I told my friend Tim that I spent my afternoon engaged in a task that should best be described as vainglorious. That made me realize that I maybe wasn’t 100% sure of the definition of vainglorious, so I looked it up, and yep, I was using it right.

I realized this morning — I don’t know why — that Ghosts might have been downloaded over 100,000 times. I don’t keep good track of the numbers. I make sure to pay my taxes, but apart from that, I try not to watch. But it’s free and it’s stayed pretty close to the top of the metaphysical bestseller list on Amazon for a good long time now and… well, yeah. I thought it was possible. And honestly, pretty cool if it had been. Sort of terrifying, too, of course, given my initial expectations & goals (I think I wanted to sell an ambitious hundred copies), but nonetheless, cool.

So, this afternoon, I was in a mood–a bad one–and I decided to add up the numbers. What a pain. I had to open spreadsheets that I’d never looked at, download some that I’d never downloaded, organize numbers, remember how to use Excel, but once I’d started, I persisted. And, um, yeah, as of April 29th, A Gift of Ghosts had been downloaded over 150,000 times on Amazon and the international Amazons. Add some rough numbers from Smashwords (that might include A Gift of Thought), plus Draft2Digital, and Kobo, and the total is over 200,000.

Tomorrow, not today, I’m going to add up the totals for the other books. They’re much lower, of course — free is an awfully effective price. But I bet sometime this year, maybe over a quarter million of my titles will be downloaded and that… well, makes me blush. Quite literally — and not the literally that means figuratively, I mean that my cheeks are hot and pink as I write. But I’m pretty sure I’m blushing with delight.