Buondì.
What’s that coming over the horizon?
Is it a sail?
The first signs of a thunderstorm?
A mirage?
I’m back from Istanbul, which was great, and back at work, which isn’t. Yesterday I was at the school, today I’m slaving away on the laptop.
Tuesday we were riding ferries across the Bosphorus, Wednesday we were queuing to have our passports stamped as we left Turkey, and Thursday – boom!
Coming back to work after a holiday is always hard, isn’t it?
Banks, emails, students, staff, supermarkets, dishes to wash, meals to cook.
Thursday, I was on the go from seven a.m. to eleven p.m., I swear.
So now I’m, reluctantly, getting back to the same old same old, what can you expect from the club in the coming months?
The company’s financial year ends of June 30th, so we’re marking time a little until then.
Which means no ‘Book of the Week’ offers, no new product launches.
But there!
Just coming over the horizon!
It’s the SUMMER SALE, scheduled for the first week of the new tax period, that is to say from Monday July 1st .
(We have to think of these things – why pay the UK government more than necessary? Especially when Boris is going to sail the place off to mid-Atlantic and pull the plug out. Singapore at the bottom of the ocean!)
But anyway, the SUMMER SALE means a 20% discount on Italian lessons and ebooks from our online shop. If you’re one of our online students and want to stock up on lesson credits to tide you over the summer, be patient for a week or so and save £££.
Ditto if you’ve run out of reading material or self-study workbooks. Hold off another nine days and pay less for your learning.
So, now you know, not that it was a secret.
It’s the same every year – we have a January Sale, a Spring or Easter Sale (depending on the timing of Easter), a Summer Sale at the start of our new tax year, and finally the Autumn/Fall Sale, timed for when people are back at school/college etc. in September/October.
Add those to your calendar. Our regular online students buy Italian lessons credits only at these times, and so always pay less than the ‘non-sale’ prices.
Or, if you want to know when the next sale will be, just email and ask.
Other than the sales, we have a slew of new ‘easy reader’ ebooks to publish (don’t think I ever wrote that word before – it’s from the Irish Gaelic sluagh, meaning “multitude” according to Vocabulary.com).
That’ll probably be from September on. Though I might squeeze out one or two during the summer for club members in the southern hemisphere, who’ll need something to while away the long winter nights.
Easy readers about what? you ask.
Well, we’ve got a prolific new writer, an Italian teacher called Francesca, who lives in Spain. She did the advanced-level ‘Prometeo e la guerra dei titani‘, which was well-received when we published it last month.
That is to say I, Stefi, and the two people who wrote reviews liked it.
Besides that one, we have a three-part series of mysteries starring a Renaissance-era ‘sort of detective’ who is called upon by members of the Borgia family to resolve various mysteries – murders, poisonings and so on.
Then there’s a tale of a bar owner’s lost love, a story about a murder in German-occupied Italy during WW2, a more-or-less modern day tale of the famous Palio di Siena, a Christmas story (which I haven’t read yet) by the author of Dante, gatto vagante, and finally something about the theater, which is still being written so I can’t say much about it.
But being the editor is so much fun! At least it is when writers respond to feedback, when the plot begins to make some sense, and when the characters start to take on lives of their own. Some of Francesca’s characters are like real people to me, which is a nice thing to be able to say.
So I’ll be excited to share those with you.
Last but not least, we have EasyItalianNews.com, which hasn’t reached it’s first birthday yet. For months, I read and listened to each bulletin, scanning anxiously for anything that would get us sued and closed down (I’d have more time to study, at least…)
But now I’ve calmed down, somewhat. The production team (my wife, my son, my elder daughter and a SLEW of freelance writers) seems to be getting on very well without my involvement.
I was particularly pleased with yesterday’s bulletin, which had a nice mix of interesting stories, many of which I hadn’t already read elsewhere.
Many thanks to the dozen or so people who have donated in June.
If you’ve been enjoying the website since it started but haven’t yet got around to sending us some cash, you might as well wait until July 1st now, and so save us 19% tax.
In the meantime though, subscribing (so as to receive three easy news bulletins each week via email) is completely free.
Nearly 3500 people have already joined us (out of 13,000 club members). Help us out by spreading the word, will you?
Così.
It’s Friday, it’s Midsommar weekend, which is very, very important in Sweden, and so it’s time to say ‘alla prossima!’ and go cook the kids’ lunch (school’s already out in Italy…)
A lunedì, allora.