Rebirth 2004: A lone figure in the literary world

Chapter 376 Unreal Sales (asking for guaranteed monthly tickets at the beginning of the month)
Tao Guodong is 40 years old and runs a Xueyou Bookstore in a small county town. The bookstore is in a good location, right on the road that students from several schools must take to go to and from school, so business is good.

Like all bookstores near schools, the main source of income for Jacky Cheung Bookstore comes from teaching aids, stationery, beverages and snacks. As for "literary books", although Tao Guodong also buys some, he usually only puts them in the corner.

After all, these books are expensive, and parents will be very unhappy when they see them, so few students will buy them. If it weren’t for the fact that every time the channel distributes the goods, they would always include a few so-called “best-selling books”, he would not even look at them.

Aren't novels just made-up things? What's so good about them? If you want to read them, why not read Story Club?
Just like this time, the channel gave him 8 novels called "Homeland". I heard that it was written by a young man who often appears on TV, and it sold very well.

But Tao Guodong just felt the pain! These 8 books cost him more than 100 yuan. What else can he do with the 100 yuan? He could buy some pig heads to drink with, which would last until next year!
The key point is that the person in the channel also said that this book cannot be sold today under any circumstances, and must be put on the shelves tomorrow when the store opens. If it is sold in advance, it will be considered a violation of some agreement and may be fined.

"Too many things to do!" Tao Guodong muttered in dissatisfaction when he thought of the staff member's serious look.

By 10 o'clock in the evening, there was no student finishing evening self-study in the street. Tao Guodong took back the sausage grill, cards, toys and snacks that were placed outside, swept the ground in front of his store, and then prepared to close the store.

At this moment, a girl who was over 20 years old flashed into the store just before he pulled down the shutter, which scared Tao Guodong. He said angrily: "Hey, hey, hey, be careful, what if I hit you? I don't have the money to compensate you."

The girl apologized repeatedly to calm him down and asked, "It's so late, what do you want to buy?" Tao Guodong guessed that she was either here to buy water or exercise books for her child.

Who knew that the girl didn't buy anything, but just asked: "Boss, do you have "Homeland" here?"

"What the hell?" Tao Guodong didn't react for a moment, his mind went blank.

"'Homeland', a new novel 'Homeland'!" the girl emphasized again, and then stared at him with her big, blinking eyes.

Tao Guodong felt uneasy at being stared at, but he also remembered what "Homeland" was. He turned around and went behind the counter, then took out a novel with the plastic cover still intact and asked, "Is this the one?"

The girl's eyes suddenly lit up and she asked impatiently, "This is it, this is it! How much is it? I'll buy it!" Then she took out her wallet.

Tao Guodong quickly took the book back and said, "I don't sell this book."

The girl was holding a red "Chairman Mao" in her hand. She was stunned when she heard the words: "Isn't this a bookstore? Bookstores don't sell books?"

Tao Guodong quickly explained the rules, but the girl said generously: "Well, if you sell the book to me in advance, I will give you the 100 yuan, and you don't have to pay for the change."

Tao Guodong's eyes widened and he asked, "Girl, are you okay? You can buy this book anywhere tomorrow morning. What are you doing here a few hours early? A printed book can be changed or not, isn't it the same?"

The girl was anxious, stamping her feet and saying, "It's different, it's different! Everyone can buy it tomorrow, who will read it if I post it on Weibo?"

Tao Guodong didn't understand what the girl said, but he became more cautious. He put the book back on the counter and said, "Girl, you really can't sell it. I'll be in trouble if I'm discovered!"

The girl looked at the middle-aged man in front of her pitifully and begged, "Boss, just this once, just once. I will never tell anyone else that you sold it to me."

Tao Guodong didn't care about that. He wanted to be safe when opening a bookstore, especially a student bookstore like his that mainly sold teaching aids. He was quite dependent on the channel, so he wouldn't take risks easily - who knows if the other party has any means of tracking him down? In the end, he still ruthlessly rejected the girl in front of him.

Seeing that her pleading was fruitless, the girl rolled her eyes and asked, "Boss, this book can only be sold tomorrow, right?"

Tao Guodong nodded and said, "Girl, didn't I tell you that I will sell it tomorrow? I open the shop early, at 7 o'clock, so you can come earlier too!"

Unexpectedly, the girl pointed to the clock on the wall and said, "Tomorrow morning at seven o'clock is tomorrow, and tomorrow morning at 12:01 is also tomorrow, right?"

