“Literature has been, and is, the saving light of many of my storms,” said Ana María Matute in her speech at the reception of the Cervantes Prize. In the Cantar del Mío Cid the case of a girl who saved her people thanks to the beauty of her words is cited. And in her Manifesto for Reading, in 2020, Irene Vallejo comments on several episodes that make her consider that “stories help us to live, with words being a spell charged with the future.” According to her, reading is the boiling of our neurons, a luminous Big Bang in the enclosure of our mind. Reading, writing and speaking go hand in hand, and the more children read, the better they speak and write.
Irene Vallejo achieved notable success with various fiction novels, but the one who gave her a deserved fame was her literary essay on the origin of writing and books, El infinito en un junco.
The number of book presentations that are currently being convened is striking, by noble or unknown authors who have lived the illusion of that moment for a long time; once written, the financing dilemma arises. Normally they pay for it with their money and on other occasions they get some private or institutional help, something increasingly complicated, since the economic crisis does not invite companies to collaborate, and public institutions increasingly allocate less budget to publishing books , and, on the other hand, prizes are increasingly scarce, and the probability of winning them as well.
The cost of publishing a book depends on many factors, including its quality and number of copies, the photographs, its layout and design, whether its pages are sewn or glued, and whether it is intended to be sold, since it is necessary to take into account the percentage that corresponds to the distribution and the bookstores, with which, except for honorable exceptions, in the end, the author receives symbolic amounts or nothing. At this point, I encourage anyone who wants to write a book to do it, it will always be better and more satisfying than leaving it in the inkwell.
But it is clear that being a writer is not easy, and neither is a good writer, and living exclusively from writing is almost a miracle, although it is not money that moves the vast majority of authors, but the satisfaction they receive from their family and friends seeing your book in bookstore windows.
In this regard, my experience is highly variable, and my first foray arose when I wanted to publish my doctoral thesis on an experimental surgery work in the rat colon carried out at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of La Laguna. No door was opened in the Canary Islands, until a German company, Braun-Dexon, not only published it, but also distributed it among surgeons and operating room instrumentalists in Spain and other countries. From there came the book Suture Materials in Surgery, which was a novelty in surgery and research.
Then I wrote the life of the doctor Manuel Bethencourt del Río, vice president of the Cabildo de Tenerife, imprisoned after the coup of July 18, 1936, The doctor of the poor, as well as the atrocities suffered by the prisoners loyal to the Second Republic in Journal and letters from the prison, by Idea editions.
The next book, Healing ourselves in health. Claves de la Sanidad en Canarias, was financed by various public and private companies, like the last Historias del El Médano and the crazy man on the beach by Leocadio Machado, which I will say helped me enrich part of my time, visiting libraries and researching archives, talking with older people, touring the South of Tenerife, recovering friends. An effort that has been well worth it.
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