It’s our pleasure to announce the release of Welcome Home, Master, a brand new book by former Taipei-based journalist Jonathan Adams. It’s his account of life as a foreign correspondent reporting on some of the world’s most dynamic countries. Observant and funny, Adams’ stories range from the serious – interviewing a Chinese dissident, covering the Moro insurgency in Mindanao – to the seemingly frivolous, like Japanese genitalia festivals.
Until the end of September the e-book version of Welcome Home, Master is available for just US$5.99 (regular price $7.99). You can buy from the Camphor Press website or Amazon, with other vendors to follow. A paperback edition will be forthcoming later this year.
I just bought a copy on Kindle. It was $7.99 btw probably because I am ordering within Asia and Amazon always jacks up the price.
It’s not your location when you order that determines this. On Amazon I’m registered with a U.S. address and a U.S.-based credit card; accordingly, I’m charged U.S. prices, not Taiwan ones, for Kindle purchases.
Thanks for your support, Mucha Man! Amazon’s $2 “foreign” surcharge is very annoying. For future reference, if you buy through the Camphor Press website you get the $5.99 price worldwide. It’s secure (we don’t see any of your payment details, all that is handled by Stripe/PayPal), you get both the Kindle and the ePub versions, and as a bonus more of the cover price goes to the author.
The first chapter of Welcome Home, Master is now available online to read, for free. It gives a good guide to the flavor and humor of the book as a whole.
[quote]I took my camera’s memory card and my notebooks back to Taipei, and dutifully filed my massive labor series and my phallus festival story. In the days that followed I waited for the reaction.
The penis festival story caused a sensation. Thanks to the provocative headline and photos, it quickly notched up over ten thousand shares on Facebook. It spread virally to a host of hip websites. My editors were ecstatic. They gave me a large bonus, enough for me to break even on the Japan trip. From across the Pacific, I got virtual “high-fives” from my American colleagues. More stuff like this, they said. Give us more penis stories.
I’m still not sure anyone read the Japanese labor series. At any rate there was zero response. At first that depressed me. I had put a lot of time into researching, preparing, and writing about labor issues, determined to create a piece of “serious journalism.” Due to weeks of preparation and the British guy’s connections with Japanese unions, I had gripping stories of real lives being affected by dramatically changing labor trends in what was then the world’s second-largest economy. What was going on?
But then I began to understand. It was pretty simple, really. The Japanese labor series was boring. Worse, it wasn’t very newsy (“Where’s the news peg?” I could hear my old Newsweek editors whine). Nobody really wants to read a long Japanese labor series, except maybe Japanese, if it’s in Japanese and in the Japanese media. For Americans and other Westerners, the very words “Japanese labor story” are enough to induce catatonia. Sure, there might be interesting implications for other post-industrial societies and their labor policies. But how many people really cared?[/quote]
Read the full chapter here.