April is gonna be awesome!

"The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year." - Mark Twain

So, lots of April Fools jokes this year.  Konrath pulled off a good one: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2012/04/i-take-everything-back.html.  There were others as well, of course.  Blizzard, the creator of the massive game that was swiping up all of my time before I found writing, always gets in the spirit; this year one of their chief human characters and a primary leader of that race, Jaina Proudmore, came with new "trailer park" artwork and tattoos.  Just, luckily, for that one day. 

April 1st is also, of course, the date I published Ascension.  Well, sort of.  It's the date I submitted the files and the artwork to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform and to Createspace for the paperback.  It took Amazon a day to review the files and put the book up for sale, and the same timing applied to Createspace, so the actual date of publication is NOT April Fool's Day.  Not that it matters a whole lot, of course. 

I'm off to a good start, at least.  I also re-worked Cataclysm to change formatting and add a table of contents, and I repriced it to see if a more mainstream price point would mean more sales.  So far, a solid performance.  I've already sold more books in April than I did in February--not surprising, really, since I have twice the number of books available now, but it's still fun to point to sales that are trending upward. 

I think that the most important thing is that I'm far more on point than I was in the beginning.  I'm a better writer, to be certain, in part thanks to experience at the job and also hugely thanks to readers' comments.  But I'm also figuring this bookselling thing out, slowly by slowly. 

Incidentally, there are lots of books out there that tell you how to sell books.  I'm not sure at this point that I'd recommend buying any of them.  Experience is the best teacher out there.  I read a bunch before I published anything, which is the main reason it took a while to bring Cataclysm back out.  Didn't help, because I had no context for the lessons I read. 

Oh, and I was interviewed today on a wonderful blog.  Go check it out: http://www.heart-of-romance.blogspot.com/ . 

-TOSK