Six Books In 12 Months!

As I said in yesterday’s blog, Saturday night I uploaded the ebook version of Big Lake Hoarder to Amazon. I said then that while Amazon always warns that it can be as much as 72 hours for a book to go live, the longest it has taken for one of my books is about 24 hours, except in one case where their system crashed, and it took longer. I also said it often takes much less time than that. I was right in this case, because just over an hour after I uploaded it, I got a text message from my pal Barbara Westerfield telling me that it was already live and that she had ordered it.

I do have to take a moment to brag here, because this is my sixth book in twelve months. This was the shortest of them, at 81,275 words. The longest was Tinder Street at 105,823 words. Those six books totaled 552,280 words. Add in my blog that averages somewhere around 750 words a day (273,750 words), and my total for the year will be somewhere around 826,000 words. Now, I will admit that I used some of those words more than once in the course of the year, but still…

I always tell new authors that writing the book is the easy part. The real work begins once the book is out. Yesterday I added links to the new book to the latest edition of my free author’s newsletter and sent it out to over 1,200 subscribers, announced the new book several places on social media, and touched base with some of my author friends who will share a link to the new book, just as I do for their new books.

And I still found time to water our new citrus trees and the patch where I planted grass seed and did a half-mile on the treadmill. I know that half a mile doesn’t sound like much, but I got out of it when my back was hurting so bad, and it’s taken me a while to get my butt in gear and get back on there and start walking again.

It will be a few weeks before the new book is out in paperback, but in the meantime, I’m starting work on the next John Lee Quarrels book, which will be titled Fresh Out Of Mojo. And once that one is done, I will jump right into the next Tinder Street book. I don’t know if I’ll do six books again in 2021, we’ll just have to see how things go.

And in closing, I always appreciate readers who share links to my books with their friends and family and leave reviews for them on Amazon. That’s the greatest gift you can give an author.

Congratulations Jim Hamm, winner of our drawing for an autographed copy of Learn Google Photos 2020 by Chris Guld from the Geeks on Tour. The book is loaded with easy to understand instructions on how to assemble your lifetime of photo and video memories in one place, and then how to use the program’s powerful tools to edit, organize, and share them, all for free. Chris is a Platinum Level Product Expert for Google Photos and she and her husband Jim have taught classes on many aspects of computer technology from coast to coast for years. We had 161 entries this time around. Stay tuned, a new contest starts soon.

Thought For The Day – Did you ever wake up feeling so glad that you are alive that you kiss the person sleeping beside you? I just did and have been informed I will not be allowed to fly on this airline again.