Dichroic Reflections

I had the most exciting thing happen today. I woke up, checked my Amazon book sales page the way I used to check work email in the morning back before I retired, and found I’d sold something like 12 books overnight! (After the initial publishing excitement died down, it was one or two on a good day. Still happy with that.)

When I got around to looking at Facebook, it turned out that someone had posted about my book on Linzi Day’s “Voracious Readers” group on FaceBook. I’d mentioned her Gretna Green series as something that my MC Macrina would want to add to her library’s shelf of books with sentient house tropes. (The hilarious thing is that she’d written “I’m so chuffed for Linzi!” as if I were a big deal. 🙂 I wrote a comment making it clear that it’s very much the other way around – while I was writing I happened to reread her series and learned a lot from those as well as her website and newsletter, on how the books interlock, the way she interacts with her readers, her publishing process and so on. )

I’d already got some sales and very nice comments from Linzi’s group because right after I published she had a thread over UK Bank Holiday weekend for her fans who are also writers to post their own books but this makes today my highest day of sales ever. And to put the icing on the cake, Linzi herself commented:

!!!

At Home in Percival (henceforth, AHIP): 23 ratings on Amazon so far! I don’t know why, but somehow 20 felt like a threshold. I don’t know if there’s a tipping point where Amazon starts to recommend your book to readers of similar ones.

Book 2 (currently working title is George II, because the working title of AHiP was George is My Friend): About 25k words so far. I have not yet had any 2000-word days yet; it feels like I was mostly able to make that goal I the first book, but I ran some quick statistics. There were 48 days when I was seriously working on the first draft of AHiP; of those, I had 7 days under 100 words, 16 days over 2000 words, and the rest between 1k-2k. So if I’m only writing 1000-1500 most days on this one, I guess it’s OK. Hopefully I will speed up as I get farther along. One problem is that it feels like I’m halfway through the story when I should be only about a third done, but I think that happened last time too. Stories unpack themselves in a semi fractal way; “semi” because sometimes they’re linear, and then you realize you’ve got to go back and unpack a lot of missed detail. It’s a much more magical process than I had expected it to be.

It turns out, the first week after you self-publish a book on Amazon is basically about checking (with ridiculous frequency) to see if you’ve gotten any new comments, then slipping to Amazon’s reporting page to see if you’ve sold any more books.

So I can say that now, after just over a week since the book went up for sale, I’ve sold enough to cover roughly half of the cost of my editor and cover designer. (Both were cheaper than expected; in the case of the designer, he is both up-and-coming and a resident of a region where labor costs tend to be lower and I’m very pleased. Still not sure about the editor; on the one hand she charged less than I expected by an order of magnitude but on the other I found fifteen or twenty small errors in my final read-through after it got past her. I don’t really know how perfect I should have expected her to be, though – after all, she did find stuff I and all my previous readers had missed.)

Before I published, I had defined levels of success in my own mind. If I make enough to cover costs, I’ll be content. Sales have slowed from the initial spike, but I think I still should reach that, over time. If I make enough in addition to cover, say one extra wine club or to replace my Kindle Scribe (which has a slightly cracked screen), I’ll be very happy. Anything beyond that, I’ll be ecstatic.

I am also very pleased that the book now has 16 ratings, with an average of 4.6 out of 5 stars on Amazon. Hopefully this will be enough for it to show up as a recommendation when similar books are purchased. Ted and I discussed it and decided not to buy paid advertising at this time; I will do so once I have a sequel or two published. I have the ability to do promotions where the book price is lowered for a day or so, but I’m not sure there’s a point to that until there are more books in the series.

For comparison, my previous book was traditionally published in 2014, and I received an advance for it. With that plus royalties over the years, I estimate it’s earned about a month’s pay at my day job, total. I don’t know if this book will ever even match that, and that’s OK. At the least I’d hope it will pay for itself, and eventually lead to a little extra fun money.

I hadn’t expected how much I’d enjoy the writing process, though! So it’s been an utter success in that respect. 🙂

Someone asked me about the process of writing this book, and once I wrote it out for her, I realized I wanted to save this for future reference (I should really make a flowchart!)

Amazon US | Amazon UK

• 1. Write first draft.
• 2. Edit draft.
• 3. Send to 3 alpha readers, plus my husband Ted
• 4. Incorporate feedback.
• 5. Send to 5 beta readers, including you.
• 6. Repeat step 4. (There was some overlap between steps 3-6, as people read and respond at different speeds)
• 7. Buy ISBN numbers.
• 8. Send to professional editor, who took just under two weeks.
• 9. Repeat Step 4. 
• 10. Figure out how many pages were in final version (needed to create paperback cover)
• 11. Figure out how to get book into Kindle Create Editor.
• 12. Fix formatting in Kindle Create.
• 13. Upload to Kindle Direct Press.
• 14. (in parallel with 10-12) Commission cover
• 15. Review cover and get revisions made
• 16. Export .epub from Kindle Create and do one final careful close reading on my own Kindle, making comments as needed
• 17. Repeat step 4.
• 18. Publish!!!
• 19. Promote <= I am here

I think I may have the blog fixed. I doubt I’ve any readers at all left, but just in case, I need to make an announcement: my first novel, A Home in Percival, will be available on Amazon within the next day or two. (Insert much happy flailing here.)

