R is home from school, which makes me happy, happy.
Except that because he’s 6’4″ and the daybed available for sleeping on is not, I’m sleeping in the living room on the small bed. This would be fine/is fine, except that Bartleby, who is the smallest creature in the house (well, bar any unknown creatures like spiders or beetles), is a bed hog. I cannot count how many times I woke up last night feeling like there was no room for me, only to discover that somehow the thirteen-pound chihuahua had angled his way into half the space and Zelda and I were curled up in what was left.
I would try to move him back but he sleeps like a log in the water. You push him and he rolls closer. Whenever I would finally give up and get up enough to lift him into a better position, it meant entirely re-arranging the bed. He finally wound up sprawled across the pillow like a cat, with Zelda and me in the remaining 3/4 of the bed.
R will be home for three weeks, which means B is going to have to get a little more reasonable about sharing the bed. I’d say I’d leave him on the ground, but past experience has taught him that if he makes a low rumble on the ground closest to my head for long enough, I will give in and pick him up. He’s trained me well. But we’ll figure it out, I’m sure.
Yesterday, Ghosts was included in a mailing from themidlist.com. The download numbers were great for a site that doesn’t change for advertising: 695 copies downloaded during the day. I spent money this summer to have Ghosts automatically posted to multiple sites ($15 for 32 sites) and didn’t get results from any of them that were noticeable, plus $30 on Digital Book Today for about 180 downloads, so the midlist results are pretty impressive, comparatively. (Probably I should be writing this on my business blog instead of here — c’est la vie.) Anyway, the weird thing was Amazon’s sales ranks. The sales rank didn’t rise during the day for hours. Instead it kept getting lower. My fascination meant a ton of wasted time while I looked at the sales rank and tried to calculate the math. If 300 downloads meant that my rank dropped 3000 numbers, how many free downloads was Amazon getting? I felt like I was discovering some fascinating business news–Amazon free downloads reaching an amazing peak–but when I came home from bringing C back to her mom (at 8 or so), Ghosts’ rank had skyrocketed to about #280 in the free store. It’s dropped back to 300+ now, so that was its peak, and the numbers were just a glitch or delay in Amazon’s reporting.
Next week I’m running my first ever promotion on A Lonely Magic. Now that it finally has a new cover, I’m doing the Kindle Countdown Deal and lowering the price to .99 for a week. I’ve paid for one ad, $20 on Booksends, so I’m not exactly going crazy with the promotion. But since I haven’t finished writing the sequel yet, there’s no hurry.
Speaking of writing, I should go do some. This feels like writing, but it’s not the kind that might ever let me stop feeling anxious about my mortgage payment, so it probably doesn’t count.
But R’s home. Yay!
wow I hope all those free downloads result in lots of people buying the rest of the series. I loved all of it so far!
That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? An indie co-op did a bunch of math, though, and determined that the free to paid rate was about 1%. I’ve generally done a little better than that, I think (I haven’t done the math), but 700 free downloads won’t turn into more than 50 sales, most likely. Which is still very nice, of course, but not the kind of nice that stops me from thinking about the need for a real job.