New cover

For my upcoming paranormal romantic comedy, from Tara Shuler:

A note from my son

My six-year-old just handed me a carefully written note:

Mom you do great things. Without you I cold not live. I wolde have no food no house I woadint even exest.

PS. I love you and more then the molty vers.

I couldn't figure out that last one, and inquired. He read it off to me: "I love you more than the multiverse."

Well. Okay then. Thanks, kid... I love you too!

Cat update

Daughter #2 was able to track Mama Cat to her den a few days ago. She was living under someone's house, and after checking with the guy who owned the house to be sure he didn't want her, we captured her one kitten and took him home. Mama Cat was quite happy to come along. She was clearly a house cat, once upon a time-- the minute she saw a litter box, she stepped right into it and daintily used it, and she loves to wind around our legs, purring like a little outboard motor. The kitten was a little feral at first, but now allows us to pick him up and pat him, though he still likes to hide under furniture.

I took them to the vet today. Mama got all her shots, and kitten got the shots he can have (he's probably about seven weeks old, and they can't quite determine if it's a he or a she yet, so for now I'll refer to it as a he). They also got a deworming shot, a nail trim, and flea treatments. Overall, they're very healthy, and with a little food they should be perfectly all right. They are adapting well to life indoors. I've been keeping them cooped up in the game room to minimize my other animals' exposure to fleas and other parasites, but I'll let them out into the rest of the house pretty soon.

Ow, my toe

I wouldn't be surprised if my toe is broken, after all. It's bruised all the way down, and the bruise also extends several inches across my foot. When I Googled it, though, I got the impression that a broken toe (excluding the big toe) is not really a big deal-- unless it is badly broken and out of kilter, they just tape it to the next toe and give you Tylenol. I can take Tylenol on my own, without paying a gazillion dollars to have the thing x-rayed. But then again, maybe there's a reason I should go have it checked out. If it isn't better in a couple of days, I shall consult with my BIL the doctor, and see what he thinks I ought to do.

Meanwhile, today I'm going to see Dad (thankfully the injury isn't on my driving foot!). Keep your fingers crossed that he doesn't run over my toe with his wheelchair *grins*.

The great medical update

Went to see the surgeon yesterday, and the gastrointestinal guy today. My incision from the surgery is healing well, so the gastro guy wants to get me onto Remicade. This is an infusion--meaning you have to sit there for hours while they put it into your bloodstream-- that works very, very well for many Crohn's patients (though of course there are no guarantees). Specifically, it helps prevent "fistulizing" disease, which is what caused my abscess, so if it works, it should at least prevent that problem from recurring. But it actually puts a lot of Crohn's patients into remission entirely, so fingers are crossed that it'll work for me. I could use a little luck for once where my health is concerned!

On the down side, I stubbed the hell out of one of my toes this morning. At first I thought it was broken, but I've kept ice on it all morning, and it feels better. Not great, but better. If I can just keep my dogs' paws from stomping it, and avoid slamming it into doors again, I think it'll be okay. I can't afford to have a major foot injury in the summer-- the kids would have a fit if we couldn't go places!

"Making a living," only not quite

Here's an article from Robin Sullivan, based on the figures she got from authors on Kindleboards, called The New Midlist: Self-published ebook authors who make a living. Yours truly is mentioned. Two things: 1. Her guesstimate for what I made in March is actually low; and 2. I'm not making that much now.

February and March were far and away my best months for indie publishing so far. I was doing mindblowingly well on B&N, and my sales on Amazon were way up too. After that B&N did the infamous +1000 to my rankings on my bestseller, and possibly changed the way they do algorithms. In any event, my sales over there have never recovered. My overall sales (and a lot of other people's sales) have been down this month, too, perhaps due to "summer slump." So I can't say I'm "making a living" this year. Had I continued with my February and March numbers, then yes, I would have been making a living. But alas, I didn't-- and some of my loss in numbers had to do with external factors I had no control over.

