P&G and the Calabria Website

Being unpredictable has its advantages, but also its blind spots — those moments when you wait for clarity to arrive, and what arrives is rarely enough to triangulate the destination perfectly.

When I told family and friends that I was not selling books but giving them away, nearly all of them concluded I had lost my mind — someone thoroughly disconnected from any reasonable grace of God.

I never explained my purpose. It was not a common one. It was the child of an existence in which a product that does not sell must always be the last one you make freely available — always held inside a reservation, like a favor extended to someone, to a friend.

Amazon understood this well, and fought people like me with the illusion that leaving us in the corner constituted marginalization. It was only the waiting room for a war that had no winners — only resolvers. Those you never see, but who collect everything.

They asked me what my platform was worth. I could give no financial or editorial value — only an economic one, based on potential consumers, taking Amazon as market leader and projecting sales against its thirteen percent of acquired readers alone.

One hundred books in English. Appearing on the first queries for Gillette across Bing and Google. A visibility basin of over two billion annual views. Available in four different versions. Across a market of sixteen hundred readers per nation. Consumable in two hundred and eight languages. At an average unit price of nine dollars and ninety cents.

The resulting figure, with a margin of plus or minus three to five percent, placed the annual business projection at nearly one hundred and seventy-five billion dollars.

Not insignificant for someone living on seventy dollars a month — and giving it all away.

And yet Frega was asking only one dollar per interview. And when they asked what he would want in exchange for rights and ownership, the answer surprised everyone.

He would give it all back only to his mother. He would not do it for anyone else. It was a debt of honor — to the one who had made everything possible — to the point where people stopped and asked:

Who the hell is this Frega?