How to kill the middleperson | Hernán Casciari | TEDxRíodelaPlata

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.
Hernán Casciari manages the Orsai Publishing House and is the most read online writer in Spanish. From 2000, he is based in Barcelona, where he has written different groundbreaking blognovels. Up to September 2010, he was a columnist for newspapers like El País (Spain) and La Nación (Argentina), but he gave it up to start hiw own publishing Project: Orsai magazine. In October 2011, he will published his last short stories book, “Talks with the right hemisphere” (Charlas con el hemisferio derecho).

(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.