My parents are living in Germany right now, and my mom just stumbled across a copy of the New Line 6 English textbook that contains my story “Lest We Forget.” Here’s a photo she just sent me of the book in its natural habitat:
“Lest We Forget” won the Dell Magazines Award for undergraduate science fiction, and subsequently appeared on the Asimov’s magazine website, where a German textbook publishing company saw it. They emailed me and said, “We’d like to reprint this story in our textbook. How much do we need to pay you for that?” I was a teenager and had absolutely no clue what the going rate might be for a textbook reprint, let alone a textbook reprint in Germany. After much rumination, I decided to ask for $1000, which I thought was probably way too much, but I really had no idea, and I figured we could always negotiate. I was a little afraid though that they would come back and say, “$1000! Sind Sie verruckt? We were thinking more like $50. Whoa, just forget the whole thing.” But actually they said okay and sent me $1000 and a few copies of the textbook. So that was all well and good, though I did sometimes wonder over the succeeding years why they’d been willing to pay so much for a short story reprint. Just how many copies of this textbook were they printing anyway?
When I set up statcounter to track visitors to my website, almost immediately I had a visitor from Germany who’d found my site by googling “lest we forget david kirtley.” I thought, “Hey, neat. Someone from Germany actually came across the story I published in that textbook all those years ago. What are the odds?” Well, apparently the odds weren’t all that astronomical, because in the next 24 hours I had two more visitors from Germany who’d found my site in the exact same way. And this has continued ever since, with three or four visitors to my website from Germany every day. My story is just a few pages in the middle of the book, so geez, there must be a hell of a lot of copies of that thing floating around Germany to account for all the internet traffic. The book is even common enough for my parents to randomly stumble across it. So I guess maybe $1000 wasn’t so out of line after all. Now I sort of wonder what would’ve happened if I’d asked for $5,000? Oh well, as long as tons of German students are reading my story I’m happy.
I found you the same way, through a schoolbook. 1000 Dollars is not even nearly what you could have gotten. We have a schoolsystem that forces us to visit the school until at least the ninth grade, middleschool till 10th, and “gymnasium” till twelvth. The story was published in a middleschoolbook which is used all across the country in tenth grade, so approximately 500,000 pupils read it per year!
And actually I was googeling to read the full story, its kinda interesting ;)