We recently connected with YY Chan and have shared our conversation below.

YY, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

My parents were very supportive of my interests and always encouraged me to be creative and try new things. They sent me to art classes, piano lessons, sports classes, making sure I got to try out different things and find what my talents were. I remember when I started sharing my story ideas and they listened attentively and shared their thoughts and encouraged me to keep writing. Those conversations gave me confidence to continue and not give up.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m an English teacher and started wanting to write my own stories after a few years of teaching. After about 10 years, I decided to take a break and started doing private tutoring for a few years. When the pandemic started, many of my lessons got cancelled and I finally sat down and wrote my first draft. I made a New Year’s resolution that I would publish my own book in 2020 and started doing some research about how to publish a book. I found a course called Self-Publishing School and got connected with a coach. After about 4 months I was ready to launch my first children’s book. Since then, I have connected with many other authors and we learned a lot from each other. We share our experiences, support and give feedback and advice to each other, which have been extremely helpful in this self-publishing journey.

I started offering freelance editing services to other authors as well. Also, reviewing and sharing others books on social media is a great way to connect with the author community. This has led to several collaborations and it has been so much fun and encouraging to continue on this self-publishing journey.

Self-publishing has led me to an amazing community of readers and writers and inspired me to help young people discover their own hidden talents as well. Through my experience, I was also able to teach my own students to be creative and write their own books. I have also helped to run a writing competition in Hong Kong and published the winners’ stories into an eBook.

I returned to full-time teaching last year but I continue to be in the community of authors and sharing their books and stories with students.

The most rewarding thing about self-publishing is not just selling the books I have written, but being able to connect with so many people around the world through our stories. I started a group chat with several other authors and we have become extremely close friends, despite our distance.

Writing and publishing can be a lonely journey if you do not have a support network of other writers who understand the same challenges and struggles. So it’s extremely important to have a community of like-minded people in your life to encourage you, be your sounding board, your beta readers and critique partners. This is something I will treasure for years to come no matter where my career takes me.

If you are interested in writing and self-publishing, feel free to connect with me!

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

My mission as an author is to share stories that help and inspire people. My children’s books cover topics that aren’t always openly discussed with children, like terminal illness, death and grief. I wish that I had read more stories like these when I was young. These topics were always avoided and when I started witnessing and experiencing them in my own life, it was really difficult to cope and process my feelings and emotions. It was through writing and reading more about these experiences from others that I was able to find hope and meaning from my grief, learn how to live with those memories and experiences, and discover my hidden talents along the way. I wanted to share my experience and perspective with others so that they can also find a way to cope and live with grief. I’ve published a creative grief journal to help others use their grief to create something beautiful and unique to them. I hope that my work can inspire others to be more open and creative, and not afraid to have the ‘difficult’ conversations with their family and friends.
As I continue on this creative journey, I hope to connect with more people who have similar experiences and know that they are not alone. It’s not easy to find people who understand what you are going through and it’s so important to have a community of people to support each other.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Social media has allowed me to connect with so many wonderful people around the world. I feel like I have made more friends in the last three years since I started my social media accounts than I have ever before. Some of them have become so close that we chat almost every day. When I first started building my social media accounts, I thought I had to post every day and that I would not be able to keep up with it all. I thought it would be a lot of work and that I needed to get 10k followers to be considered successful. I soon realised that those were all insignificant compared to what I actually gained from it, which are genuine friendships with people I actually care about. When I didn’t care about how followers I got or how many people liked or commented on my posts, I enjoyed it a lot more. I post when I feel like it and chat with people I want to chat with. I use two main platforms – Instagram and Facebook – and share the same content on both. It was less stressful and I didn’t feel guilty if I didn’t post every day. The friends I made were mostly other authors and we support each other more than our real friends and family do. We also share each other’s books and new releases on our platforms and with our own friends to help spread the word. It is a lot easier than sharing and marketing our own books. Social media should be fun and engaging and not feel like work. I know some people may not agree with me but social media is a way for me to connect with other like-minded people. I would not be where I am today without those connections and I am so glad that we have become such close friends. I have less than 5,000 followers, which may seem like a lot to some, yet not a lot to others. It doesn’t really matter, as long as those who do follow me are people I care about and care about me in return. It would be nice to have a large following but it isn’t that important in the large scheme of things. Don’t feel discouraged if people don’t follow you back or unfollow you. Some people are just not worth your time to begin with.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.yychani.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yychan_author
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yychanauthor
• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/yychan_author