On the positive side, I will say I have made a quite decent income-- I've paid my mortgage every month this year, except June, when I think I'll come up a little short-- and self-pubbing has absolutely been better for me than trad pubbing or small press pubbing. But the point is that you can't extrapolate "making a living" based on a month or two. We writers know that income goes up and down. It's part of the business. I am hoping my income will go up in the next couple of months as I get a few new titles up. But I don't want anyone to look at me and think, "Oh, look, she's making a living and I write better than she does, so I can make a living too!" You probably do write better than I do *smiles*. But I'm not making a living... yet. And there are no guarantees for any writer.

So if you go into indie publishing, go with your eyes open and your fingers crossed. Good luck!

Sometimes I get the feeling that B&N is messing with me

My latest release sold 13 copies on B&N yesterday... and yet none today so far. How likely is that? Also, how likely is it that it would sell 13 copies in a day and still not have moved up from its #29,000-odd ranking (especially when another book I have sells about ten copies a day and is ranked around #1700)?

Sometimes lately I really feel like B&N has it in for me. Stuff like this just doesn't seem to make any sense...

Luck and unluck

Courtney Milan, along with five other indie authors, was featured in a mass e-mailing from Amazon. Rankings shot up-- Milan's book Unlocked, which was already ranked quite high, exploded up to #2 in the paid Kindle store. (It's now tumbled all the way to #3:-). The other authors have apparently done quite well, too, and so have quite a few authors who happened to be featured in the "customers who bought this book also bought" bar on these books. I happened to read Unlocked yesterday, and it is very good. Milan definitely deserves the success, and I don't doubt the other authors do, too. But there's also no doubt that luck plays a part in sales.

In a somewhat different display of how luck can help out an author, Mary McDonald had her No Good Deed made free by Amazon. This isn't entirely up to luck, admittedly, but luck does play a role, because you can't make a book free on Amazon. The best you can do is offer it for free somewhere else, and hope Amazon will price match (they don't always choose to do so, which is where the luck comes in). But it worked for Mary, and her book shot way up the free rankings. When it switched back to 99 cents, it continued to do well, remaining in the top hundred for two weeks (it's still ranked at #125). While No Good Deed has been a perennial seller, this seems to be the best it's ever sold.

Meanwhile, Victorine Lieske's sophomore effort, The Overtaking, continues to be ranked fairly high-- right now it's around #38,000. I'm sure it will eventually take off as Lieske's first book did, but this is a good example of how strange indie publishing can be. Lieske's first book sold literally tens of thousands of books a month, getting her onto the New York Times Bestseller list, and is still ranked at around #600. It's hard to imagine why all those readers aren't snapping up her second book instantly. But for whatever reason, it's taking a while to get rolling.

This all makes me nervous about my next book. Luck can play such a large part in sales, and there are so many variables that no one seems to understand!

Happy summer days

I took the kids to Water Country in Williamsburg today (part of the season pass that also includes Busch Gardens). We had a good time. The girls tackled the big slides, and the boys puttered around in the little kid areas. I mostly lounged on chairs and watched the boys, though I did float around Hubba Hubba Highway a few times. We left around three, and managed to get home through a thunderstorm and the usual backed-up traffic. (Traffic was so backed up I had to go a strange back route, but we didn't get lost! Yay!)

On Sunday, the oldest leaves for a camp with her youth group for most of a week. I am sad. Really *grins gleefully*.

Kitty kitty

The other night, a very sweet and small kitty wandered through our yard. She's a calico with a lot of white, and a medium-length coat with a very fluffy tail. We asked around, and she appears to be a stray. She also appears to be a nursing mother, so she's got kittens stashed somewhere (safely away from my yard where the dogs will not eat them-- smart kitty!). We fed her, because she was terribly thin, and the next night she showed up again, so we fed her again. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to get her to adopt us (not that I need another cat, but I think I know a family member who'd love her). I don't dare capture her and take her to the vet for spaying/shots/deworming till I find her kittens, though, so we're just going to keep on feeding her for now.

She's an awfully sweet cat, and was obviously someone's pet kitty, once upon a time. She deserves a happy home!

