Jiang Dejun and his wife were urged back due to work. The reason needless to say was due to [Stories About The Ming Dynasty] suddenly emerging into fame.
Discovering the author Bright Moon was supposedly from Shanghai, the excitement and interest of all the publishing houses in Shanghai were naturally aroused.
Currently there were few in the industry who didn't know about the novel!
The hottest topic on the Internet right now was -"Did you read [Stories About The Ming Dynasty] today?"
The new legend of online novels! Today the number of hits on it had exceeded a million!
Just the traffic it brought in alone had almost broken the Tianya Forum servers!
...
As [Stories About The Ming Dynasty] became more and more popular on the Internet and more and more popular in reality, more and more publishers and retailers began to focus on the book. The book in their eyes was the Chinese [Harry Potter], a gold mine! And the author who hadn't appeared yet, Bright Moon was the JK Rowling of China! "
It was a pity that Bright Moon was too inconspicuous. The chapters uploaded online were almost enough to produce a book, but he still hadn't contacted a publisher yet. Unlike JK Rowling who, when she finished writing [Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone] instantly began to search everywhere for publishers, suffering through several twists and turns before she managed to successfully publish her novel.
Bright Moon still remained hiding in the dark, despite them taking the initiative and swarming him with messages and flattery.
This left the major publishing houses anxious and distraught. As the book became more and more popular, piracy had begun to appear but the author still hadn't appeared! Was he insane? This was all potential money!
The local publishers in Shanghai especially were in pain. This was like hearing the God of Wealth was at your doorstep, but you couldn't find your keys to unlock the door.
Executives began trying to contact Tianya to find a way to contact the author and some even resorted to looking for hackers to track Jiang Cheng's address.
Unfortunately, they underestimated Jiang Cheng. After all, staying in the United States for so many years in his past life and having been in contact with future tech, he had a few tricks up his sleeve to prevent people tracking him down. He created a bunch of fake temporary emails and routed his internet connection through a bunch of VPN's.
He was unaware but Jiang Cheng's actions killed the arrogance of those domestic hackers who usually held proud gazes, and let them deeply understand their own shortcomings as they ran head first into Microsoft's brand new PPTP VPN network. Running into it now ahead of time before it became mainstream, China's hacking underworld actually gained a boost as they developed ahead of time, indirectly driving the vigorous development of computer technology in China. And a few years later, Jiang Cheng would even profit because of this, though he didn't realize it now.
Xu Guoqing, Chairman and the main shareholder of Southern Weekly Publishing House, was also amongst those eagerly searching for Bright Moon.
The performance of Southern Weekly had dropped so badly in the past two years that it was in need of revitalizing before it truly fell into deep trouble and it was at this time that [Stories About The Ming Dynasty] had appeared. Xu Guoqing was attracted at first sight by [Stories About The Ming Dynasty] not because he was a fan of the book, but because he saw the vast money making potential of it!
This was the kind of work that could save their publishing house. Xu Guoqing wanted it and Southern Weekly needed it!
Southern Weekly was also the publishing house where Jiang Cheng's father Jiang Dejun worked,
It was formerly known as Southern Publishing House but Southern Weekly was one of their core magazines, having been extremely popular for some time in the 1990's and due to the brand recognition it provided they had eventually decided to rename the publishing house after it.
However despite it's fancy new name, the performance of Southern Weekly had fallen sharply, exiting it's honeymoon period as it headed for the sunset.
In Jiang Cheng's view, the main reason for the decline in Southern Weekly's performance was that it's thinking was too old. Southern Weekly mainly dealt with documentary reports, tracking current affairs at home and abroad and asking experts and scholars to give reports.
This was very popular in the last century, because at that time people had very little access to information, only resorting to newspapers and magazines; But now there were more and more channels of information, which were ultimately faster and cheaper. For paper media to compete would only get harder and more futile.
When people could just search for what they wanted to know without much hustle for free, why would they want to pay for your magazines and newspapers? Which were neither fast or up to date.
Even if they didn't want to go online, they could just watch those news channels. Why go and buy magazines and newspapers?
As a result, mergers were becoming more and more prevalent. There were fewer and fewer small and medium-sized publishing houses, with most either being annexed by the main titans or closing down. Those who didn't want to go bankrupt, switched to do something else.
Southern Weekly could sustain itself up to now, thanks to the brand loyalty they had accumulated among their middle-aged and elderly customer base in their early years. But while they were fine currently they were running on a timer.
So Xu Guoqing seeing [Stories About The Ming Dynasty] becoming more and more popular became hopeful and anxious.
But that hope soon transformed to frustration and anger when he realized that his CEO and editor-in-chief, Jiang Dejun at such a critical juncture had taken his wife to Hainan on holiday and was seemingly pulling off a second honeymoon!
"Oh, it wasn't a honeymoon, but a family trip to Hainan. So why is your son still at home?"
"The kid said he didn't want to go, so the two of you went alone. How is that not a honeymoon?"
The most excessive thing was that Jiang Dejun had been gone for almost a month, and he still hadn't come back?
Seeing that they hadn't had much work recently, he actually went and approved himself a month-long vacation.
"Dammit, hurry and get your ass back here!"
So with that Jiang Cheng's parents reluctantly ended their second honeymoon.
Yeah, it was indeed a second honeymoon.
Though to be fair they didn't initially plan it as such, after all the trip was originally planned for the whole family but Jiang Cheng right at the end refused to go!
And since they had already paid....It would have been a waste to cancel, so they went. After all they rarely got so much alone time together.
The two of them enjoyed the gentle sunshine, golden sand and warm waves of Hainan and even went as far as to turn off their phones, only switching them on an hour a day.
So when they learned what was going on from an angry Xu Guoqing, they were stunned.
[Stories About The Ming Dynasty] was tens of chapters deep but Bright Moon still hadn't appeared yet, was he really so generous as to let everyone read his book for free?
Publishers naturally didn't believe so, they thought that Bright Moon was fishing amongst them for the highest bid. So publishers secretly raised the price tag in their hearts, they couldn't wait for the appearance of Bright Moon.
Even Jiang Dejun, upset about his holiday, after reading [Stories About The Ming Dynasty] couldn't help admit that it was a rare book, destined to create waves.
But then thinking of what he was missing out on, he couldn't help but feel slightly aggrieved.
Of all the times for this Bright Moon character to appear it just had to be now huh, dammit.
But what he didn't expect was that when he got home, he would run into the very person he was cursing.