Tao Guodong: "Uh..." He felt vaguely that the other party wanted to say something, but it was too late to stop him -

"So, in just one hour and 1 minutes, it will be tomorrow. Boss, please don't close the shop yet. Wait until midnight and sell this book to me before closing the shop, okay?"

As the girl spoke, she held Tao Guodong's hand and rocked it gently, tilting her little head back, and her big watery eyes began to blink again.

Tao Guodong was so flattered that he almost agreed, but suddenly the angry image of his boss at home suddenly appeared in his mind. He quickly pulled his hand out from the girl's jade fingers and emphasized again: "Girl, you'd better come tomorrow morning."

Then, in the other person's disappointed look, he first asked her to leave the bookstore, then turned off the lights and pulled down the rolling door.

Tao Guodong returned home in a daze and told his wife about this incident as if it were a new thing. As a result, his wife only laughed at him: "I see you fell asleep in the store and had a dream.

"A little girl would stay with you in your store until 12 o'clock for a novel? Is the cover of the book made of gold, or are the pages made of gold? You are so funny!"

Tao Guodong was anxious and kept asking: "What do you know? The book is called "Homeland" and the author is very famous! That little girl just shook my hand and begged me all the time, and I was thinking about you..."

Before he could finish his words, he noticed that his wife's face looked strange, her eyes were as big as copper bells, and her eyebrows stood up like two steel knives.

"You mean, that slut shook your hand?" Every word my wife said seemed to be squeezed out from between her teeth.

The skin on Tao Guodong's back tightened, but just when his wife was about to slap him, a voice saved him -

"Dad, you said our store has Zhang Chao's "Homeland"? Is it true? Can you go to the store and get it back now? I want to read it!"

Tao Guodong and his wife stared in amazement at their precious daughter standing at the door of the room, her eyes blinking as she stared at her...

Tao Guodong was unwilling to open the bookstore until 12 o'clock for the beautiful girl, but Confucius had plenty of people to come to him.

Century Bookstore, Nanjing's largest chain bookstore, has 12 stores across the city, and tonight is an inevitable night.

All store managers and employees received a temporary notice at 8 p.m., asking them to work overtime tonight. The hours were not fixed and depended on sales. There was only one goal - to sell Zhang Chao's new book "Homeland" as soon as possible.

The head office will provide a batch of "Hometown" to each branch to ensure that every reader who enters the store can buy it. The employees of "Century Book City" who received the notice had the same inner OS: "Are you crazy?"

I have only heard of people queuing up overnight to get Spring Festival train tickets and queuing up overnight to get expert appointments, but who has ever heard of people queuing up overnight to get a novel? Even if the author is Zhang Chao, it can't be so ridiculous!

But they soon heard that several other large private bookstores and chain bookstores had also issued "overtime orders" - only the state-owned "Xinhua Bookstore" was calm and composed, eating and sleeping as usual, and knowing that if the sky fell, it would have its textbook franchise to support it!

Similar situations are happening in major cities across the country, and the reasons are simple:
The press conference of "Homeland" ended in the afternoon, and the word of mouth exploded that night!

Just when the traditional media present at the event felt that they were shouldering the heavy burden of supporting the sales of "Homeland", the readers who had received the book a day earlier began to show off their new books crazily on Weibo before it even got dark.

First of all, let’s show off the cover——

Lu Jinbo put a lot of effort into the design of the cover of "Homeland": the overall color of the cover is dark blue, with a wave pattern emerging; the crest of the wave holds up a banyan tree with exposed roots; the trunk is translucent like glass, and the branches and leaves stretch out like the strokes of Chinese characters;
The end of the root system turns into an inky thread that hangs down into the waves. In the lower right corner, the title "Hometown" is written in silver, and the brushstrokes are like carving with a knife or an axe.

Not only is the pattern beautifully designed, but it also feels like it is floating on the paper, like a relief - this is done using a convex-concave embossing process, which is not cheap.

Coupled with the equally beautifully designed waistband, themed bookmarks, and exclusive gift cards, this wave of operations is a real dazzle for netizens and book fans who have been eagerly waiting for the book.