Ugh

Just as I was about to go to bed, a piping little voice came floating down the hall: "Mommy, I frowed up all over the bed." I went down to the six-year-old's room, and sure enough, he had. This stupid stomach bug hasn't been particularly virulent, but it's slowly making its way through the family-- four out of five of us have had it now.

There's nothing more pleasant than cleaning up puke at midnight *makes a face of disgust*. But it's part of being a mom!

Indie successes, the best one yet!

Amazon reports that John Locke is the first indie author (and only the eighth author overall) to sell over a million Kindle books.

Spamming the incompetent way

Bwa ha ha. I just got a lovely piece of spam in my inbox from someone trying to convince me that the IRS needed all my tax information via email in order to get my tax return properly filed. Yeah, I'm probably not dumb enough to fall for that anyway. But I was even less likely to fall for it when I noted that the moron who sent it thinks IRS stands for "Internal Revenue Source."

Mommy brags

Now that my kids have settled into the school system here, they did great this year. My kindergartner got an award for being on the Honor Roll all four quarters. My older boy got the same award (and was annoyed because he was supposed to get an award for perfect attendance, but ironically was ill and had to stay home on the day of his awards ceremony). My younger daughter got an award for being on the Principal's List (ie, straight A's) all year-- something that none of my kids have ever accomplished before. She was also the top Accelerated Reader in her grade. And my oldest got A's and B's in tough classes, and got perfect scores on two out of three of her state exams.

They're a smart bunch of kids, but more importantly, they've really worked hard this year. I am a proud mommy:-).

A mention

The Galaxy Express kindly mentioned Farthest Space: The Wrath of Jan in today's post, which is about "a campy, fifties-style sci-fi story" called Invasion of the Nylonians. There are some other campy stories listed near the end of the post, too.

Humans are SO hard to train

After their last piddle of the evening, Hero goes upstairs to "his" bathroom, and Impulse goes into his crate for the night. Impy's crate is in my office, so sometimes I let him out while I hang at the computer (he makes a nice warm footrest:-). My daughter usually comes down to say goodnight to him, and when she does, she generally lets him out of his crate for a few minutes. But last night I was tired, so I said, "Oh, don't let him out, I'm just about to go to bed."

Impy waggled happily at his girl and waited expectantly for her to open his crate. When she only patted him through the bars, he pawed at the door.

Hey, kid. Open this, will ya?

She didn't, so he pointed his muzzle to first the top latch, then the bottom latch.

Here, you have to pull these, and then the door will open.

Still nothing, so he did it again, carefully pointing out both latches.

Come on, kid, I know you can figure this out.

She said goodnight to him and headed upstairs, and he sat down and looked after her with a disgusted expression.

Humans. You can try and try to train them, but they just don't seem to learn.

Heaving bosoms

I'm probably oversensitized to this phrase right now, due to that Fox News article, but when I see authors write something like, "I write romance, but not the heaving bosoms kind-- the spicy, realistic kind!" it makes my teeth grind together. What exactly is the "heaving bosoms" kind of romance? Have you read a romance since the eighties? Have you seen a heaving bosom in a romance since then? And why are you trying to get me, a romance reader, to read your books by using an outdated and cliched phrase that's often used to insult romance as a whole?

Could we just delete that stupid phrase from our collective vocabulary, please?

I'm on Fox News!

Well, sort of. This article (which presents some very odd half-truths about the ebook publishing industry), featured this illustration:



Yep, that's my book in the bottom row. But not one of my current books, as you might expect to support the thesis of the article. Nope, it's the Italian edition of my 1998 historical, which featured a much older Western cover (how on earth they even FOUND that cover is a mystery to me). In fact, all these covers are from the eighties (as is the ridiculous phrase "heaving bosoms"), which makes one wonder if the person writing it had any clue at all about the current ebook industry.

And LOL, some of these are actually spoof covers... "For the Love of Scottie McMullet"? Hee. Do SOME research, people! Don't just grab images off Google!

