Zaibun Siraj talks about her journey as a self-published author. Unstoppable. The Woman Driven by Passion and Purpose.” (2024) is published by the India based self-publishing platform Notionpress.com and is available in paperback.

Singaporean educator Zaibun Siraj is one of the founders of the women’s advocacy NGO, AWARE. She has recently self -published her memoir, “Unstoppable. The Woman Driven by Passion and Purpose” which began as an oral history project conducted by the National Archives.

The Asian Bookshelf spoke to her about turning the project into a literary endeavor.

TAB: “For this autobiography you chose to take the self- publishing route. Why?”

ZS: “The chapters are very much the structure of the oral history interviews. I decided that if I polish it up and add photographs, I could reach a wider audience because the oral history unit is largely used by researchers. I went to a couple of publishers, two turned me down, and said that they don’t really go into autobiographies, one of them sent it to a senior editor who said that the manuscript needs editing, but that it should be published because this is an interesting life. That motivated me to go on. Another publisher turned me down without giving me any reasons, and another one wanted to charge me a sum of money. I could have gone down that route, but I decided, okay, maybe I don’t want to spend that much money because I didn’t know whether it was really necessary to put in so much money into this. So then I decided, okay, I’ll start editing it.”

TAB: “These houses that turned you down… were they Singaporean publishing houses ?”

ZB: “Yes, Singaporean publishing houses. I didn’t try any overseas publishing houses. Some of them did say that they would only respond within six months; that’s a pretty long time for someone who’s very keen and enthusiastic about putting out their work and some of them don’t even bother to reply. So I think a little bit more communication from the publishers would really help.”

TAB: “What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of self -publishing?”

ZS: “There’s no doubt that if you go through an established publisher, the established publisher goes through all the things that I had to do as a self -published person. And now, because the books were published in India, I have to have them shipped into Singapore. When I look at the costs, I wanted to keep the costs down. So right now, I have a problem, for example, big bookshops like Kinokuniya won’t take it unless I go through a distributor, and the distributor wants 60% of the cost of the book. That makes the price very expensive. I’m being very honest with you. I’m torn between the two because I’ve had my other books published by a publisher, that’s fine, they’re okay. But in terms of self -publishing, I think what is interesting is that… okay… I worked with an editor, but I also had the liberty of choosing the photographs, which I thought were suitable to illustrate my text. I’m not so sure whether when you work with a publisher, you would have that amount of freedom, whereas if you self -publish, you do. Notion Press don’t question you, actually, to be honest. They help you with developing the text. I really like the way they did the layout and so on. They seem to have a lot of people who are very clever at this kind of thing. I don’t know whether a publisher would have given me that much freedom.”