Get Audio+
Hot FM
Kool 101
Eight FM
Fly FM
Molek FMKedai Fixi + Amir Muhammad
Thirsty for JUICE content? Quench your cravings on our Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp
Amir Muhammad
Having a full plate
Against all odds, Amir — a writer, filmmaker, and publisher — has proven the naysayers wrong as Buku Fixi became quite a success story in the local publishing industry; especially in injecting much needed variety in the Malay literature market through the introduction of urban contemporary novels of the pulp and noir variety. The four-year-old company even won The Bookseller International Adult Trade Publisher last year at the London Book Fair. But he isn’t one to rest on his laurels, other than the physical store, Amir still has a dizzying number of projects that’s in store for Fixi in an effort to further diversify the company and the publishing industry.
One of the challenges you’ve stated about Kedai Fixi was to get people to come; [at the time of this conversation] it’s currently the third month since the shop has opened, how has the response been?
The first two months exceeded our target, we have a certain target. I think we are doing okay. Even though we do not get so much random traffic, we get people who come specifically for it. So, I think that’s the big strength lah. If you want random traffic, then of course somewhere like KLCC and all that, [those places] will get a lot. But here people need to make a certain effort and they do that because we get our latest titles first before any other shops — not because we are kiasu or whatever, that’s just how it works out because it takes time for other shops to process from their warehouse whereas here, it’s literally from the printer. We can just bring [the books] here. So, we often have one or two weeks head start and in that two weeks, normally our bestsellers will be the very latest ones that haven’t come out [elsewhere]. That helps.
With that in mind, have you lessened the distribution to other bookstores, possibly as a way of driving more customers to Kedai Fixi?
It’s been the other way round ever since we started. Other shops have increased their orders because for example, the two books (Cyberpunk: Malaysia and A Malaysian Restaurant in London) we recently launched yesterday, we’re reprinting tomorrow because the demand was more than normal. Normally for an English book, the initial demand will be 800 from shops, but this time, the initial demand was 1,500 and we printed 2,000. We sold 100 each at the launch so it’s like, we don’t have enough for our own [store]. Rather unusually, we’re reprinting two days after the launch so I don’t know why, it’s just timing.
Now that the shop has been operating for a few months, what are some of the challenges that you’ve discovered that’s unique to the physical store rather than the Fixi website?
I would say in some ways [running the store] is easier because we don’t have to deal with Pos Malaysia (laughs). Sometimes they don’t leave the card and then we get blamed. And then we can show that we’ve given the tracking number to Pos Laju… “macam tu lah.” I suppose that’s what makes it easier. But I don’t think there are any major challenges, the management here was easy to work with and the renovation was, I think, only a month. We have one full-time staff whom we’ve already knew beforehand. We already knew he was interested with that kind of preparation for that and aside from him, we only use part-timers, because there is no need for more than one [full-time staff]. No real [challenges]… well, of course you have to open at 10am, but [that’s] expected (laughs).
How do you feel when you see a Fixi-published book sitting on the front few shelves of a bookstore, ahead of the romance novels that prompted you to start Fixi in the first place?
You know, I don’t want to knock [the romance novels] but I can, privately. I think it shows some variety, I don’t mean that what we are doing is so artistic or worthy or noble; no, don’t mistake us (laughs). The reason I started was to give some variety to the Malay bookshelves in particular and also to the English bookshelves because there, the problem would be something elsewhere if something is published in English, it would tend to look wordy… “This is good for you, this is literature.” You know, that kind of thing? I didn’t want that. I want something to be like rude – this is like pulpy, but well done, not so many typos and all that. I just think… there should be more; a wider range than there is now.
How is your first publishing company Matahari Books doing? It seems to be in an inactive state.
It doesn’t exist anymore as a company because (laughs) I didn’t renew the license and it was my own mistake because it wasn’t handled well as a business. I didn’t even, like, open a bank account. I was using my personal account, I kept meaning to… “Oh yeah, next week I have to open an account.” And before you know it, three years had passed. So, the accounts were kind of a mess. I mean I do pay people, but in terms of showing the cash, sales report and all that. I did something which you’re not supposed to do and that’s pay people according to print run. Print 3,000 and pay them as if all 3,000 had been sold, which is actually not good business practice, but what else? I don’t even keep records because it started as a hobby.
