ALOYSIUS ASEERVATHAM
https://www.aseer.com.au/
Q: Please tell me about yourself – what kind of a person you are, your beliefs, your nature, your follies, anything.
A: I hail from a middle-class Sri Lankan family. I am the oldest and the only son with four sisters younger than me. I have shaped into a person with a high degree of pride after having had a comfortable and protected early life. I choose my associates carefully to avoid unwanted troubles! Hence, I don’t have many friends. Generally, I am God-fearing. I may not go all out to do good to someone but I never contemplate doing harm to anyone. I am sincere, honest, and trustworthy. I like to help poor people and those in real need. If my conscience says that what I have done is wrong in a given situation, I am quick to ask for forgiveness.
Q: Tell me about your writing journey, when and how did it all start?
A: My father was a well-known author of school Arithmetic books for Sri Lankan children for more than two decades. He encouraged and guided me also to write a couple of mathematics books after my graduation and before I left my country to live overseas. I am proud of my achievements all throughout my life. I worked in England and Africa for 11 years as a teacher. I had to take a break from teaching for six years to get some practical accounting experience to become a fully qualified accountant. This I accomplished in Zambia working for the National Passenger transport organisation. At the age of 45 years, I migrated to Australia where I worked for 20 years as a Principal teacher of Accounting at a Technical and Further Education College. I also acquired more Australian Accounting qualifications such as CPA Australia. The subjects I taught at this institution in Australia motivated me to recommence my writing. I was keen to write books that could help students easily grasp the essential concepts. This writing journey for over thirty years started in 1987 and is continuing - even after retirement.
After retirement, I started writing books of general interest.
Q: Tell me about all the difficulties faced in getting a publisher to publish your book.
A: I was lucky that for the first four books I wrote when lecturing in Australia, the traditional publishers came to know about my unpublished writings and approached me. The four books were: Essentials of Accounting for Business, Management Accounting Principles, Managing Finance, and Accounting Information Systems. These books were meant for specific syllabuses and the teachers and students in various colleges liked them. This ensured a consistent sale each year. The publishers did all the marketing and I received regular royalties. I got good feedback from students who used the books in my classes.
The limited number of traditional publishers of today are in great demand and they can only be approached through Literary Agents. Anybody can of course get their book published using any of the many self-publishing companies.
The traditional publisher essentially buys the right to publish an author’s book and pays royalties to the author from the sales. They make sure that the book is of a good standard before buying the right.
Traditional publishing involves the author going through a stringent process to have their work selected for publication. Self-publishing means that the author only pays to have the work published and may manage some or all of the other parts of the book publishing process such as editing, cover design, marketing, and production.
Q: Do you believe that marketing is essential for the success of a book?
A: It is vital to employ a suitable advertising and marketing strategy for an author’s work to be exposed to the interested parties. This is facilitated by social media. Whether or not the author can afford any of the advertising methods is another question.
Q: What marketing ideas did you deploy for marketing your book?
A: I could not afford to advertise all of my self-published books. I did get the publishers of a few books to do affordable marketing and I don’t recall any great success with that.
Q: Do you interact with your readers? What do they say about your book?
A: The readers of my book do not interact with me at all except for a few I know personally. I get advised by the publishers, through their author centre on the sales statistics. Generally, I come to know of the number of books sold of a particular title only when I get a royalty payment.
Q: What suggestions would you like to offer potential authors?
A: The author must first try to get the book published by a traditional publisher.
If this is not forthcoming, finding a good self-publishing company is the only other choice. Having published the book using the chosen self-publishing company, the book must be affordably priced and appropriately marketed. The retailers don’t generally conform to such requests from authors. They have the final say on the price depending on the margin they want for themselves! This is especially true in the cases of hard and softcover copies. Electronic copies seem to be priced reasonably! If the book is printed in colour, the price per unit is prohibitive!
Authors would find that they could hardly recover their investment unless the volume of sales is large. The only guaranteed reward for the author is the personal satisfaction of having published a useful book!
Authors of school books with repetitive sales each year and of popular novels with high sales volume can benefit substantially!
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Aloysius Aseervatham is the author of twenty successful books - most based on the concepts of Mathematics. His twenty-first, A Simple Guide to Chemistry Concepts, will be out in August 2021.