I missed my Friday post yesterday. Sorry about that. I kinda forgot what day it was until it was late, and then it didn’t happen. Anyway, here’s what’s up in the land of Hartness.
I wrote a short story and submitted it to a magazine. We’ll see how that goes. It’s a stand-alone story that grew out of a lunchroom conversation. If it gets 5 rejections, I’ll self-pub it and you can read it then. This is part of my ongoing plan to get enough SFWA credits to join. I’ll be writing more stand-alone stories and submitting them around while I’m doing my novels and my Bubba stories. Don’t forget, Ballet of Blood is available now! At $1.49 it’s a little more expensive than my other shorts, but at 9,000 words it’s half again as long. Voodoo Children, the first Bubba short story, is one of my best sellers for the month, so that’s pretty interesting.
What makes a best-seller for me, you ask? Well, I didn’t intend for this to be a numbers post, but we can go there. Let’s start with the fact that my sales are off by 50% from the high point this summer. A lot of that has to do with an Amazon algorithm shift, which kicked me square in the nuts, but I’m still making plenty of cash. Here are my numbers so far this month –
Black Knight Chronicles –
Hard Day’s Knight – 214
Knight Moves – 200
Back in Black – 175 (I have NO idea why Book #3 consistently outperforms Book #2, but it does)
Black Magic Woman – 90
Movie Knight – Crazy numbers since it’s been free this month – 1,247
The Chosen is plugging along at 149 copies, just a little below its average pace of 10 copies per day.
Genesis has started off more slowly than I thought, only doing 24 copies so far. But hopefully we’ll see some residual effects next week of my blog tour.
Like I said, Voodoo Children is blowing me away, moving 159 copies this month
And Ballet of Blood has shipped 7 so far. There are a few other assorted things out there, like my holiday story The Christmas Lights. It’s sold 7 copies this month and I’m just as thrilled with that as I could be. It’s a little litfic story that I put up there hoping to sell a few copies ever. It sells five or so a month, and that’s just brilliant with me.
I’ve done a ton of work this week on Red Dirt Review and Ebook Deals Today, the other two sites I actively run. RDR is an online literary magazine that updates every Monday and Thursday. You can check it out online, via RSS, or you can subscribe to it on your Kindle. I’ll also be publishing print and ebook anthologies from the submissions to RDR quarterly.
Ebook Deals Today is a place where authors can feature their bargain ebooks, so you can go there to get daily deals. All ebooks will have at least half a dozen positive reviews on Amazon and be $6.99 or less. So check it out if you’re looking for a good deal on a good read. You can follow the site at @ebookdeals2day on twitter.
Then I spent a couple of hours today updating the ebook files for The Chosen to reflect the revisions the book has gone through. I once again worked with Lynn O’Dell and her team of editor ninjas at Red Adept Editing Services to clean up tense issues, word choice issues, repetition issues and mommy issues. Okay, they didn’t really help me with mommy issues. That’s what tequila is for. But if you haven’t read The Chosen, I now once again recommend it. I’ve spent a lot of time with those people recently, and I like them again. They’re fun. It’s worth a read.
Once I got that done, I reformatted the print edition of Hard Day’s Knight and got it uploaded. I’m down to just three hard copies left with the old cover, so I wanted to repaginate the whole thing and get copies with the new cover on it for my December signings. We’ll see how that works out. Tomorrow I’ll probably spend some time doing the same thing to Back in Black. I have a lot of copies of that one on hand, but when people look at the big canvas print of my new HDK cover, and the Knight Moves cover, they want Back in Black with the new cover. So I might be having a paperback sale here on the site after Thanksgiving. Keep your eyes open!
