SINGAPORE – Home-grown publisher Epigram Literary Foundation chairman Edmund Wee is a maverick.

From setting up shop in London to restructuring Epigram as a foundation and launching an online bookshop with other independent bookstores, he has constantly reached for the unexpected in the course of pushing Singapore Literature (Sing Lit).

Fresh from

a landmark compact with regional publishers

that will take Sing Lit to five major South-east Asian markets, he says: “Not that I don’t want to make money, but what if we didn’t think about money first?”

At the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, Mr Wee scored a coup by getting five South-east Asian publishers – Malaysia’s The Biblio Press, Indonesia’s Elex Media Komputindo, Thailand’s River Books, the Philippines’ Milflores Publishing and Myanmar’s NDSP Books – to commit to publishing four Epigram Books Fiction Prize winners a year up till 2028 (2030 for the Philippines).

In an industry first, he solved the perennial problem of book distribution by outsourcing to partners with their own channels.

Persuading them to publish manuscripts they had not even read required him to

absorb much of the upfront costs

. Epigram waived the substantial sum these publishers typically had to pay for distribution rights, settling instead for higher royalties for each copy of the books sold.

It is a gambit in service of a higher cause, he says. “I realised I needed to foster the readers first. Even if 10 per cent of South-east Asians read English, that’s 70 million people. It’s important that in Asean, we know...