Adventures in Kindleland: Cover Drama

So it's been a little while since I've posted. Been busy with work, freelance work and (kind of) promoting my book. I hate to say it, but I can't wait until the fall! There are just not enough hours in the day during the summer.

My four year old was pretending to be me last night. He had my sweater on and told me that I had to pretend to be him. I was sitting in front of the computer and he said "Get up from there. I have to sit there so I can work all the time."

Ouch.

I don't know why we always find it so hard to balance work and home. For me, it's because I work from home, but it's still no excuse! I need to figure that out, asap.

I titled this post Adventures in Kindleland because I thought it would be cool to give you updates on the world of self-publishing.

Sunday night, on a whim of course, I decided to take advantage of the KDP Select promo. They give you 5 days in a 90 day period to give your book away for free. I haven't really started promoting yet, so I thought, why not?

I put my book up for 48 hours. Well yesterday afternoon, I checked to see how things were going and my book had "sold" 317 copies. I blinked a couple of times, because I didn't think it was for real. Then I did a little research on the Kindleboards and realized it was quite possible. A few hours later, I looked again and I can't remember the exact number of books "sold" but I was #676 in the free Kindle Store. Then, because I was a tad obsessed with my progress by this time, I looked again a few hours later. I was #8 on the Occult list and number #288 in the free Kindle Store.

Somewhere between all that obsession a thought occurred to me. My current cover couldn't be given away for free!! So I had to change it, pronto. And I did. And it sucks. If you click on the link to amazon, you'll see for yourself.

I worked on a new one last night and I changed it (amazon takes up to 12 hours to do this). Now I'm working on brushing that one up. So there will be one more cover change to look for. I will go back to the original, once I sort out the extended rights. I like the original best, but the temporary going to have to do until then.

To all the customers who have to deal with the crappy temp cover, I apologize.

Now for the update:

Today's the last day for the free promo. And I should mention that I've done absolutely no advertising for this, until right now, in this post.

Free-Promo Units "Sold": 790 (this jumped 9 units while I typed this post!)
Free Kindle Store Rank: #271
Free Occult Genre Rank: #5

I really hope the people who downloaded this will give honest reviews. I'm really anxious to see how my novel measures up! Now I have no idea what these numbers mean for actual future sales but, as always, I'll keep you posted. ;)


Have a great day! I'm off to do some last minute cover work, some editing, continue working on a book trailer and a grant proposal and somewhere in there I promise to take a nice long break and take my kids for a walk, to the park and to the ice cream store. Cause otherwise what's the purpose of all that hard work!