At the beginning of 2009, I signed a collaboration with the current publishing house and at the same time moved to a different neighborhood, to a new home, making a fresh start in my life, determined to leave behind many things that had been troubling me for years and had burdened me excessively. It is not the easiest thing in the world to throw off a long-standing professional collaboration, to leave a beloved neighborhood and neighbors, to move to another house, changing scenes and habits of years. However, I was determined to make changes.
In 2009, The Crossroads of Souls with my new publisher became a huge commercial success, surpassing every expectation I had and every sales number I had achieved until then within just a few months. My joy, of course, was indescribable, but at the same time, it made me very careful about what I would publish from then on. I now wanted to focus on writing lengthy books, without tiring or losing the reader's interest in the slightest. Of course, I did not do this for profit reasons; the financial crisis had already started in Greece, and I knew that publishers, in order to retain the readership, were lowering book prices regardless of their page count.
What mattered more was to analyze in detail the characters of my heroes, placing the reader in the depths of their soul and mind, even conducting psychological analysis of their actions, to convey messages to the readership that would awaken them or even provide solutions to their own problems, and to have in their hands a "satisfying" book. Naturally, this required more time and effort compared to my earlier books, but I did not mind.