In the middle of the night...

The dog is driving me insane.

Insane.

I have no idea what her problem is, why she won't settle down, why she wants to go outside yet again at 2:30 when she was last out at midnight, why she insists on wandering the house with a click-clack of tiny claws on the floor.

And I can't settle either. The bed isn't comfortable, I wish I'd done laundry, no pillow feels exactly right and somehow my heart is racing as if I had too much caffeine. I didn't, though. Sushi dinner at Arigato -- no caffeine involved. I didn't even have chocolate for dessert.

So I let the dog out and I flip open the iPad. I'll play a little Pocket Frogs while I wait for the dog to be finished. But first, yes, I will check the Amazon ranking for Ghosts, because it was at 20 on the Books > Romance > Fantasy & Futuristic list when I first tried to go to sleep at 10 PM and even though it's probably dropped off, looking at it on the very first page of the list is gratifying. That's a book list, not even an e-book list.

And then, yeah, this...

Wasted day -- not

I didn't exactly waste the day. Yesterday, I mean. I might have wasted today. Eh, actually, I made a bunch of possible covers for Ghosts, signed up for CreateSpace, submitted my files -- okay, I didn't waste today either.

But yesterday, the day I might have wasted by making Ghosts free on Amazon without doing anything to tell anyone that it was free? Not wasted.

12,286.

That's how many people downloaded Ghosts yesterday.

I have no idea why. Perhaps a $4.99 book looks like a better value and more worth downloading than a less expensive book? (That was part of my theory.) Perhaps my reviews have hit some point of critical mass where people actually believe them? Perhaps my blurb -- which is a little more typical although still not exactly revealing -- gives enough information to make readers feel safe in what they're getting? Honestly, I have no idea.

But twelve thousand people will get to meet Akira and Zane in the next few weeks, if they remember and if they feel so inclined and if they actually are readers and not just downloaders of every free text out there, and that's...well, exciting and scary and exciting again. It's sort of like having twelve thousand potential English teachers grading your work and it's also sort of like having twelve thousand potential new friends. I'm quite sure that if I ever do have a legitimately best-selling book, not just a temporarily best-giving-away book, chatting with readers will become my drug of choice.

Anyway, I got my first one-star review today, which was initially anguishing and then almost a relief. Whew, I got that over with. But the reviewer was just mad about the price changing at the moment between reading the Look Inside (free) and hitting download (4.99) and I totally sympathize with that. I think actually that made it even better -- she didn't actually hate the book, she was just mad. I hope that the experience will make me a little tougher for when the next one-star review shows up.

Today is the free day

I was not terribly specific on my last post: today, March 2nd, is the final free day for A Gift of Ghosts. If you haven't reviewed it, today would be a great day to post a review. Or if there are people you'd recommend it to, again, today would be a good day. I'm at school all day, with two presentations, treatment plans, clients -- it's going to be a long day. It'd be nice to come home to a successful book giveaway!

I admit, though, I have low expectations. The problem with needing to use the day before my time ran out is that this week was/is midterms. I spent my time much more focused on school than on making sure the free book sites knew there was one more free book in the daily thousands of freebies. C'est la vie. It seems to me -- anecdotally, at least -- that people who get the book for free are much less likely to ever read it. It just sits on their Kindles, invisible amongst the multitude of other freebies. So I'm not going to feel badly about my own laziness, even if I have wasted the day.

Last free day for Ghosts

I'd always planned to publish Ghosts on other platforms once the 90 days of KDP Select were up and it turns out that they conveniently finish right in the middle of spring break next week. Handy, since it means I'll have time to work on the formatting and on creating a print-ready cover.

I'm going to use Create Space for the print version and Smashwords for the other e-versions. I think I'm probably competent enough to publish on all platforms by myself, but the Smashwords contract lets you stop publishing with them when you feel like it. If I reach a place where I'm making so much money (ha, ha, ha) that I feel badly about the 10% that's going to Smashwords, I can pull the book off that service, make my own editions, and publish them individually. But at the moment the 10% royalties they'll get seems as if it'll be a reasonably good deal.

Unfortunately, I've discovered why people all use the annoying 99 cent prices: Apple requires it. You'd think if they were going to be such control freaks, they could be control freaks with round numbers, but no. So I need to change my price to a 99 cent number if I want to be in the Apple bookstore. If I hadn't already been debating whether an unusual price forces potential buyers to think and potentially loses them, I'd be more annoyed than I am. But so it goes. I will join the ranks of the 99 cent pricers.

In fact, I already did. Since my time in KDP Select is coming to an end, I need to use my last free day. I wanted to experiment with the blurb again, but I decided I'd experiment with pricing, too. Unfortunately, it sort of messes up the experiment -- I'll never know whether the changes were the result of the blurb or the price -- but unless I  keep Ghosts in KDP for another 90 days, this is my last chance to try these out. Well, last chance with a free book. Anyway, I wrote a "traditional" blurb -- the kind that most people use, no quotes, no parentheses, no authorial chatting, and more or less a summary of the plot. A little more less than more. And I changed the price to $4.99. The $4.99 price is mostly because of the free day: I'm curious to see whether I get more downloads with a higher price, because it will look like a better deal. 

Immediate result: a dead stop to sales. I'd like to blame it on the blurb, but it's probably a result of the price change. But it will be interesting to see what happens next week, after the free day. That'll be the true test. The last time I changed the blurb I added details but also made it very first person -- me, the author, chatting with an imaginary reader. That time the post-free day results were terrific, averaging 19 sales a day for the week after, before steadily dropping off. If instead sales stay steady at nothing for a couple of weeks, I'll change the blurb back to quirky. With much happiness, I admit. I'll feel like my quirkiness is being validated!

Alas, however, the $3.50 price point is probably gone for good.