LOKI'S DAUGHTERS is an Amazon Best Seller!

So, an update on the last post, when LOKI'S DAUGHTERS was free on Amazon. By the time it was finally removed from the Free Reads list, it had downloads just shy of 50,000 copies, in about 13 days. And then it moved to the Amazon and Kindle top Sellers list!

Its first re-listing, or the first I saw since I was out with the guys to see Harry Potter, was at #10,072. Really disappointing. But I should have realized that was just a starting point. It quickly moved to #1472, then #375, then up to #271. The next morning it started at #171 and moved rapidly up to #103, and then onto the Top 100 Sellers, getting as high as #90. Since then it's been lurking in the mid 100s range and gained some this morning to be at #140. But I'm pretty sure a lot of its potential market was sapped by staying on the Free Reads for so long,

All in all, that's fine. It's a book I always loved and so I love it when new readers find it and love it. And even more so when they let me know it caused them to go looking for my other books.

Right now, yes I'm still being a bad blogger (almost wrote blooger, which seems oddly fitting). There  's not enough time in the day. I barely make it to Face Book and forget Twitter regularly. It seem so me when I'm being very productive with writing and cover work, that's an inward thinking process, and it's hard to shift back out to the outer, more social networking process.

Here's what's happening:
1. Amazon kicked back The Mudlark for bad formatting. Duh, didn't we have it fixed exactly right yet again? I saw it and even read through on the Kindle again. It was fine. Then suddenly it has all those crazy double indents again. This time we got some hexa-digital software and went through it line by line, and there are NO hidden codes, no thing that could possibly be triggering those ugly nasty double indents. The book looks just perfect with every other format except Amazon's Kindle.

But this time someone wised me up, and pointed to html format. At first I gagged- you know, the whole eye-rollling head-pounding "No! Don't make me learn it!" thing. But it's easy to just save as an html web page. In Word, it's called "Web Page", and you do it exactly like saving in rtf format. Then you put it into the Kindle Generator in exactly the same way you would a Word doc file. You just choose the file from your computer files with an extension of .htm


I hope this works. It looks great in the preview, and I went through the whole thing. This isn't totally adequate, and now I'm finding that in spite of my desire to avoid learning html, it's what I'm going to have to learn next if I want my books to be really professional. Funny thing, that the tool I really needed was right there all along. But it took the really good explanations of Guido Henkel  for me to understand why and how to do it.  I DO NOT WANT TO DO THIS! My brain says it hurts, just thinking about it! But I'm telling you, if you want a really professional book that looks great in any ebook format, this is what you have to do. Go check him out. I'll blog more about my learning experience as I go along.

2. I'm still not finished getting FAERIE in publishable state. I'm disappointed but I can't put it out until the last problems are resolved. While all books have problems, I've found those are the places where I have real opportunities to make a book great instead of just good. So it's best to keep looking for the things a book needs to be unique instead of taking the first reasonable way to finish it. I hate putting it down again, but other things now must be done first.

3. I have to finish BELOVED STRANGER (was IN THE ARMS OF A STRANGER), which is aimed at an invitation-only series of novellas through a publisher. I may still self-publish it instead if I think it would work better for me, but I'm still aiming to get this book done and sent off by August 14.

4. And cover art is really keeping me hopping. I'm going to have to cut back on that, even though I love doing it. I've been getting a lot of multiple requests from authors, and often they want to bring out several books at once. Sometimes I can't accommodate them. But it is fun to develop a series style for their books.