So, that was a good lesson for you when you started Fixi.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good lah, I mean it could have gone wrong. I could be bankrupt or whatever (laughs). But I will restart Matahari under Fixi. It will be like Penguin Random House (laughs). Fixi Matahari, macam tu lah. It has to be a separate company because the pricing structure is different. For Matahari, we would publish like RM40, RM30 or RM60 books whereas Fixi, you can’t go that high at all because we’re targeting college kids.
Matahari primarily publishes non-fiction. So what about Fixi Mono which is the non-fiction brand of Fixi?
Fixi Mono, it turns out to be a flop, we probably won’t continue it (laughs). We even tried to sell it to Big Bad Wolf and we sold them 200 first. But after the huge Big Bad Wolf sale last year in December, [even in] ten days, it couldn’t sell. So I try to sell it to them again, they were very diplomatic because they’re friends of mine, and they said, “Um, we have to look at the numbers first.” Then I said, “Nevermind, I’ll give them for free.” Then they said, “Okay, can.” So, we’re giving away like 500 books for free. Yeah, it was a mistake. I don’t know why, maybe it was the topic because it was about the World Cup, Malaysian football. Something I learnt is that not every subject has fans who would want to buy books on [it]. I think non-fiction is about the subject [and] not really about the packaging, I mean it is to some, but it’s not the main point.
Other than the possible resurrection of Matahari, is there anything new that’s in the works for Fixi?
Ah, yes. [Matahari] will be resurrected because I promise people that their next books will be published under it. We’re doing this regional anthology; we just announced the call two days ago. It’s actually open to writers all over the world as long as it’s set in a Southeast Asian city. So that’s our attempt to… mengantarabangsakan (internationalise) [Fixi]… cheh, I want to be like KRU (laughs). A lot of times when people want to do something for the international market, it turns out to be crap because they have such a weird idea of what the international markets want, you know, like Vikings. Why would anyone want to see a Malaysian-made Viking movie? But on some level, you have to acknowledge that our reach is quite finite if you were to focus on Malaysia all the time and why not in this age? It’s so easy to say, “Even if you are in another country, just submit to us and we will still pay you.” This would not have been possible before, right? And they can easily Google us, check our track record and that kind of thing, so it’s quite encouraging. So in the first day alone, we got five entries, all not from Malaysia. Three from The Philippines, one from Singapore, one from America but it’s set in KL but the writer is not Malaysian. So all of them have been shortlisted for Man Asian Literary Prize, they are professionals and they trusted us enough to consider us. So yeah, we wanna do more of that and we are also starting this other label where we buy Malaysian-English rights rather than Malaysian-Malay rights, so in a way, this is what they do in India, like you reprint a book that’s out in America and all that but you make it cheaper, but with the condition that you’re not allowed to sell it outside your territory. We’re starting that where the goal is to start collecting as many countries as possible, so the first three countries we’ve already signed are the Philippines, Iran, and Israel. So, Israel, I’m really proud of, we’ve bought Tel Aviv Noir, so we’re publishing it in English because the book originally came out in English. That’s the deal.
Why do you think that there is a shift in interest in the Bahasa-reading crowd to alt. books when romance novels are still dominating the market?
It’s hard for me to say objectively because it would sound like I’m tooting my own horn and I could be proven wrong, they might stop buying tomorrow, you shouldn’t get to riak lah – cheh (laughs) – about this sort of things. But I think on a very obvious level, there was the variety factor where everybody was assuming that’s what people want based on the fact that that’s what they saw. Any new publisher… and actually that’s what they were told by bookshops, I was told this by bookshops, Malays only like three things; love, cooking, and religion. So they said if you want the Malay market, don’t try anything else – I was told [that]! And this is not by readers, this was by people whose job was selling books and you’d think they would know. They were very sceptical and when they agreed to take it, pun cam like charity, almost like, “Okay lah, we’ll help.” Macam tu kan. So, they were also taken by surprise. A lot of the bigger companies, they got to a stage where they were so big, the people who started them didn’t even read what they were publishing and I think that made them out of touch. I hope I won’t get to a stage where I don’t read anything that I publish, I would have to read everything, every word. So in a way, if there are typos, it’s also my fault because I didn’t read even what the edited version was. You have to know what you are selling. You don’t have to love every book, “Oh! This is the best!” Whatever. You have to think that at least [the books are] good enough lah: Bolehlah – that kind of thing.
So you don’t have a particularly perfectionist standard for the entries?
