What an Amazing Year!

It’s hard to know where to start with this bit of news. A year ago this month, I noticed Wool, a little story of mine, was out selling all of my other books and garnering an unusual number of rave reviews. During the month of October, I watched it notch upward and upward. I remember staying up until midnight on the 31st hoping to see a book of mine sell 1,000 copies in a single month. At 35 cents per book, that would be $350 in profit! From writing! That was more money than I made in a week at the bookstore!

At the time, any dreams of quitting my day job and writing for a living were impossible to consider. No way. All I could think of was that I had thirty or forty Amazon reviewers clamoring for more to read. I was getting emails from people demanding more from this world. On November 1st, I started writing the second Wool story. If you’ve read the first book, you’ll know how challenging a task this was. Somehow, I managed to not upset too many people with the direction I took things.

Three months later, I had to quit my day job. The demands on my time were too much. I was selling in a day what I had gone gaga over selling in all of October. In January of this year, I wrote Wool 5, which is the length of a novel at 63,000 words. Over the next few months, I wrote First Shift, another novel. And then I, Zombie. I’m now working on what will be my fourth novel of 2012. Life is a complete blur. And then something like this comes along to put that year and this journey into perspective.

Kindle Book Review is one of the great go-to websites for discovering awesome reads. A few months ago, I found out Wool had been nominated for KBR’s Indie Book of the Year Award. It was the highest honor to make the list of incredible semifinalists, to see Wool listed alongside these other top indie books. I never dreamed of winning. This is an award chosen by a panel of readers and reviewers, and surely there was something better in that pile of awesome ebooks. I’m not supposed to win annual awards. It just doesn’t fit. I still see myself shelving books for a living and writing on the side. I still remember screen-capping Wool at #98 in Science Fiction > Anthologies on Amazon, terrified the book would slip out of the top 100 of that category and never be seen again.

And now this. This is such an honor. Such a highlight of my life, much less my writing career. It’s been an awesome twelve months, and I thank all of you for making it so. I think the best way to express my gratitude might be to punish you all with a new version of the Omnibus. I can include all the changes Random House made, the new chapter, the added scenes, and this big, old, honking gold star slathered on the front!

Just look at it!

And congrats to all the other winners and to the semi-finalists who likely deserved this more than me. The universe will correct for this eventually. It must.