Friday, February 25, 2011

My First Sale of "Mom's Letter"

My e-short story, "Mom's Letter", has sold one copy since I listed it not quite two weeks ago. Yea! That sale was to someone I know, a former colleague in the poetry wars on Poem Kingdom, years ago when we were moderators together there. Poppy also wrote a nice review for it, an honest review, not a fake one. I'm grateful for that.

Due to having been away from home for an engineering conference, combined with a little vacation, I haven't been able to do anything to create a buzz for the story, except for one post here, one on the Suite writer forums, and one post at Facebook. I need to get to a few other places and do some posts. A few more sales would be nice.

On this trip I've managed to write one chapter for Documenting America. The document I reviewed has also given me fodder for at least one more chapter, maybe two if I want to. Once I type that chapter in I should be at 28,000 words. So that's edging ever closer, and publishing it before the end of March is possible, though possibly rushing it.

The sun is shining. I'm on vacation, and by the view through the windows it appears a gentle breeze is blowing. I should be outside, walking the campus or sitting by the pool, reading. Perhaps I will. I'll set this to publish tomorrow, actually, and fool all my readers (all ten or so of you) as to my whereabouts.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am glad to support your writing "career" in any way I can. Since I bought and read your story, I've looked at some of the other inexpensive short books in the kindle store on Amazon. Thank goodness for the "send a sample" option else I would've bought some stinkers. And some are okay, but the formatting is all messed up (this is especially true of poetry books). I think Amazon still has some kinks to work out, or maybe the authors need to take more time formatting their books. I'm not sure how it works, but there's room for improvement, I think. I didn't see any trouble with the formatting in your story so that was a plus. You could have the best writing in the world, but the story could be "lost" to the reader with bad formatting. Anyway, maybe that's why you haven't had a lot of sales yet, maybe others have had the same experience that I have and are afraid they'll end up with a stinker with bad formatting.

By the way, I chuckled at your reference to the poetry wars. There were some good times and bad times back then, but I try to remember the good times we all had in those forums.

David A. Todd said...

Poppy:

Thanks for the comment. The formatting issue is due to the fact that for Kindle the text size and width of the screen govern the line breaks. So poetry is messed up if the text is too large, but okay if the text is small enough. I understand that might not be a problem with a Nook device, but I'm not sure.

I'm not too worried about sales (which are up to 2 now) at this point. "Mom's Letter" is a trial balloon so I can test the uploading process and the management of e-SP. Any sales are great, but even if it doesn't sell, no biggie.

Dave