After a long day at the booth, KMP Head and co-conspirator look all puckered up...
4 years ago
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Monday, May 28, 2007
Meeting the Editors and meeting Kristy
Our first “Meet the Editors” session and launch of “Compassion Conquers All” was at 11am on Sunday morning. Susan Lim kick started the session with a brief power point presentation to introduce HE Tsem Tulku Rinpoche to the audience.
There were about a dozen non-KH faces in the audience, which wasn’t bad, considering it was the first session of the day and it was a Sunday morning! As you can see in the picture, some people didn’t want to sit down but merely hovered in the back, some even standing beyond the barricades. After Susan finished her presentation, she passed the mic over to Andee Uetz, who introduced the ‘Compassion Conquers All’ book, followed by Jamie Khoo, who read a chapter of the book.
A few of the people who attended the session came to visit our booth so it was time well spent. Well done to Susan, Andee and Jamie! The only question that was raised during the Q&A was from Jamie’s aunt, who asked.. Why does the Rinpoche have hair? She said she asked that because others would’ve wanted to know.
This hair issue came up again later, when a man asked Shin at our booth the same question. After Shin explained, he seemed to accept her points, but still refused to buy anything from us – saying, “I don’t want to buy anything because Rinpoche has hair.” Truly hair raising!
After the Meet the Editors session, Susan and I met up with an old friend, Kristy, who I hadn't seen for a long time. The last time I remember seeing her was in Bali, at May Lynn and Ledand's wedding.
We had a lovely Japanese lunch and caught up with a LOT of news. She came back to the booth after lunch and listened attentively to Susan's explanations of the Gaden video and others. She bought quite a few items and I hope she enjoys them as much as we enjoyed putting them together!
There were about a dozen non-KH faces in the audience, which wasn’t bad, considering it was the first session of the day and it was a Sunday morning! As you can see in the picture, some people didn’t want to sit down but merely hovered in the back, some even standing beyond the barricades. After Susan finished her presentation, she passed the mic over to Andee Uetz, who introduced the ‘Compassion Conquers All’ book, followed by Jamie Khoo, who read a chapter of the book.A few of the people who attended the session came to visit our booth so it was time well spent. Well done to Susan, Andee and Jamie! The only question that was raised during the Q&A was from Jamie’s aunt, who asked.. Why does the Rinpoche have hair? She said she asked that because others would’ve wanted to know.
This hair issue came up again later, when a man asked Shin at our booth the same question. After Shin explained, he seemed to accept her points, but still refused to buy anything from us – saying, “I don’t want to buy anything because Rinpoche has hair.” Truly hair raising!
After the Meet the Editors session, Susan and I met up with an old friend, Kristy, who I hadn't seen for a long time. The last time I remember seeing her was in Bali, at May Lynn and Ledand's wedding.
We had a lovely Japanese lunch and caught up with a LOT of news. She came back to the booth after lunch and listened attentively to Susan's explanations of the Gaden video and others. She bought quite a few items and I hope she enjoys them as much as we enjoyed putting them together!
Sunday, May 27, 2007
A champagne party for Dharma
After a long Saturday at the booth, JJ and Jamie had invited us to go 'PLAY' - a happy club. It was Joy and Justin's last night in Singapore too so they wanted to go out (hmmm just noticed that they are the four Js!). Susan knows how much I love to go out so she was very sweet and seemed quite gungho about going out.
So Shin, Susan and I tentatively agreed to go out though we were feeling quite tired so we headed back to shower and get changed. Yek Yee wisely said she was going to stay home. When we got back to Ros' apartment, we found our hostess having a party. We had been invited when we had first arrived but we got back, we felt a bit shy and grubby in all our sweaty t-shirts!
However, after we showered, we felt even more lazy to go out and sent our FFK sms to the Js. I must have been really tired to turn down going out. Instead, we squirreled away in our room on our respective computers but there was soon a knock on the door and we were reluctantly dragged out to be sociable. Actually it wasn't really that reluctant - how can we say no too many times to champagne? That would be too rude!
