Everything Is Awesome (Sort Of)

My wife and I took the children to see The Lego Movie last weekend. Child B is the one who frightens more easily, so of course it was Child A who spent the entire movie in my lap. Right before the end of the movie, Child A decided she couldn’t take it anymore and wanted to leave. My wife took her out of the theater. At that moment, Child B (who had not shown any ill effects from the action and violence in the movie despite being too afraid to watch Thomas the Tank Engine because of the occasional train crashes) became agitated–not because of the movie, but because her mother hadn’t taken her coat with her. So she had to leave, and I had to go with her, and I have no idea how the movie ended, and now I’m going to have to pay to see the ending at some point, and I am only pointing this out to say that everything is not awesome all the time. Sometimes things stink. Sometimes you are right in the middle of multiple different things and you have to deal with it because that’s how things are.

I have three different things going on right now, and here’s the status of all of them:

1. Promotional stuff for RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY. The 99 cent promotion that I did through BookBub was over two weeks ago. I would like very much to tell you how well I did, but the problem is that I just don’t know. I can say that RoYWD did very nicely on Barnes & Noble for the first time. I took RoYWD off KDP Select in August 2013, and hadn’t had a single sale on B&N ever until late February 2014. After the BookBub promotion, RoYWD went into the top 100 on the Nook list, which was a nice thing. It went into the top 500 on Amazon’s e-book list. I even got a few sales on Kobo, which I hadn’t done before, and one on Smashwords. (I have no idea why I do so badly on Smashwords; I think it’s kind of a cultural thing.)

The problem, though, is that I have no idea whatsoever how well I did at Apple. I’ve sold one book there, that I know of, in February. For whatever reason, I wasn’t able to get a merchant account set up through Apple, so I can’t sell RoYWD there directly. I was able (after a copious amount of elbow grease) to get Smashwords to ship the book to Apple, which is fine even though it allows Smashwords to take a cut. But what I didn’t realize is that Apple only reports to Smashwords once a month, and so I have no idea if I only sold a couple of books there or if I sold a lot. I’d like to know one way or another so I know whether I should market that channel or not.

2. The audio book for RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY. It’s almost done. I am listening to it now, in dribs and drabs. At first, I couldn’t listen to it–couldn’t listen to the stuff I wrote myself. (I don’t listen to audio books anyway–no good reason why, I just don’t.)

I started to kind of get into it, and when I listened to something I had written that I knew I had just nailed, I enjoyed it quite a bit. But when I heard something that I had written that came off clunky, or a place where I had a mistake or a continuity error, it really sucked. (I won’t tell you about the biggest error, but I didn’t catch it, and neither did any of the editors, and so far not any readers–although one reviewer did spot a different error in the same chapter that I am still embarrassed about.)

If you’re writing, you owe it to yourself to listen to your audiobook. You will learn a lot.

Anyway, I don’t have a date on specifically when the audiobook will come out, but it should not be too much longer.

3. WREATHED. I am about halfway through the latest round of edits. I am about at the point where I have to rearrange the structure a bit and move some pieces around, and I am not really thrilled about that, but it isn’t a patch on what I have to do about the ending. The entire thing is about 70,000 words, despite all the edits, and it is probable that the additional chapter or two I have to add will bring that up a bit. I am hopeful that the editing process will be done by the end of April, but it may be quicker than that.

So. Is everything awesome? I don’t know. It may be, later, after I’ve had a chance to work through everything I need to do with these projects. I still only have a minimal amount of time to do self-publishing in the day (and much less time to do blogging). One day, I expect to have another book out, and an audio book, and maybe an upgrade to this page, and time to work on the Depressing Country Songs project, and who knows what else. But that time is not now. Much work lies ahead. Ogden Nash once wrote a poem about “Duty,” and complained that she wasn’t a “cutie,” and he was right about that.