Trying to follow my own advice, and it's not easy

"Give it time."

It seems like I've said that a lot lately, especially when talking to myself. In spite of self-publishing 6 books this year, I still look at my sales reports from Lulu, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble's Pubit, and Amazon's Kindle sites on a daily basis. Don't get me wrong, I'm never discouraged by what I see there. I cheer every sale. I've had enough goals in my personal and professional lives to know that goals, big goals and little goals, are achieved a piece at a time. Small forward progress adds up.

I set up a Google alert. If "David J. Steele" appears on the internet, Google tells me about it. It's kind of cool. It's also good to know I'm not the only David J. Steele in the world--and I get to keep an eye on those other guys. (Insert wink here.)

"Give it time."

Today I saw that my name and "Storm Clouds Over Sexton" appeared on someone's blog. I've never heard of the individual. I investigated. To my delight, I see that her blog has an advertisement placed there by Smashwords for the third book in the Sexton Chronicles series. I'm excited. Smashwords pays me a royalty for each of my ebooks they sell, and apparently if someone buys my book from an ad placed by Smashwords, they'll receive a portion of the price and I'll get my royalty.

In other news, Authors Den, a promotion site for ebooks and self-published books has launched a print on demand service. I tried to publish my books on it, and after a frustrating day have decided to let them develop their program a little more before I try it again. The server was unreliable and I didn't like the cover program. So...if you should happen to look there and see a Sexton book--the one with the blurb that says "don't buy this"--take my advice: don't buy it. *Authorsden doesn't seem to give the author the power to delete a published work. Having said that...if you buy the book I retitled "123" with the blurb on the back that says "Don't buy this"--you'll get a copy of Sexton.

Shoot--I might have just sold copies of this by having a blurb on the back that says "Don't buy this." We'll call it reverse-marketing.

Have a great night. I'm going to do something productive today--like write another chapter in Sexton Sand.

I'm excited about a couple of things...

I'll mark this first one in my calendar because it makes me happy for reasons I don't fully understand: Someone, somewhere in the United Kingdom bought Green Goblin for their Kindle. The Sexton books have been up on Amazon UK for a couple of months with no sales, and I was beginning to wonder if any of my stuff would sell on Amazon there. I guess it shouldn't surprise me that Green Goblin was my first sale in the UK. They're waaaay ahead of the US in terms of recognizing and treating Wernicke-Korsakoff disease.

I'm also excited, for different reasons, about Smashwords.com. Smashwords publishes eBooks in all formats. I uploaded all three (to date) Sexton Chronicles books as well as Green Goblin, and Smashwords converted them to epub, kindle, Sony Reader, Palm Reader, PDF, RTF, and other formats I don't remember at the moment. You can buy/download books from there and read samples there. 

The other thing Smashwords did for me is made the Sexton books easy to find with a simple Google search. The books appear with all kinds of URLs that lead to free samples, and ultimately to the books. Very, very cool.

If you have an electronic reader, take some time to check out www.smashwords.com And it won't hurt my feelings any if you buy one, or two, or four of mine while you're there!