Yes, I am in this for the money, your point?

Funny how the little things can just brighten up your day!

I’ve been angsting big time about the fact that Amazon sales of Mortal Touch had tanked this month. It seems like I need 40 hours in every day: I can do time-consuming things to build up my brand and marketing presence (such as blog, read whole books and review them, write articles, etc) OR I can work on The Longer the Fall which is coming along very well but really slowly. But doing both is hard.

Meanwhile, the Kindle edition of Mortal Touch has been selling! I’ve sold six Kindle editions so far, and I make a higher per-unit profit on those than I do on the print books. Still, I’ve been pondering the oft-repeated question, that no one has an answer for, as to whether e-books cut into print book sales.

But, after a couple of weeks of watching the print edition’s sales rank slide inexorably down into “remaindered” territory (wah!)–I just made a sale! Boom, I’m back up into, “best selling in this category” range! Yay! And thank you, customer, whoever you are!! Now I feel all bouncy. *g*

I am beefing up my Amazon Profile (I realized this week that it has a counter, and that people are actually, gulp, reading it). I created my first “Listmania” list–and it’s getting views. That might have helped. I also just discovered that a friend of mine created a “Listmania” list and included Mortal Touch on it. That might have helped, too! I have more Listmania lists to do and one or two “So You’d Like to…” features in mind.

I had two checks in my mailbox on Monday–both for writing, at least technically. One was for the church service on March 9th and one was for the article I wrote for the Broad Universe Broadsheet, “Thinking Outside the Coffin: Writing the Vampire Novel.” That was a very nice surprise. Today, a friend sent me a tip about a writers’ grant I actually qualify for. It’s a grant for “older writers” (over 50) working in the field of “speculative fiction.” The deadline is March 31st, so I spent most of this afternoon putting my application together and sending it off. It’s a tidy little bit of change–not enough to take a year off to write or anything, but it sure would keep my Muse supplied with Hershey’s Kisses for a while! I just sent off a lengthy application to have By Light Unseen Media listed as a market on Ralan.com. I still have to wait a couple of months to see what happens with several contests I entered Mortal Touch for.

This weekend, I’ll be out at ConBust in Northampton, Massachusetts. I’ll be participating in the Broad Universe Rapid Fire reading on Saturday morning at 11:00 a.m. I still need to select something to read and start rehearsing it. That video I made of myself reading was very helpful. If I’m going to record audio book versions I need to get my delivery up to professional level. No matter how you think you sound, there is absolutely no substitute for watching and listening to yourself on video. If any writers here on my f-list will be doing a reading–even for your writers’ group–I can’t recommend this highly enough.

The economy is swirling the bowl, I’m freezing cold, I think that’s an actual glacier on the north side of my house (it’s starting to ooze down the slope, I can tell), what I’m having to do to my Muse to get The Longer the Fall finished violates the Geneva Conventions, but…I just sold a book! 🙂