We met Ari, a charming Singaporean banker who is based in Hong Kong, a Malaysian in manufacturing and another Singaporean who works for General Electric. Altogether there were eight people. When asked what we were doing in Singapore, we shared with them and showed them the Compassion book. Immediately, Ari said the eight of them would buy a copy each. At SGD22 each, we raised another SGD176! What a fabulous day!! I was so glad we didn't go out in the end and stayed in for the party. Below is a photo of us celebrating the sale and we hope that Ros and her generous friends will have lives touched by the Dharma.
So Shin, Susan and I tentatively agreed to go out though we were feeling quite tired so we headed back to shower and get changed. Yek Yee wisely said she was going to stay home. When we got back to Ros' apartment, we found our hostess having a party. We had been invited when we had first arrived but we got back, we felt a bit shy and grubby in all our sweaty t-shirts!
However, after we showered, we felt even more lazy to go out and sent our FFK sms to the Js. I must have been really tired to turn down going out. Instead, we squirreled away in our room on our respective computers but there was soon a knock on the door and we were reluctantly dragged out to be sociable. Actually it wasn't really that reluctant - how can we say no too many times to champagne? That would be too rude!
We met Ari, a charming Singaporean banker who is based in Hong Kong, a Malaysian in manufacturing and another Singaporean who works for General Electric. Altogether there were eight people. When asked what we were doing in Singapore, we shared with them and showed them the Compassion book. Immediately, Ari said the eight of them would buy a copy each. At SGD22 each, we raised another SGD176! What a fabulous day!! I was so glad we didn't go out in the end and stayed in for the party. Below is a photo of us celebrating the sale and we hope that Ros and her generous friends will have lives touched by the Dharma.
Tomorrow we will have our first “Meet the Editors” session – and we will be meeting up early to regroup before the session.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Our first day of the Book Fair
Today was the start of the Book Fair proper. In the morning, there was a Singapore Book Industry seminar entitled ‘Get Rich With Books’, which was attended by Joseph, Susan, Shin and Yek Yee. It was a good opportunity to network with distributors and Joseph was even approached by aspiring writers once they heard he was a publisher! One of the other publishers based in Singapore came over to visit our booth after the seminar and said that he was impressed with our displays and book covers and congratulated us. At 2pm, the doors to the Book Fair opened and people started to trickle in. Ben, David, Chia, Joseph, Susan and I were officially on duty during the first shift but there were quite a few of us in our spanking new KMP ‘Dharma that Bites’ T-shirts as you can see in the photo above, which was taken at the start of the Fair!
Our booth was in the ‘Books of Special Interest’ section, near the Chinese Books area, so we deduced that many English speaking potential customers may not venture down our end. So Susan, Paris and Irene stood outside the booth and took turns wandering through the halls, distributing bookmarks and inviting people to visit our booth, while I happily stayed put and played cashier.
The crowd was expectedly quiet as it was still a working day and school holidays hadn’t started yet. Our friend, Nan, who works in PR had kindly sent out our press release on our behalf and visited our booth in the evening. Sheila, who had introduced us to Nan, also came with her mum and it was lovely to see her again after so long! She is a Hindu priestess and we had shared many long nights discussing spirituality and the meaning of life.
Bigger crowds are expected tomorrow onwards. At the end of the day, which finished at 10pm, total takings were SGD522, which was considered by all to be a fairly respectable figure. As usual, we made a dedication and prayed that the next day would bring more people to the Dharma through Rinpoche’s teachings.
Friday, May 25, 2007
KMP goes to Singapore!
Wednesday, May 23, Susan, Jamie, Yek Yee and I piled into my Altis, fully loaded with KMP promotional stuff, and set off for Singapore! The drive was uneventful and we had dinner at KFC on the Malaysian side (our last cheap meal!) but when we arrived at the Singapore border, I was told my autopass card had expired! They needed to check my road tax. After they made sure it was kosher, I then tried to get a new card. After half an hour of fluffing around, they said that since I'd already clocked in with the expired card, I should use this card until the next time I come to Singapore, when I can get a new one. Oh well. Obstacles. Rinpoche always says that whenever we do anything meritorious, there will be obstacles.
