Stranger(s) In A Strange Land

For the information of those of you kind enough to express an interest in this project:

Having accepted delivery of 1,000 copies of this trilingual anthology (and – of course – having paid the printers for them), all profits from which are pledged to volunteers who work with refugees, once on the train to Barcelona with ca 800 copies... I discovered several mistakes* (in the translations into Catalan and [even more] into Spanish) which meant that I was unable to sell them at the listed price.

I did manage to sell 6 copies @ 5€ instead of 7€, explaining each time about the mistakes.

So much for my high hopes of selling 1,000 copies at the Barcelona book fairº!

So much for my high hopes of selling surplus copies to the Catalan library network and education department! @ 5€, the book is worth its price for private ownership by individuals warned about the glitches. But totally unattractive as a proposition for use by several users interested in improving their knowledge/usage of 3 languages.

The plan is now to print 1,000 bookmarks to go with the books, the bookmarks listing the corrections w/ page numbers, and (together with the “house” bookmark), offer each copy on-line @ 5€.

Since nobody knows that our web-site exists, prospects are bleak. Since bookmarks go missing, this does not solve the problem re: libraries and schools.

* The mistakes are in the Catalan and Spanish translations of a FEW stories and are not due to the my lack of fluency in the 3 languages, rather to the fact that I was in a rush to get the book to the printers in time for the book fair. Never again! Don't do rush jobs! Rushing meant:

a) not having sufficient time to check and recheck for mistakes;

b) not having sufficient time to get enough sleep. (I haven't had more than 3 nights this past month with more than 4-5 hours of sleep... often even less. The brain does not function at its best under these conditions, and neither do the eyes.)

º The Barcelona book fair is held on Les Rambles (Las Ramblas in Spanish), a central and favoured stroll for tourists. On the day of the fair, it was chock full of people struggling to make headway in both directions. Many of them looked neither to left nor to right, apparently only interested in crossing “stroll down Las Ramblas” off of their “must-do list for tourists”.

In addition, I was assigned a position right at the lower end. The vast majority of Barcelona residents who ARE interested in this fair are there for one purpose: to buy ONE book and ONE rose per couple (in earlier, even-more-sexist times, the rose was always for her, the book always for him) as a kind of duty/tradition on Catalunya's patron saint's day. (Sant Jordi = Saint George.) Once they'd bought ONE book and ONE rose (at an exorbitant price), they could return home, proud of the fact that they'd done their duty. Since most of them start at the upper (more accessible) end, the dribbles that even managed to walk past my stall were no longer interested in books. They were either tourists determined to stay the course, or “done my bit” locals. I believe that the only books that I sold were to a scanty few who started from the lower end.

Of course, other factors were at play, but honestly: with maybe one exception, everybody who thumbed through the book was enthusiastic about it. (Some had no money left on them.)