Well, most of the entries are first time writers, so sometimes, it’s not so polished. But we have an editor, so some books have to be rewritten up to like three times, not more than that. Sometimes, quite minor rewrite, but sometimes very few typos here and there. It depends; some people are quite natural storytellers, I find. But what I find is that a lot of teenagers submit a lot I would say, like half. We found [out why] that they get rejected because we have a panel of readers; they all try to write about things they don’t know. So they try to say things like.. [it’s] set in the White House, you know that kind of thing where it’s so obvious that they don’t know [what they’re writing about], including those who write in English. We don’t have an age limit; we could still discover some twelve-year-old genius tomorrow. You need some kind of life experience at least to convincingly set it in certain places and unfortunately, we found that they try to imitate what was successful before… read the synopsis pun, like, “(Sigh), didn’t we publish this a year ago? Why are you submitting this?” So, those are easy to reject lah (laughs). We’ll just say, “We’ve published this, but under a different name (laughs).”
What do you personally think of books such as Suami Aku Ustaz and their regressive views?
I’m jealous that they sell so well, madly jealous so I have to get that out of the way. But on the other hand, I think as much as we can be horrified by the gendered kind of assumptions and objectification that go on… I think what people usually don’t bother to do is to ask somebody who likes reading them, “What do you get out of them?” Are they all stupid people? Are they all gullible people? I don’t think it’s necessarily so because the reading experience is very different, especially when you read fiction, it’s different from reading a manual – then you follow the manual. It’s not like you’re trying to fix a computer and you’re following a manual. I feel quite strongly about this because people react to it… they will often take out of it what they want to take out of it. For example, something like Ombak Rindu, I didn’t read the book but I saw the movie. To be honest, the movie, I enjoyed it on the level of [what] I took it to be – this is a story about a masochist, you know? All her life she’s been told what to do and she enjoys it. So I thought that’s great! And there’s also this Henry James movie, Washington Square – [the heroine] was in service of her father for her whole life and this man was trying to pursue her, but she got the sense that he wanted her money, so whatever, she would just turn off this thing. And, it’s the same thing with Portrait of a Lady where in the end, she turned away from the man, this romantic hero who was trying to save her because she thought her duty was just to stay and it was of this very… (trails off) I love Henry James! Because there are always things going on under the surface and it’s not this Southern California thing – you have to follow your dreams all the time. You have to stand up for yourself, so people who read this sort of books, I don’t think they are all so dumb and gullible and get the message that, “Oh, I have to get married soon and I hope that my husband really controls me.” They have to see it in a way like it’s a sort of danger. If you’re like a 15-year-old, I mean it sounds politically incorrect, but if you’re reading about someone who gets raped, on some level, you’ll feel that this person is experiencing extreme situations, extreme emotions. You watch an action movie; the hero gets beaten up so you’ll get this adrenaline rush. Yes, of course underlining that, there’s a lot to think about in terms of religious hypocrisy, that’s actually just patriarchy channelling through other means. I’m sure every woman or person who reads it, they actually get something quite different. They used to do this in film studies and it was considered a novelty when they started it and it was called Reception Studies because film studies had existed for decades where it’s scholars talking about what these movies represent. In the ‘90s, some people came up with the idea, “Why don’t we actually ask the audience?” You know, “What do they get out of it?” Not just something simple like “Good movie”, “Bad movie”, but “What do you actually feel?” Let’s say somebody is getting abused, do you get excited and want to abuse them more? Or do you empathise with them and recognise the awareness, that kind of thing. So I think that’s something that hasn’t been done. I think a lot of our assumptions are elitist, we think people who read it are somehow less educated than us or less bright than us to get what we can see, even though we haven’t read the books, you know? So, a lot of this is patronising…
But what about this idea of the passive audience who can’t think for themselves because the media – one of its many roles – is as the ‘educator’…
But if you see the way people respond to things, it’s not necessarily so. Like for example, there are certain non-fiction books that are published by another publisher called DuBook [Press]… some of the bestsellers are… I can’t imagine — why are people buying these? Actually, one of the bestsellers is one of [Z.F.] Zamir’s books; it’s a book about educational policy and it’s so dry and it’s so factual and there are quirks and it sold over 10,000 copies… [It’s called] Sekolah Bukan Penjara, Universiti Bukan Kilang and I was surprised. People were discussing it in universities and I think it shows that all this while, they asked enough people who are not just uncritically [consuming media]… And for the media to say this, it’s a bit rich lah, like weren’t you a part of shaping people’s passivity or otherwise over the decades? And people respond with like satire and many creative ways and they find their own cracks, so you can’t just homogenise things like that.