Then someone started showing off the preface——

Open the cover and you can see "Written Before You Open This Novel" written by his teacher Yu Hua:
[…I always thought that memory was a torture device for the living. The living had to carry it on their backs, like carrying a rotting corpse. But in “Homeland”, memory is a living life…]

[…When I was young, I always wanted to write something that would hurt people and make them “shout out”, but later I discovered that real pain cannot make a sound. …]

[…When I first got this book, I was thinking: Is this novel about nostalgia? After reading it, I know it’s not. Nostalgia is too light, like a piece of catkins falling on the water. And the people in “Homeland” are trees that have been uprooted. Their roots are stained with blood and soil, the blood is from the living, and the soil is from the dead. …]

[…A good novel never provides answers, it only opens the wound and allows readers to see the maggots and buds inside. After putting down this novel, I once again heard those silent cries. …]

Yu Hua's preface is more than 3000 words long and is not perfunctory at all. It is simply a reading guide written specifically for readers of "Homeland". The insights and personal feelings contained therein are also quite touching to the readers.

How could this be called reading? It was a spontaneous large-scale “unboxing” of new books—although in 2007, this term had not yet become popular.

Next is the main text of the novel——

The passages in Hometown that made readers feel fresh, excited, confused, shocked, lost, etc. were also shared on Weibo by at least hundreds of readers in the form of photos or texts, and then accompanied by their own feelings.

[“I cried until I suffocated while reading Hometown, especially the part where Gu Feng was looking for Lin Rongsheng in Chinatown. It really wrote out all the myths. We left with our “hometown” and were torn apart by it. The pain under the sci-fi shell is too real. ”]

[I came here for Zhang Chao's first science fiction novel, but ended up being blown away by its literary quality! The fragmented memory narrative + three-generation timeline is mind-boggling but enjoyable. It's just that Lin Xiaohai's schizophrenia setting is a bit depressing, and the aftereffect is too strong...]

[The scene where Lin Xiaohai searches for his father in vain is a microcosm of my family. It turns out that the feeling of being "rootless" is not lonely... But the short poem at the end, "Hometown is the restless roots," healed me.]

[Confused! The narrative jumps to the point where you need to draw a relationship diagram while reading... But the metaphor of Gu Feng and the trembling memory space is too perfect! Using reason to cut through the chaos of the countryside? Zhang Chao is challenging the reader's cognitive boundaries. ]

[Please make it into a film! The scenes of Chinese people from different eras are interwoven in the smoke of Chinatown, and the camera sense is fully utilized. But the multi-dimensional narrative may make the director bald... (Director Zhang, please consider it?)]

……

These cover photos, content fragments and readers' comments were copied to portal websites and forums at an astonishing speed. Although many people wondered if they read so fast?

But this information still spread like a virus, and more and more readers wanted to see the novel as soon as possible.

That evening, several TV stations broadcast live clips of the book launch for Hometown, which added fuel to the fire. For a while, who could see the new novel first became a competition among young people on the Internet.

But no matter what, "Homeland" would not go on sale until the next day.

The power of the people is infinite, and soon someone came up with the idea of ​​waiting until 12 o'clock to buy the book - but which bookstore would be open until midnight?

In the end, the large number of people asking for help eventually forced many large bookstores to work overtime and request an increase in the supply of "Hometown".
At 11 o'clock that evening, a scene that had never happened in the history of Chinese book sales took place at the entrances of these private bookstores:

Readers one after another, mostly young people, lined up in long queues in the cold autumn midnight, waiting for a new book to go on sale!
The longest line stretched for two to three hundred meters and bent several times on the road outside the bookstore.

This confused everyone who was paying attention to this matter: When did the Chinese become so fond of literature?

"Chinese people probably don't love literature that much," Zhang Chao said, sitting opposite Lu Jinbo, taking a sip of tea, and continuing, "But I am sure that people all over the world love to join in the fun - and Chinese people are no exception."

Lu Jinbo was numb at this moment and didn't want to talk at all. He had an expression of "Yes, yes, you are right" on his face.

Just an hour ago, his cell phone was damaged by calls from dealers all over the country. At this moment, it was powered off due to exhaustion. Zhang Chao even laughed at him, "I asked you to keep up with the trend, but is this iPhone battery life a joke?"

However, before shutting down, he received the most important information from his employees: "According to the data collected from various places, the 150 million copies of the first print run we prepared should be sold out within one day, and no later than two days.

Now all places are asking for more printing, Boss, how many more should we print?"

150 million copies sold out in one day, what kind of magical realism is this? Lu Jinbo looked at Zhang Chao with a complicated expression and asked, "Did you calculate this?"

Zhang Chao shrugged and replied, "Half and half. But do you think this is the limit of "Homeland"?"

(End of this chapter)