(Applause)
A dream made true.
You'll notice in my voice, as soon as I calm down,
that I have a somehow weird accent, as I've lived in Spain for twelve years.
Twelve years ago I went to Paris for 15 days to receive a literary award
and I met a Catalan girl there, and I stayed to live with her.
Back in Argentina I had a job, a house, and no intentions of moving whatsoever.
While in Spain I had nothing: no house, no job, not even papers
to get a house and a job.
Even worse, after living 8-9 months in Spain
only because I was in love,
two horrible things happened in Argentina. First came the 2001 crisis,
4-5 presidents in one week and social chaos.
And, even worse, around the same time, Racing won the soccer championship.
I am a Racing fan. It's horrible seeing your team champion for the first time
while being away...
Far away from your land, but in my case, from my father,
with whom we'd always thought
we'd see this event, if it ever happened, together.
These two circumstances, the economic crisis in Argentina
and my team winning the title, happened at the same time
and taught me what I didn't have the slightest idea could ever happen:
that pain and party,
tragedy and triumph are the same
when you're away.
Not being able to cry with your loved ones when something horrible happens,
or celebrate with your people when something wonderful happens
puts you immediately offside.
As I was in Spain sad and alone, I had the idea to create a blog
and I started writing.
I named that blog Orsai,
that means in soccer jargon in Spanish that you are offside, off the game,
that you're not allowed to play.
In those times I used the Internet mainly to send emails
and to chat with my friends from Mercedes.
So what happened when I created that blog was a huge surprise for me
and I imagine it was so for everyone else at the time.
I started writing short stories, sometimes as myself,
or disguised as different characters; a housewife, a seer, a princess.
And little by little it started to get crowded.
People from weird countries: Honduras, Nicaragua,from Spain or from here.
And so Orsai turned into a kind of involuntary community of readers.
I did nothing to gather them, I mean,
I didn't put banners in my blog saying:
"Come in, feel comfortable, generate a community".
The only thing I did was writing short stories,
I also read the comments the readers made to those tales
and also, most of the time, I chatted with them.
When that community got even bigger because of word of mouth,
and specially became more fervent,
some traditional companies related to culture and media
started to listen to this babble of voices.
"Look, there's a guy who writes and people are there."
And so my phone started ringing,
they offered me to work with them.
The publishing companies proposed me to make books
with the stories I wrote for free on the Internet
and the press invited me to write columns in their newspapers,
similar to the kind of stuff I wrote on the Internet.
I know this now, I didn't know back then.
I think I made a rather serious mistake.
I went to work with the industry,
I ended the direct communication with my readers
and I let them put me intermediaries, an agent, a publisher
a manager, a content editor.
All those people lined up between me and my readers.
The publishing companies also asked me, for the publication of my first book,
to take away all those free articles from the Internet so they could sell them.
The situation got a bit tense there because I told them immediately
I couldn't do such thing for I had given those texts as presents,
and I couldn't go house by house asking every reader if, please,
I could get the gift back because now I wanted
to sell it through white collar guys.
But it became worse as books and time went by,
that permanent feeling that the publishers were robbing me.
One time they closed the sales one of my pocketbooks.
It's an anecdote I always tell and I think it's descriptive.
they stated to have sold about 900 copies in Argentina of a pocketbook
and I knew, because I'm a close friend of a bookseller from Mercedes,
one of the three bookstores in Mercedes, I knew that 750 had been sold
in a small bookstore
of a town of Buenos Aires province.
And it wasn't just the feeling of being robbed at gunpoint,
the impossibility of checking sales and printing.
I also started receiving a lot of emails from readers of the blog
telling me my books were not available in their countries.
The industry distributes books in Spanish only where it is profitable:
Argentina, Spain, Mexico,
but if a Salvadoran or a Peruvian wants my book,
they have no choice... They will never get it.
With the press I was going through something similar.
They asked me articles 400-words long,
but if there was half a page of advertising,
the editor called me to tell me that this week my column was 200-word long.
When the European economic crisis came and the companies
stopped advertising in newspapers,
I thought "Now I'll be able to go back to 400 words".
But no, they removed a sheet from the newspaper and left me with 150.
Last year, when these issues started to get worse,
I got very tired and publicly broke up with the publishing companies
Mondadori from Italy, Plaza & Janes from Spain,
Sudamericana from Argentina and Grijalbo from Mexico.
I also publicly finished with the newspapers
La Nación from Argentina and El País from Spain.
In 1400 words in the blog, free, I told them to fuck off.
(Laughs)
(Applause)
As I did this, and after a year of silence,
I started communicating with the people from my blog
and I told them I had a new idea.
An idea that could be really fun and especially risky
but that had the secret goal of proving,
also and specially to myself,
that the famous crisis of the industry is not an economic crisis
but a moral one, it's a crisis of greed.
The idea was of making an impossible magazine
from my backyard, in a town in Catalonia,
without any offices, and with a staff integrated
only by my family and childhood friends.
A magazine that would be called Orsai, just like my blog.
One night with Chiri, who's my dear friend,
we wrote a kind of decalogue
a sort of promise to the readers. This happened exactly one year ago.
We promised the magazine wouldn't have any advertising, not an inch of it.
It wouldn't have private or state subsidies.
We promised it would have the best graphic quality available
in any of the countries where distributed.
That it would do without any possible intermediaries.
That it would have a paper version, and a dynamic version for iPad and iPhone,
for BlackBerry and, besides, a free PDF ten days later,
so the magazine can be read regardless of the cost.