Not bad for a short story

I tallied up my bestseller (written under my other name) today, and was surprised to see I've sold over 12,700 copies of it. That's a lot of copies of a short story!

The weekly Dad-makes-me-rant

So Dad's handyman put up a new kitchen fixture this week. The minute I walked into his house, Dad started complaining that the 75-watt fluorescent bulbs weren't bright enough (he has macular degeneration and needs a lot of light), and would I please put in 100-watt incandescent lights instead?

I got up on a ladder, took the shade off the fixture, and contemplated the problem.

"It's rated for 75 watts, Dad. You can't put in 100-watt bulbs."

"Oh, that's not a problem," he answered. "I put 100-watt bulbs in all my fixtures."

Note to self: Check all lights in the house. "It is a problem," I said. "You'll start a fire. We're not putting in 100-watt bulbs."

A pause, while he considered that. "Why don't you just put them in and see what happens?"

So if the kitchen ceiling bursts into flame, we'll know for sure it's a problem, right? Great idea, Dad. "No," I said, more firmly than before. "It's not safe. It's rated for 75-watt bulbs, and that's what we're using."

"The handyman said it's perfectly fine to put 100-watt bulbs in it, and he's an electrical engineer. He ought to know."

I am reasonably certain the handyman did not say this, or he probably would have put 100-watt bulbs in it to begin with. "I don't care what he said," I answered. "I'll put in clear, incandescent light bulbs, and I'll leave the shade off. That ought to be bright enough. But I am not putting 100-watt bulbs in this fixture, and that's final."

Dad kept grumbling. But since he can't stand on a ladder to replace the bulbs, I won the argument:-).

Indie successes, part whatever

Over on Kindleboards, Bob Mayer reports that he sold an average of 1000 books a day last week. That's a lot of books!

Happy big 3-0, Raiders!

Raiders of the Lost Ark is thirty years old today. I loved that movie when I was a kid. I remember going to see it with my sister (who took me to most of the movies I saw as a child, because my parents thought these newfangled movies were all stupid). We went to see it because we loved Harrison Ford in Star Wars, but I wound up loving Raiders all on its own. That Christmas my sister gave me the movie poster, so I had Harrison Ford's face hanging on my closet door all through my adolescence.

It's one of the few "classics from Mommy's childhood" movies I haven't gotten my oldest to see yet. I need to work on that, because everyone should see Raiders!

Busch Gardens again

Since we have season tickets, we went to Busch Gardens for the second time today. Last time we waited in traffic for a long time, but today we drove right in. My oldest and I headed for the Loch Ness Monster, and walked right on. Then we headed for DarKastle and walked right onto that one, too. And so forth and so on.

It was only about ninety today (not terribly hot for summer in Virginia), so I had expected the place to be a madhouse. But it appears everyone else headed for Water Country instead. The only time we really encountered a line was for the Roman Rapids, and even that wasn't too bad. We got to ride on just about everything we wanted to, with much less stress than usual. There wasn't even a line in the Festhaus when we did lunch at noon!

Also, my kids were awesome, with no squabbling and much watching out for each other, and I didn't have problems with my stomach for once in my life. So overall, it was a near-perfect day:-).

The unexpected benefits of a new computer...

Got iTunes back onto my computer this morning. I've never listened to music while working, because the old computer couldn't handle websurfing or Word while listening to music at the same time (you'd get these weird lags where one note would repeat over and over as the computer struggled to keep up with it all). But with the new computer, I can listen to music just fine-- and with my new speakers, I can even annoy my children by playing really loud music!

Life is good *grins widely*.

Sigh

Trying to get all my crap--- pardon me, the files of earth-shattering significance and undeniable galactic value-- off my MyBook and onto my new computer. Right now, it seems to be kind of... stuck. It's retrieved less than 3 GB so far, and now it's just staring blankly at me like it can't bear to go on. Come ON, computer, it can't be that hard to transfer info from one device to another. Can it?

Amazon in Spain?

