So here’s what’s up in the Hartness-land on a Friday.
Happy to be home in Charlotte after working out of our Atlanta office this week. Yes, not all of us self-published authors are superstars who sit around chatting and posting monkey videos online, some of us still have day jobs. But you can fix that by buying more books (and more and more of you have been, so thanks!). So yeah, I got home yesterday and hung out at home last night watching my Panthers suck against the Bungles and catching up on Season 2 of Glee (don’t judge). I think the Panthers could be better this season than last (can’t be much worse!), but they need to start Derek Anderson for at least a little while and let Newton get his confidence and skills more NFL-ready. The kid isn’t ready, and in a win-now league he could get wrecked by a bad start. I hope not, but it could happen. Look at last year with Jimmy Clausen, or David Carr, or Jamarcus Russel (ok, probably a bad example there, but you get my point). Newton will be an amazing player someday, but today ain’t that day.
I’ll be playing a little poker this evening, and I’ve really missed hanging with the guys and flinging cards around. Hopefully I can recoup some of my nasty losses from a few weeks ago, or at least hold my own.
Book sales have been great – the release of Knight Moves has gone better than I had ever hoped. To date the new book has sold over 800 copies, which is way better than my hope of 500 in the first month, so I’m ecstatic about that. It’ll unfortunately be a while before I get back to the Black Knight boys, because I have at least two other books to knock out before I get to Volume 4. But I’m amazingly pleased with the first month sales of the book, especially since everyone tells me August is the slowest month for e-book sales. So I’m really interested to see what happens in the fall!
Next week I’ll be in Atlanta for Dragon*Con, which I’m very excited about. There are a few people I’ll be autograph-stalking, including James Marsters and Stan Lee. And I just saw that they added Bill Sienkiewicz, who was one of my favorite artists back in his New Mutants days. I’ll also be going to a bunch of panels, readings and parties. If you’re there and want to hook up, hit me up via a Twitter DM (@johnhartness). That’ll probably be the best way to find me.
Once I’m done with Dragon, it’s on revisions of Return to Eden: Genesis. I think I’ve figured out the big problem with the book, now I just need to make myself sit down and do the edits. It’s a huge change/rewrite, so I’ve gotta make myself remember how to eat an elephant – one bite at a time. That’ll probably take the rest of September, then I hope to have it out by November 1. When it’s out I’ll spend November and December working on Copycat, then get to Black Knight Vol. 4 the beginning of 2012. That’s unless a shiny object catches my eye, of course :).
