Sure enough, Wang Yang shook his head. "It simply isn't time yet."
Xiao Baoyue looked at Wang Yang, her gaze icy and her lips pressed tight.
Wang Yang made as if to rise. "I'll take my leave, then."
"Young Master, please stay..." Xiao Baoyue smiled through gritted teeth. "Actually, I was going to tell you about this the next time we met, but since you've asked, there's no harm in telling you now."
Wang Yang settled back into his seat, his faint smile serene. "Then I'll wash my ears and listen."
Xiao Baoyue pinched her sleeve between her delicate fingers, the smile on her face unchanged. "I've already delivered Comprehensive Study of the Southern Man to the bookshop to have two thousand copies transcribed. They go on sale in four days."
"Two thousand copies? That's quite an undertaking."
There was no concept of copyright in this era. Once a book came out, people would copy and circulate it. Set the price too high, and either pirate booksellers would undercut it or readers would borrow copies and transcribe their own, leaving no one to buy it; set the price too low, and recovering the costs became difficult. And if those costs could not be recovered quickly, sales would only worsen once pirated editions and private copies flooded the bookshops.
That was why, during the debate at the White Tiger Daoist Grounds, even with the momentum of his great victory and his personal efforts to promote his new book, Wang Yang had only arranged for three hundred copies of One Hundred Questions on the Book of Documents to be transcribed in advance for sale. His real selling point had been immediacy.
Later, when his fame grew even greater and he published the second volume, Questions and Answers on the Book of Documents,