I'm still in shock. I can't simply believe what I found in Geneva. According to Goran it must be around 2.7 million euros without counting the drawing. Ostermann says that it's worth another half a million as badly sold.
In the morning I drove with Mirko and Johannes, the chauffeur to Geneva. I met Nicholas already sitting at the table in the Restaurant and I dashed to it, embarrassed that I have kept him waiting.
Buckling two little bundles of energy was a difficult task, no matter how simple it looked for the untrained eye. Milan Mihailovic had given up long time ago to fight with the four and a half years old sons of his employer, Konrad von Lintorff, Duke of Wittosck. For the Serb bodyguard, it was much easier to leave the task to the boys' tutor and dedicate all his efforts to keep one child inside the car, while the twenty-five year old man wrestled to get the eldest -the most problematic case- sat and quiet while he fastened the seat belt. Only a whispered “Klaus, the more you waste your time, the later you'll get your tea,” accompanied by an accomplice smile, convinced the child to remain still and let the young light brown haired young man finish the task.
I can't get out of my head the guilty feeling I have over Constantin's death. I should forgive myself as Goran tells, but I have to ask him his forgiveness first. I know he's dead, but I should have at least visited his grave to say goodbye. Over the weeks I've learned how to get to Smolensk. It's really far away. The airport is closed and you have to take a train from Moscow to get there. It's a seven hours trip.
I don't think Konrad will allow me to go there. For some unknown reason, he's very cross with Ivan Oblomov upon his return from Russia. I could ask -yes, like a five years old- if I can travel there, but he will say no and be alerted. He would explode once more over the “Repin issue”. I have to do it on my own and bear with the consequences. If he's furious in the aftermath, I'll go away to Zurich. I'm also tired of being just his puppet.
A few weeks ago, Stacey ended her battle with my English Grammar and we have a nice book in our hands. I'm very proud to present now the book in a new format (Royal Size 9*7 inches) more easy to carry around (and guaranteed to stop any Konrad if you hurl its 656 pages at him)
There is a 99 pages preview at Lulu. com so you can see Stacey's great job.
Lulu.com now forces you to price your book to Amazon's retail price which is 50% more over the author's printing costs. As it is a Print on Demand publishing company you pay for each page (0.02) plus the covers, binding and their fees for doing something so misterious that it can't be shared with the rest of mortals.
Naturally, the price sky-rockets. TS1, with over 650 pages will be priced at $31,95 for selling in Amazon and I will make the incredible amount of $0.96 per each copy sold there. In Lulu (as they only calculate their printing costs, fees and their share of the profits) my benefits rise to $10 per copy.
But over $30 for a book is an excessive price. Lulu allows me to make a discount so I can offer the book below $24 but no more because I have to cover my own costs of paying a professional editor, designing the cover, the interiors and perhaps a tea box for curing this author's fatigues.
I will not release any digital version of this book or The Substitute II. The minute the PDF, EPub is out, it is pirated no matter what I do. Applying DRM or stamping the copies is calling the real good-honest people a potential crook. I hate to say this, but for me fighting against piracy is like swimming in a lake full of piranhas. Too many open fronts to fight at the same time. I've tried all what is in the "handbook of the good author who wants to go digital" but it's useless. Why paying for something that you can get free? One pirate even added a "donations" button to my work.
I even considered the "freemium" option, a model that is quite successful in China. It's like a "pay per read"; the reader purchases a membership and has access to all the website contents for that month. The Chinese use it for publishing novels and it contains piracy much better than the DRM. The few independent authors who do it in English price a monthly subscription between $ 4,99 to $ 9,99 for 50.000 words.
The problem? The Substitute Book II has material for 8 or 9 months. Even if I were a "bad companion" to other authors and priced my things at the bottom, the final cost for the reader is almost 40 dollars. Let's be a maverick then, and price the subscription at $ 2,99, (crossing my fingers that at least I can cover the hosting costs of such a website)... and we have the same price of the printed version of the book, without the hassle of waiting for each installment. Some days ago a group of Spanish journalists were making a huge scandal because a website (Suite 101) offered to pay them € 0,75 per 400 written words.
Ebooks are the future they say, but the future is not always a good thing. As most traders say, losing a few bucks is no problem at all; you can recover them with the next move, but the time you wasted is irreplaceable. Fighting against piracy makes me lose my time, time I could use to write instead of ranting. I like writing stories, answering e-mails or comments but if I have to play the "Rin Tin Tin" all the other is lost. Going digital is not my thing. I'll stay with the old paper.
