Cover design by the author

On the second floor expanse of long, wide corridors inside the Mayfair gallery-cum-meeting house at the Nehru Center in central London, retinues of young South Asian artists congregate and make small talk by the lectern.  As they chat about release parties and publishing dates, a pit crew of Indian men clatters about the stage, rolling out a large Persian rug and quickly apportioning the carpet with a triumvirate of mahogany chairs.  It is one of many events at this year’s South Asian Literary Festival.

Seated in the rearmost chair is Julie O’Yang. O’Yang is a Chinese author and visual artist who works out of her studio in Amsterdam, and one of Amazon’s many new self-published authors.  She is here at the South Asian Literary Festival to promote the electronic release of her first novel in English, Butterfly, which concerns the relationship between a Chinese woman and a young Japanese soldier during the years before and after the Rape of Nanking.  She has previously written solely in Dutch and Chinese.

O’Yang is wearing a black and white variegated skirt and a cocked tweed newsboy’s hat, looking every bit the artist.  O’Yang, who also paints, has a large pendent slung over her sweater—a work of modern art itself—looking like an oversized blue M&M.

I met O’Yang very much in the way her characters appear in her novels: by pure chance and without precipitation or warning.  The lead protagonist in her current project, China Sonata, begins like this: A man with a cello appears at the doorstep of an unnamed female lead.  He enters the house and together they retreat to her chambers, open the doors of her wardrobe and peer into the past.  For our part, I was staring at the event poster in the lobby of the Nehru Center, trying to figure out in which room the event was held.  She too was staring at the very same placard.  She asked me if I knew which room she was due in.  Recognizing her from her website photograph, I said no, but suggested we find it together.

Contemporary art is about ideas, not technique

And while we did not commiserate retrospectively through an open wardrobe, I would ask her quite a bit about her future.

We met the following afternoon in the lobby of her Paddington hotel—a long and massive colonnaded work of marble in central London.  As we walked to a nearby café, I asked about her exhibition in The Hague last week.  As will happen quite often with O’Yang, the scope of the conversation quickly expanded and she was on to contemporary art.

“Contemporary art is about ideas,” she intimated, “not technique.  Take Ai Wei Wei.  His father was a Minister of Culture and a collector of Ming furniture.  So he started by taking this furniture and making it impractical—he would add a fifth leg on a chair, or something. But this kind of art is less intimate, less personal.”

“Anyway,” she continued, “the people that come to these exhibitions aren’t really interested in art; they’re just looking for something to match the carpet.”

O’Yang is cynical about her art, perhaps because she never had any intentions of being a writer.  She took a class on a whim at a writing academy in Amsterdam.  After a month her professor, Pim Wiersinga, insisted she had nothing to learn from the school and put her in contact with a Dutch publisher straight away.

Three novels later she began having disagreements with her Dutch publisher.   One in particular concerned the film rights to her novel China Noir, which was to be bought by a Dutch filmmaker.  The film was never made.  This is when O’Yang decided to go digital.

Butterfly will be published solely for Amazon’s Kindle.  Her editor, Robert Masterson, is a creative writing professor at Manhattan College. Her agent works out of Barcelona.  She met both through Facebook.  Her novel will be released digitally with no immediate plans for a hardcopy release.

This is a new trend in book publishing and it is gaining more and more traction among disenfranchised authors who feel shunned or disgruntled by what is often an arduous publishing process.

Previously, a legitimate question lingered: could Amazon produce their own best sellers? A recent New York Times article answered the question:

“The Hangman’s Daughter was an e-book hit. Amazon bought the rights to the historical novel by a first-time writer, Oliver Pötzsch, and had it translated from German. It has now sold 250,000 digital copies.”

This is the success Amazon promises.  Authors like O’Yang and Pötzsch can effectively cut out the middlemen—choosing their own editors and publishing immediately without the constraints that traditional publishing normally entails.

No longer subject to the intransigent whims of large publishing houses, previously unknown authors can now take advantage of Amazon’s existing fiction market to build their careers.

Speaking earlier from her chair at the literary festival, O’Yang had at least hinted as much:

“Butterfly can be purchased on Kindle,” she noted in a bit of self-promotion, “please buy it.  Please read it.  Please review it.  And please suggest it to your friends.”

And now with Amazon, this can all be done with a single click.

Julie O’Yang is represented by Pontas Literary and Film Agency.  Butterfly will be available Christmas 2011.