We then proceeded to customs where they checked our handbags thoroughly and opened our boot. When they saw the printed postcards and bookmarks, they asked to see the invoice. I was like what invoice. There was no invoice, so I had to call Joe to ask him what to do. He said we didn't have any invoices. I was like.. what shall we do? Talk about obstacles. In the end, the customs officer let us off, but advised us that if we were to bring anything that was printed outside Singapore into the country, we needed to bring an invoice.
Finally, we could enter Singapore.
Anyway, after a few detours, we finally arrived at 44 Monk's Hill Road, which was where our very kind hostess, Ros, was staying. She was Kelvin, another writer's sister, and had offered to put us four girls (Susan, Yek Yee, Shin and I - Jamie was staying with her aunt) up. We'd never met so to let four complete strangers into her home was extremely generous.
We had a room with a sofa bed, and shared a bathroom with Ros. Since there were 4 of us, we scratched our heads on how to sleep. Fortunately, Susan and I brought our pillows with us! We decided to sleep horizontally across the bed, which was a small double bed, with our feet dangling off the side. That allowed all four of us to sleep on the bed!
When we woke up though, Yek Yee was sleeping on the bare floor with her jacket over her. We went off to Suntec Convention Centre by cab. I got it wrong though and had just asked the driver to take us to Suntec City. I didn't know that it was a huge complex and the Convention Centre was a different building. Poor Susan had to carry a humungously heavy bag full of KMP catalogues up and down some stairs.
When we finally got to the Exhibition Hall to set up the booth, there was no aircon. It was very still and hot in the Hall and JJ, Ben and Irene were already setting up there. We sweated away, putting labels on our DVDs - can you believe it - they were rated PG (Parental Guidance). As Rinpoche would say, 'Oh dear'.
Finally, about 8 hours later, the booth was well decorated and everything set up.
We were all hot and tired (and did I say sweaty?) but we loved how our booth looked. Here's a picture of all of us (ok, so you can't see much of the booth but nevermind - you get to see US!)
To end the day, Joseph generously said that KMP would treat the remaining coolies to a delicious dinner at Tony Roma's! Now, we were ready for the Book Fair tomorrow!
We then proceeded to customs where they checked our handbags thoroughly and opened our boot. When they saw the printed postcards and bookmarks, they asked to see the invoice. I was like what invoice. There was no invoice, so I had to call Joe to ask him what to do. He said we didn't have any invoices. I was like.. what shall we do? Talk about obstacles. In the end, the customs officer let us off, but advised us that if we were to bring anything that was printed outside Singapore into the country, we needed to bring an invoice.
Finally, we could enter Singapore.
Anyway, after a few detours, we finally arrived at 44 Monk's Hill Road, which was where our very kind hostess, Ros, was staying. She was Kelvin, another writer's sister, and had offered to put us four girls (Susan, Yek Yee, Shin and I - Jamie was staying with her aunt) up. We'd never met so to let four complete strangers into her home was extremely generous.
We had a room with a sofa bed, and shared a bathroom with Ros. Since there were 4 of us, we scratched our heads on how to sleep. Fortunately, Susan and I brought our pillows with us! We decided to sleep horizontally across the bed, which was a small double bed, with our feet dangling off the side. That allowed all four of us to sleep on the bed!
When we woke up though, Yek Yee was sleeping on the bare floor with her jacket over her. We went off to Suntec Convention Centre by cab. I got it wrong though and had just asked the driver to take us to Suntec City. I didn't know that it was a huge complex and the Convention Centre was a different building. Poor Susan had to carry a humungously heavy bag full of KMP catalogues up and down some stairs.
When we finally got to the Exhibition Hall to set up the booth, there was no aircon. It was very still and hot in the Hall and JJ, Ben and Irene were already setting up there. We sweated away, putting labels on our DVDs - can you believe it - they were rated PG (Parental Guidance). As Rinpoche would say, 'Oh dear'.
Finally, about 8 hours later, the booth was well decorated and everything set up.
We were all hot and tired (and did I say sweaty?) but we loved how our booth looked. Here's a picture of all of us (ok, so you can't see much of the booth but nevermind - you get to see US!)
To end the day, Joseph generously said that KMP would treat the remaining coolies to a delicious dinner at Tony Roma's! Now, we were ready for the Book Fair tomorrow!
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