My church service went quite well yesterday…and I sold two copies of Mortal Touch! One of the purchasers asked if I had talked with a particular bookstore, which made me feel that I should get back to my project of sending out flyers to independent bookstores and following up with a phone call. So, I’m going through Yellow Pages listings online and getting bookstore names. I’m not sure how up-to-date the listings are–I’ve found several bookstores which, when I attempted to find their websites, had not only relocated but changed their names. A lot of the stores only deal in used, rare, collectible, and/or particular categories of books, like computer manuals or textbooks. So, I’m sure my list will get winnowed down a lot before I end up with a usable data base. I’m just doing bookstores in New England (for now) because my series has a strong regional focus (“the Vampires of New England Series”) and I hope to do some talks in some of the stores.
This morning I had a reply from someone I sent a review copy to. This is very heartening, not only because I’m happy to get the reply at all, but because I actually sent this book to, gulp, Belgium, and I’m very glad it arrived safely! (Why did I do that? Because it’s a review website, with no location hints on the site, I queried the owner, got an enthusiastic response–and only then was given the mailing address. It seemed tacky in the extreme to suddenly say, “sorry, I can’t send the book because you’re not in America!”) The reviewer says she really likes the book so far. 🙂
All those books I ordered from Amazon and aLibris are starting to arrive–because I bargain-hunted and ordered so many used editions, they’re coming from resellers all over the place. The first one to arrive, as I mentioned earlier, was Michael Romkey’s The Vampire Virus, which is funny because that is literally the last one that I ordered. I’ve been reading it, but I can’t say I’m very impressed by it. I’m finding it both dull and silly. Oh, well. I bought it for “historical” reasons. Today I picked up Ronald Hutton’s third book about Pagan history (ancient and modern), Witches, Druids and King Arthur, Bruce McClelland’s Slayers and Their Vampires (he’s the one whose doctoral dissertation on Bulgarian vampire folklore I acquired from the microfilm service…and I have an entire novel of his that he once posted to the Vampyres listserv archived, as well), and Lawrence Wright’s Remembering Satan, about a famous “false memory” case in Olympia, Washington. There’s a bit of a story behind that last one…short version is, I’d had a copy and loaned it to someone who never returned it.
I cracked the Livejournal customization code–that is, the S1 code, I’m not devoted enough to LJ to get into the morass of S2. If you’re reading this on your own or someone else’s f-list, pop over to my LJ and you’ll see what I’ve done so far. But I’m definitely getting the hang of Cascading Style Sheets–so much so that I’m now going back to my Blogger accounts and putting stylesheet code back into those templates. Blogger has been cranky the last couple of days, though–my blogs have been taking a long time to upload, and they’re not that big.
No title for Book 2 yet, but I’ve been a bit distracted with church service. I’m trying to find ways to post to my blogs more regularly–because my blog entries, I’ve noticed, bounce straight to the top of search engines, and I’m not exploiting that nearly enough. What’s the point of naming my business after my established website if I don’t milk that connection for all its worth? Oh, be aware of this if you post to blum_community, by the way–those posts get indexed right away, I’ve found that running searches on various keywords and tags for weeks now.
So, that’s my life on a quiet and somewhat chilly Monday night.
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