This and That

i'd love to say it was a killer or stellar sales week with my ebooks but alas I can only report 2 sales of "The Tulip Kiss" this week. The past six weeks have yielded royalties of $4.55 of non-free downloadable stories. That's enough to buy a McDouble, order of fries, a large sweet tea and a sundae at McDonalds. Amazon only pays royalties once you have reached $10 (I think; could be $20) so I still won't see any royalties from these sales until May 1; Thursday evening my February monthly report will go up - showing all my downloads and what my actual royalties earned on those over 600 downloads of "Bride-and-Seek" and "The Tulip Kiss" ended up being since those are figured differently than actual sales.

I received an email this past week inviting us to the new office building for the "The Writer's Plot" (a place where we grow authors; formerly AnAuthorWorld) for an open house party and we were also invited to bring a piece to read if we wanted. As you all know I've been fighting a cold the last couple of weeks and the cough has affected my voice. Nonetheless, I invited Andi (a writer in my town who is blind (blindness due to a blood disorder she has and she lost her sight in a short period of time - less than a month's time)) and she was going to go but at the last minute responded that she better not since she was swamped with school stuff. This is understandable with mid terms coming up and tons of things to read and write about. I also invited Faye to come to the party but then found out the building doesn't have an elevator and Faye would have had no way to get to the second floor (which is where The Writer's Plot is located) since she uses a walker to get around. So with no one to go with me, I invited Anita, a good friend and although she isn't a writer, I knew she would enjoy herself and I would have good company - lol.

So we arrive to the building and mingle with a few folks that I already knew and met a few new folks. We had some excellent refreshments and then started the readings. Since my voice is going by the wayside and I really need to try to save it for my presentation Thursday (thankfully I won't have to talk too much at the SCASL conference as I'm doing a hands on presentation - yeah right, me not talk too much? - that's going to be one for the history books), I decided to be the first reader. I took in the first three pages of Imogene's story to read. Now I've read it out loud, it's in the universe and I have to finish the story sometime. Before going to the party, I called Faye and talked to her a bit and we talked about my story. Brainstorming is mostly what we did - shooting ideas of directions to take Sarah Beth's secret that I recently discovered that she doesn't even know about (yet).

After the party, arriving back to Anita's house, we just sat in the car and talked and brainstormed. Anita really helped give me some ideas that have put a few more pieces in the puzzle and I know have a prologue and have found that the story is no longer just about saving Imogene but it is also about Sarah Beth saving herself.

On the plus side of last night, I did sell a copy of Finally Home and a copy of State of Successes and I had sold a copy of Finally Home to a girl scout yesterday morning when I was out and about town. Overall, a fairly good day for physical sales.

I can't wait to get caught up with work and get some researching done to work on Imogene's and Sarah Beth's story, and I thank Anita and Faye for helping me brainstorm some directions for the story. I'm forever in your debt, ladies.

What's coming up this week: I've readied my WWYWWQ for Wednesday but am running short on topics to post on Mondays and Thursdays. I will try to get my Friday book reviews caught up before heading over to the SCASL conference Wednesday. I'm still open to topics - if anyone has an idea of things they would like me to talk about on the blog or a question they would like answered, just leave a comment and I'll do my best to try to come up with something.

So I'm off to do some work and will report back next week on the happenings in my corner of the world. See you all in the postings - E :)