March has not been a good month, thanks to a pile of personal things that the average person doesn’t care about.  I will say that the most annoying is that I have hurt my neck, which limits my computer time. It’s gotten better, but it  still hurts if I sit here for more than an hour/hour and a half. Needless to say this is cutting in to EVERYTHING!

despite that, I have finally gotten all the notes/comments from the beta readers and the Mighty Ed compiled together into one document (yay!) I need to cut out around 5,000 words, so there are a couple of scenes that may get changed (I can always move the events to a later book) and one on an airplane I may delete and just “tell” later. I know, I know, a writer should “show not tell” but there’s a point, and 106,000 words exceeds that point!

On a random side note, I have suddenly started to sell on Amazon after a several month stall. I’m not usually into sharing sales numbers, but I will say I was selling maybe 20 a month on Amazon since late 2011 and suddenly it hopped up to 158 (not counting the 21 returns) in two weeks. Why, you ask. What amazing sales tactic did I come up with?

None.

I simply have the good fortune (or misfortune, depending on your views) of having a book with a similar title as another. 50 Shades of Grey, the new “indy-to-traditional” sensation that was originally written as a twilight fan-fic (more on this in another post), is being haled as “mommy-porn” and is selling like mad. Much of the media coverage on it stresses the Twilight angle, so one would assume it has vampires in it, only it doesn’t. So the poor, misguided souls who go to Amazon and search for “Shades of Gray vampires” find me (in slot 1 or 2 depending on how they spelled grey/gray) instead. (Side note: If you do a search for simply “Shades of Gray”, you won’t find me until page two. This illustrates the importance of tags).

On one hand this is good. It’s 158 sales, 30 of which went on to buy book two, and 21 of which went on to buy book three. However it’s also BAD because of those 158 people, most – if not all – were NOT looking for that book, which means it did not meet their expected criteria (hence 21 returns). And though it hasn’t netted a bad review yet (or a good one, for that matter), it very easily can.

Why? When customers are confused or don’t get what they expected, they strike back by leaving angry reviews. For instance, I have a freebie called 101 Tips. The description clearly says “this is a list of 101 tips, nothing more.” However, because there used to be a three page intro, people STILL expected it to really be a book with a story, plot, etc. When it wasn’t, they left one star reviews and the complaint, “this is not a book! It’s a list!”.  True, if someone takes the time to read the description AND the review they might think “Duh, it SAYS it’s a list” and discount the review, but few people do all of that work. They glance at the star rating and if the star ratings are low, they skip off the page without giving your work a chance. (on another side note this is also why it is important to market your book to the right audience.)

Regardless, good or bad, there’s nothing I can do . I had the title first, so I’m not going to change it, and I’m not going to add a note in the description that says “This is not the BDSM book you are looking for. You will probably be disappointed”. It does show though, that no matter how much you double check your titles BEFORE you publish, someone may come along and snag it – especially if you consider that out of the books that rank higher than mine under the Shades of Gray search, only three were published before mine, and none of them involved vampires OR romance (two are Civil War dramas).

It’s closing in on “heating pad” time, so quickly I want to thank the awesome Stephannie Beman for bestowing upon me the Lovely Blog Award (yay!) If you don’t know she is not only an author, and blogger, but she is also a cover artist, so check out her site.

And now to share the awards goodness!

Ang

Donna

Juli

Sue

Lindsay Downs

Barbara G. Tarn

Reena Jacobs

Dawn Colclasure

Barb K.

LC Cooper

I don’t generally use this space for personal blogs (those go over at Ramblings from the Darkness), but as Barb was kind enough to give me the Kreative Award (yay!) I am obliged to write ten facts about me that you don’t know.

Should be pretty easy.

1. I am a Roxette fan. Yes, there is just something about sugary Swedish pop that makes me giddy. And Per is pretty hot, too. Yeah, I know he’s old enough to be my father, but he’s not lookin’ too bad for his age!
2. I have not had a chance to work on book four in several weeks. I am hoping to get caught up on my other work and get back to it in a week or so, though. *crossing fingers*
3. I am absolutely lousy at “time”. If I say something will take five minutes, it takes an hour. If I say ten minutes, it’s half the day. If I say a week, it’s more like a month. This is because when I am doing things I loose all sense of time, and so I have no idea how long anything takes and just guess by how long it “felt like”. (Hint: I have been working pretty much non stop for ten hours now, I know this because the clock tells me so, however I would guess it might have been five…)
4. I can’t swim because I am too afraid of drowning to ever learn. I chalk this up to a past life.
5. I have a bad temper.
6. The only thing I have in common with my protagonist is the “don’t think about it” philosophy. If something is upsetting, simply put it out of your mind and move on. Not always the best way, but it works for me (and has worked for many a gangster’s girlfriend, too, I imagine 😉 )
7. Speaking of this philosophy, I say it is all Amadala‘s fault that Anakin turned into Darth Vadar. If she had just A- stayed home like a good, heavily pregnant wife (seriously, I’m hugely pregnant and I KNOW Obi-wan is after my husband, so I go running to him?!? Where’s the logic!?!?) or B- nodded along when he started in about  ruling the galaxy and then had a quiet talk with him later about acceptable behaviors and not acceptable behaviors (for example, killing little jedi-lets is not acceptable) think how much different their universe coulda been? And how much hotter Darth Vadar would have been…
8. I’ve been told I have questionable morals (see above).
9. I have also been called a chauvinist (again, see #7).
10. I’m a huge geek. Oh, you already knew that. Okay then, um… I have recently gone on a bread strike after finding out the L-cysteine, a common dough conditioner in commercial bread products, is usually extracted from either human hair or pig hair. YUCK! So Now I am checking all the labels before I buy. Strange? Maybe, but it just grosses me out.

And that looks like 10, so I am cutting it off here 🙂 And now for the awardees… (that’s not a real word, but I like it anyway!)

Juli, Sassy Sue, Jonathan aka Jissilly, Donna and Stephannie.