The Business after the Writing

After the Writing the Real Work Begins

My novel Suitcase Charlie was published 2 months ago.

Since then I've become addicted to following the rise and fall of my sales numbers.  I get up every morning and the first thing I do is check the numbers.  At night before going to sleep, I do the same thing.

Authorrise, a company that provides this info for free, tells me my rank.

Usually it's dropping.  In fact for the last 3 days it's been going down, from 75,000 to 150,000 to 400,000.  A sad slide.  I look at my copies of Suitcase Charlie sitting on my desk, and I shake my head.

This afternoon I got an email from Authorrise.  My rank spiked.  This is a good thing.  Spiking means I've had some sales and my book is getting readers.

In fact, my rank "jumped 227,311 spots from  #395,873 to #168,562."

When I first got these spike notes, I was ecstatic.   I would jump up and shout, "Holy Smokes!"  I'd break out the champagne, even share a glass with my wife Linda​.

Now I'm less ecstatic, still happy but no longer crazy, no longer "doing the mambo" ecstatic.

Part of this comes from the realization/discovery what these numbers mean.  I've learned that I can go to my author account at Amazon and look at my sales figures.

A 227,311 spike?

Maybe 2 books, maybe 3.

All of this is interesting to me.  I've published 4 books of poems and almost never thought about my sales or my rank or whether people were or weren't reading the book.  I guess I never felt that poetry had much of a market so never thought of it in terms of sales.

Prose writing has robbed me of my innocence.

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My noir, hardboiled, true to life detective novel Suitcase Charlie is available as a Kindle and a paperback.  Buy it, please!

Just click HERE.