in my next post…
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The question is whether you buy it or not. Forget the Farrer Park, forget the attractive near-by Tekka Market then .
). Perhaps they don’t have enough money to pay for the housing loans. Perhaps the owners die (oh my…). We also heard of rumors that some owners borrow money from loan shark and run away. The loan shark will disturb whoever stays in the houses until they get the money. They don’t care who is who. 
Those are enough reasons for us not to be fond of repurchased houses. Well, the last thing a buyer wants is a returned house, right?
Was it because the price was too high or the floor area was too small (only 60 m2)? Was it because the house was repurchased? Or was it because of some untold tales? 
Close the windows and use curtains then, you may say. Well, yes, we can if we afford to turn on the aircon all day long. Hello, Singapore weather is super hot!
Oh, I forgot to mention that HDB never allows us to check out the real houses. We can only see the floor plan on the paper, the location, the price… So, if we lucky that the house has viewable windows, we can see more.
)! After checking the location, the lease commencement date, the price, the design, blah blah… we only liked the flats at Farrer Park. The rest are either too old or too far or too expensive in our opinions.
We told ourselves that this would be our 
Die lah! There were 494 people before us! How “lucky” we were! 
Optismictic as we were always, we consoled ourselves that it would be okay, there were a lot of houses (about 150 actually). We tried hard to forget the fact that there were about 500 people fighting over 150 houses!!!!!!!!!!
! It’s still another month to our HDB appointment date !!!!!!!!