I probably need to set up an author page in the next week or so, so I will keep this one for technical details for my own reference. But first: the cover!

And also the full paperback cover:

I hit “Publish” yesterday, so within 72 hours (or 48 from about now) the e-book and paperback will be available at Amazon. The e-book will be exclusive to Amazon, and will be available on Kindle Unlimited. I’m working on self-publishing the paperback via Ingram Spark as well, so it can be sold from other venues.

It’s roughly 280 pages, a very gentle cozy fantasy. (An aside: it has a bit of a slow start, since it begins in the autumn of 2021 and the main character, Macrina Magid, literally has done no in-person socializing for about a year and a half. Remember the pandemic?) Many of the incidents are based on real life, though no characters are – except Macrina’s two cats. And there’s a lot of me in Macrina, but I gave my consent to that 🙂 But everything is just a bit better when you have a) magic and b) an author. As an example, in real life the city of Eugene finally got a good high-end steakhouse in 2024; in my book, it has one back in 2022 – and it betters the real thing by having a river view.

As you might guess, I am not enjoying the wait until this thing is officially up and for sale!

The date is August 10, 2025, which makes it six years since my last update. Life has changed greatly; Ted and I have both retired, we now live at our lake house full-time, and I’ve completed writing my first novel and it’s with an editor now.

This blog has been broken for at least five years, and it’s taken me this long to get around to trying to fix it. Apparently it’s still possible to access individual entries; I think possibly the main issue is that the index page was hacked.

Because whatever other blog-writing I let fall, I will not skip the annual light-in-darkness Chanukah poem. This one is bleaker than usual. My life is OK, if a little lonely and circumscribed by pandemic, etc, but I have an online acquaintance, quite young (30s?) whose husband is dying of cancer. This is for her.

This year’s Chanukah candles
may be next year’s Yahrzeit.
Either way,
the candles of memory
are not enough
to hold back the encroaching dark.

Let other years have their festivities.
This year’s candles are a clew –
a thread of light to hold to
through a dark maze
whose end is past my sight.

Changing things around a bit, just to see if it helps my WP editing issues.
(Spoiler: Nope.)

ETA, 9/24/2021: it’s only taken me a year or more to figure this out – a little Googling found the answer here. All I needed to do … was to go to my profile and uncheck “Disable the visual editor while writing.

I got a big monitor and separate keyboard and mouse well before the pandemic, when it because clear I would be working from home a lot for early and late meetings. Since the pandemic we’ve managed to put together desks that fit my (lack of) height at both houses (I say we – really my husband the woodworker created shorter legs for one existing desktop and one top that was originally a table leaf), and added a monitor, keyboard and mouse for the other place when I started spending more workdays there. Working on a laptop is not really ergonomic for more than short periods!

The bigger change is that I have even fewer boundaries. I am not unequivocally recommending this for everyone, because it goes against the prevailing advice and doesn’t work for all, but it works for me. Working in non-business hours is nonnegotiable in my job, so I compensate or it. For instance, last night I had a 9PM meeting and today I went to the grocery store during a break between meetings to get a prescription refill and because we were out of fruit. My standard workday is 7-4:30, but I regularly am at my desk by 6:30 and often have meetings til 5. I also check work email on my phone before I even get out of bed, a holdover from when I supported several European teams and people might try to reach me early. The flip side of that is that if it’s a beautiful day and I have time between meetings, I might grab a kayak and go; I have a knitting group (from work) that meets Mondays at lunchtime, and I have carved an hour out of Friday mornings for voice lessons, that I try very hard not to schedule over (it’s only happened once or twice in the past year, and we have rescheduled those lessons).

OTOH I don’t take meetings during my sleep hours (10-6) except on very special occasions, and I do little work on weekends – usually only when I have a small, concrete task that urgently needs to be done. And I do check work emails on my phone on weekends, once or twice a day.

This all works for me because I have never been one of those people who does very rigid separation between work and home, needs commute time to destress, never ever goofs of during work hours, and keeps a separate personality or work vs home or friends. So I am not recommending my methods for all, but they work for me.

Anyone happen to read this and know about WordPress? For a while now, I have had to use the Classic Editor – with the new one, I type in a block and then the content all vanishes after I click anywhere outside the block. Very annoying!