This article suggests Amazon will be launching a bookstore in Spain in the next month or so. I'm not sure it matters that much to those of us who write in English-- I've sold a big three books in Germany so far. (By way of contrast, I sold around 300 copies in the UK store last month.) It's always nice to see a new market open up, but I don't know how much demand there is for English-language books in Spain. But I could be wrong, and these markets might begin to expand saleswise. Who knows?

Yeah, I'm not too bright

So Geek Daughter and I have been setting up the computer. I'm not very smart about this stuff, sadly. I spent an hour trying to get the wireless to connect, and finally realized I had the device, but that it had also come with a CD (which I was not able to find to install). I went to Best Buy and confirmed this with the sales guy, who said (quite politely), "Yes, ma'am, it won't work without software." Uh-huh, I knew that. Really. Or at least it dawned on me after an hour or so *sighs*. So I bought a new wireless device, and it works. And this time I'm carefully stashing all my software so I can FIND it again.

I have to figure out how to work Microsoft Word 2010 (all this time I've been limping along with 2003) and how to get the stuff from my external hard drive onto my new computer. Also, I thought the speakers were very, very quiet because the old computer had a bad sound card or something, but they're still far too quiet-- as in you have to hold them up to your ear to hear them-- so I guess the problem is ancient speakers (I can tell from the style that they're from at least two computers ago). Gotta buy new ones, I guess.

Anyway, it's fun having a new computer. It doesn't happen often:-).

New computer!

My old computer was on the verge of death, so I gritted my teeth and bought a new one (and none too soon-- when I went to turn my old computer on today, it wouldn't go on). So far, the new one is great-- a ton more memory than the old one (which was seven years old-- a Methuselah in computer terms!), and watching videos should be a much smoother experience. I had all my stuff backed up to an external hard drive, and that was easy enough to put onto the new computer. I still have to install the newest version of Word (a crucial necessity!) and learn how to use it. I've been used to 2003, so the latest version will be something of a step up!

New Summer Breeze cover

The general consensus on the Summer Breeze cover was "we don't like the fuzzy navel," so Terry kindly redid it just a bit:

A note from my son

My six-year-old handed me a note today. His spelling is really improving, though those long words are still a little hard for him to figure out (his grasp of phonetics is terrific, though):

Cars2 comes out this sumer it said on a comershil. P.S. I Love You.

I'm guessing this is a subtle request to go see the movie:-).

Tagging

A good blog post on why tags were (probably) removed from Kindle books, here.

"I have no more data than anyone else so I won’t go so far as to claim no doubt but it’s my educated guess that tags stopped being a reflection of what readers thought and just a cheap way for authors to game the system. So Amazon killed them, at least in their original form."

Interesting

Lee Goldberg lists new criteria for active members approved by the Mystery Writers of America. Lee says, "These new guidelines, approved today by the MWA Board, opens the door to scores of authors whose books are published solely as ebooks or via print-on-demand, but they still exclude self-published works."

From the guidelines themselves:

"Self-published books, whether they are published in print or as e-books, still do not qualify for MWA active membership.

"In crafting the criteria below, we had to strike a balance between including books published using those new technologies while also maintaining our high professional standards and our commitment to protecting our members (and writers in general) from the less-than-reputable publishers who seek to take advantage of them."

This criterion for establishing an Approved Publisher in particular caught my eye: "During the preceding year, the publisher must have paid a minimum of $500 in advances and/or royalties to at least five authors with no financial or ownership interest in the company."

Not being a mystery writer, I have no dog in this fight. But I do find it slightly amusing that their desire to protect their members means that they approve publishers who can prove they've paid a lousy $500 in royalties in a year to five authors. I make quite a lot more than that off self-publishing every month. So do a lot of indie authors. And yet self-published authors are apparently ineligible for Active Membership. Intriguing.

Field Trip by Jody Wallace

My friend Jody Wallace has a new short story, Field Trip, available on Kindle.

May results

I had my worst sales month since January, but still managed to cover my mortgage... barely. I hope to have three new books up this month; hopefully that'll help improve sales!