We promised those to write and draw in the magazine
would be only people me and Chiri admire a lot.
That it would be quarterly and have more than 200 pages.
That it would cost the equivalent of 15 Saturday newspapers in every country.
We stated at the 8th item that we were to put the money,
and that we were going to make it even if it didn't sell.
The 9th item said that we would be happy if we saved the investment.
and the 10th, that if we didn't save the investment, we didn't give a fuck...
(Applause)
At that moment an amazing thing happened
within the community of the blog.
Something we hadn't foreseen:
the readers of Orsai spread the idea,
they told their friends
there were some men in their forties, in a town hidden in the mountain
that wanted to make a magazine of popular
literature, of chronic narrative, with long texts,
just in the middle of the paper crisis.
Before even telling them what the magazine was going
to be about, the readers started buying it massively.
People put a faith that I hadn't seen in a long time
in a cultural product.
It was bought by 10 000 people, I repeat: without knowing its contents,
in pre-sale, before it was released.
And it was an expensive magazine: 16 euros in Europe, 12 dollars in America.
They bought it from everywhere, including Salvadorans, Costa Ricans, Peruvians,
Latin Americans living in Thailand, in Japan.
Readers from every region decided to distribute it themselves.
We decided that magazines wouldn't be sold per unit but in packs of ten,
so that you could distribute the remaining nine in your area.
This way, we also killed the intermediary for distribution,
which is a mafia.
Distribution gets the 50% of the sale price
of every publication we buy.
The author gets the 8 %, the big stores, the 50 %.
The first day of this year, the first number of Orsai was released.
And we did so every three months,
until we reached the goal of the four annual numbers.
The fourth number went on sale just one week ago.
Every magazine weighs about a kilogram
and it makes a visual impact; it has no advertising.
More than a hundred invited authors wrote through these four numbers.
Among them Juan Villoro, Abelardo Castillo Nick Hornby, Agustín Fernández Mallo.
It was illustrated by 'el negro' Cris, Horacio Altuna,
Miguel Rep, Alberto Montt, among many others.
They were all paid in euros.
In the middle of all that we discovered that the dream was only possible
if we talked with the readers,
and so at mid-year,
when we were between numbers two and three,
we decided, in an also rather risky way, to turn into a publisher.
The idea was to take a standard contract
from my former publishing companies and write the exact opposite.
The idea was not to defraud the authors;
the rights always for them.
If you wanted to leave the next day, "Good night, you can leave, all OK".
And specially, the author is receiving the 50 % of the sale's price,
instead of the 8-10%,
And even more, the author has the possibility of, with a password,
checking every sale and reader online.
They also have the email of that reader
to thank them or tell them:
"I know you're buying my books and that you're paying to me."
We noticed, as we moved forward, that Orsai was not a blog anymore
nor a magazine, or a publishing house,
but it turned into a project of the readers.
Two months ago we thought of opening a bar in Buenos Aires,
a meeting place for those who read the magazine, we named it Orsai.
One afternoon I asked the readers of the blog
if they wanted a bar to be opened and I also asked them
if anyone would like to join the project as an investor.
We received 204 emails in 24 hours,
with people that wanted to put 1000 or 10 000, a nuts offered 80 000.
There were also people who had no money,
and they offered to paint the bar,
or to help us with the permits
as they worked in some ministry, etc.
Others offered to show their paintings
or to play with their bands once the bar was opened.
This occurred in early August this year.
The Orsai bar opened last Thursday in the heart of San Telmo,
471 Humberto Primo, 2x1 beer before 10 pm.
There were so many people in the opening we had to do it four times:
Thursday, Friday, Saturday and last Sunday.
In March we will try opening another bar in Barcelona,
using the same system of investment of the readers,
and the goal for the next year is to keep making magazines,
this time bimonthly, and besides making a lot more books,
the goal will be to open a third bar in Central America
to form a sort of Iberoamerican triangle of culture,
or of the drunks who read, or something...
Two weeks ago we almost had two and a half tons
of our books and magazines stopped in Buenos Aires' customs,
due to a misunderstanding with the Secretariat of Commerce.
It was a wonderful Thursday, Orsai readers from all over the world
made a lot of noise in Twitter with the slogan "Free Orsai".
And that was big, because 12 hours later the Argentinian government heard us,
and the Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers answered through Twitter
saying he would personally solve the matter.
The magazines were released by the next day.
It's the last story I will tell. I believe that it means something.
I'm sure it's the beginning of something.
Cultural decisions are starting to be more and more in our hands.
We no longer obey to voices in sole speakers that tell us what to do.
It's us who communicate,
we are 400 million people who speak Spanish.
Every one of us, every region,
has a different jargon that makes us unique,
but that also enriches us.
We understand each other, the Internet arrived some time ago to unite us,
to tell us we can do things together, specially with culture,
which is the fundamental base of the complexity of the mind.
Almost ten years ago I opened a blog because I felt alone in a foreign country.
I felt in offside, I needed to communicate with my people,
and so named it Orsai.
I am sure now that the cultural industry
are we, the readers and the authors.
And nobody else...
and that the other industry, which is afraid of changes,
that tries to make us believe that the Internet is a burden.
the one that scratches and hurts, is dying and we'll watch it die.
Culture has to be free in every way.
I exhort authors and editors to, every time you release a book,
upload a free PDF the same day,
because you will sell more.
We depended on a greedy industry for years,
buying what they wanted us to buy.
Now suddenly, and more and more,
they're starting to be "orsai".
Thank you.