Wednesday, April 10th

The Daily Report

There was a point yesterday where the Tales of MU ebook had sold about 12 copies (6 the first day, 6 the second), and I was thinking to myself how awesome it would be if that ended up being a pattern, if it just kept on selling about that many copies. I don't think that's actually very likely... while the ebook has the potential to reach new audiences, it's not going to do it on its own in a big way. So there's likely to be a large initial burst of sales as the readers who've been waiting for it get it, and then it's likely to taper off unless and until I do something to push it in front of a wider audience.

(And I don't plan on doing that until I've got the second one ready... which may be sooner than I'd expected, but will wait until I've got the Nook edition straightened out.)

But the thought was so intriguing. Six sales a day is about $12 for me, which would mean an extra $300 a month, which is exactly the kind of shot in the arm my income's going to need.

And it was thinking about that that made me realize how much my original business plan (such as it was) had depended on the idea of monetizing my archives in a way that I haven't yet, that I have done all this labor and produced all this content and that each passing year the value of it has grown but I've done little to take advantage of it.

The book ended up selling more than 6 copies yesterday... as of this morning, there are a total of 21 sales in the US store, which as of this moment makes it #60 in the category of lesbian fiction (sidenote: I wish Amazon had a "queer fiction" category, as that's a better fit) and puts it at number sixteen thousand something overall. That's $40, or it will be... after doing business directly through PayPal for so long, it's kind of dispiriting to watch my Amazon numbers climb and know that I'll have to wait for those sales to translate to money in my account.

But that's something I'll have to get used to.

The State of the Me

Last night was the second night in recent days that I've had a random nocturnal muscle cramp interfere with my sleepytimes. This one was a blast-from-the-past calf cramp. Probably time for me to boost my potassium or something.

Plans For Today

Today is a writing day for Tales of MU, which will put me through next Thursday. I'm going to be working on the Nook edition of the book this morning.

Timing is everything?

I didn't yet have the URL down for Nook's web-publishing platform, so I had to Google it and I was briefly confused by the fact that the first page is full of results talking about it. I wondered what kind of lousy SEO team Barnes & Noble has working for them, and then I looked at the date on them and noticed that a lot of them were "12 hours ago" and things like that.

Apparently the day I decided to check out getting my stuff on the Nook is the day that they underwent a major upgrade and re-branding. Talk about timing! This makes me feel better about how many error messages I got before it finally accepted my upload. Technically, I'm an early adopter.

Well, it finally happened.

For the first time in the three and a half weeks that I've been back in Omaha, today I had a writing day where I can't write. I'm just not up to it. It's some combination of tiredness and a pill thing I'm not going to get into here. I'm not falling asleep and I'm not totally beset by brain fog, but I lack the necessary spark to get a chapter started, much less fill it out in any way.

It's something that was bound to happen sooner or later, and it did. But you know what? It affects nothing. I'm still ahead. And maybe because I know that failure to create is not going to put me behind, I've had a productive day anyway. I learned how to use B&N's "Nook Press" site. I've actually got the Tales of MU ebook manuscript all ready to go in it, though they won't let me submit it for publication until they verify my payment information. It handles chapter breaks and links in a kind of weird way, at least when coming from a manuscript that was set up for Kindle, so I had to redo a lot of that stuff. In the process I discovered some inconsistencies in how I had some links set up in the original manuscript, so I fixed them and re-uploaded that to Amazon.

Once my account is verified and assuming the publishing process goes smoothly, Nook users can look forwards to having my short stories in the Nook store, as well. I'll be playing catchup with them for a while, but in the future Nook might get some of my stuff first... the user experience for publishers is very good. Nook even gives a slightly better royalty on 99 cent works compared to Amazon, though that's balanced out by slightly lower one for $2.99 stuff.

I also started work on the book 2 ebook. Still no ETA on it. If it's not finished before Wiscon, it will probably not be finished until the middle of summer, which is the next time I'll be back in Nebraska. But even that's better than my original estimate of "sometime after I move".