Thursday, March 10, 2011

Update on First Novel

For those of you following along concerning my first novel, I posted a week ago that my novel finally made it into Smashwords dot com's Premium Distribution Catalog. 

Starting Sunday March 6th, 2011 Started Smashwords promotion for Read an E-book week, which I opted into, in order to help get noticed I made my book free for the entire week promotion.  My sales ( people downloading the book for FREE have been steady since Sunday.  Nothing Earth shattering, but for a completely unknown author to have people choosing to download my book and try it amongst the literally thousands of books out there to pick from, I feel grateful and honored.  I truly hope that many of the people who are giving it a try will be entertained and add me to the list of authors whose stuff they watch for to read future works of mine.

Today's news is Smashwords has shipped my book to Apple yesterday as a new offering of theirs to show up on Apple's site with in the next week.  If you consider the platform to be a virtual bookshelf, my book just landed on a really big book shelf.  Hopefully this week it will ship out to more places. 

I get discouraged at how long this process seems to take but then I realize I could still be e-mailing query letters and snail mailing query letters to agents and waiting for rejection notice's.  I could still be unpublished, and unknown.  Considering that I realize that as of today 88 people have downloaded my book to read at some time in the future.  Two people have posted reviews of my book on Smashwords, and one person wrote a wonderful review of my book as a comment on my blog.  I have two actual sales (for money) on Smashwords and three on Amazon, one of which is in the UK!  So I tell myself that I am still way ahead of the unpublished, getting known by those who have downloaded my book and are giving it a try.

I am very curious to see what happens with the sale of my book as it gets distributed to more major sites through Smashwords Premium Distribution.  I have read about authors having breakout's in different outlets at different times.  I know that all comes down to who is talking about what books they are currently reading, reviews written on different sites about said books, and promotional bits being done by the author.  I will keep everybody posted as I find out for myself what happens.

One final bit for those that are curious about my experiment concerning naming one of my posts Free Nude Pictures.  The hits to my blog stayed the same all that day until between 11:30 and 2:00AM the following day when the hits spiked to somewhere between 75 and 80 hits.  Then everything went back to normal.  So I imagine on that evening there were a few frustrated porn surfers who keep getting directed to some lame site about some guys first novel.  Oh well.  I was curious, it had the results I was looking for as far as does the title of the blog attract a certain criteria from the search engines? Yes it does, and that knowledge is helpful and good to know.  It also shows what a few people were looking for between 11:30 and 2:00 that evening, I am sure they where sadly disappointed.  I have to say it gives me a little chuckle when I think about some poor shmuck clicking through my blog wondering what the Hell!

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