What will I write…

I wonder if you all remember the English textbooks you all used in school and how boring they were. Remember D.H. Howe’s “The Crows of Klang”? Good grief! Who would want to read anything like that?

Another problem is one textbook is supposed to be in use for 10 years but I noticed that they would drag on till some 15-20 years even. I guess now that students are getting the textbooks free, it is not easy to get rid of the old books and supply brand new ones. For one thing, they’re VERY expensive – RM12 or more (and I will not delve into the reasons why). Of course, if you use a textbook for so long, things get outdated. Take, for instance, one passage from the set of textbooks at the time on the Penang Ferry Tragedy. The students today, who were probably not born yet when that happened, would know nothing of it and I do not think they would be interested unless perhaps they’re from Penang or around those parts.

But what actually drove me to writing workbooks for students was the fact that textbooks cater for the general standard of the students – too easy for the good ones and too difficult for those less proficient and the latter, of course, formed the majority. In view of this, I decided to write a book that was simple enough for the weak ones to handle and this gave birth to my first book ever…

I wrote and typed everything and even designed the cover with my limited computer skills using Print Artist and I got the printer – the one who used to print my school magazines for me – to print 1,000 copies. I was planning to use whatever I needed for my students at the time and keep the rest for the subsequent years…but some teachers in the other schools heard of it and came to cart the rest away, payment in cash no less!

Then the people from the publishing companies heard of it and started coming round to persuade me to let them publish the book. After some time, I relented and gave the publishing rights to the sole Sibu firm and these two books were released the following year…

The royalty payment was extremely little though. I can’t remember exactly now but I think they deducted 40%, that being the standard discount they gave to the bookstores and paid the writer 3% of the remaining 60%. Fortunately, the books sold like hot cakes, so what I received was encouraging enough to keep me going.

Unlike many workbooks where they will reprint the same thing year in and year out, changing the name and the cover only, this publisher allowed me to revise my books. Thus, I could replace those that I found too easy or difficult, boring or perhaps I came up with something more interesting and so on. Other than revising the existing copies for the upper forms, the following year, the publisher asked me to write two more workbooks – for Form 1 and Form 2. He was able to get somebody else to write the Form 3 edition…and these were published…

This arrangement suited us real fine and we did the same for the year after that and came out with these…

I also wrote some sets of model examination papers for practice purposes for this particular publishing firm, this one…

…and this one…

The sale of the books every year was very good, to say the least, and I was extremely pleased with the money that was rolling in…until disaster struck. The publisher was very ambitious and got a whole lot of writers to write for the other subjects but I heard that they failed miserably on the market. At the same time, he opened a bookstore and there was this conflict of interests. The bookstores boycotted the books he published as he had become their rival…and the other publishers refused to supply their books to his bookstore as they felt he would be promoting the ones he published himself instead of theirs. I guess his hands were tied and since he had incurred heavy losses on the unsold books, he closed down the publishing firm.

Then I was approached to work with one in West Malaysia and while with this particular firm, I came out with these workbooks…

…and these sets of model examination papers…

It did not work out too well for various reasons which I would not bother to elaborate on, but the bottom line was I was getting paid very little. They would say that the books did not sell well (even though I heard that they had to reprint a couple of times) or they had to deduct from my royalty for the unsold copies and all that kind of crap. The worst thing was they would not even bother to pay me unless I called them again and again to pester them, not that what they paid was really worth that trouble. In the end, I decided to call it a day.

Well, all in all, it was a nice experience while it lasted and I did make quite a bit over the years out of the endeavour. After all, life is like that – full of ups and downs…and we just plod on our own way one day at a time.