A Good and Stable Start

It’s been a wild week: I’m still sick, but my short story Harvest is now up on Kindel and Kobo too!

If you’re interested in something that’s equal parts eerie, humorous and heartwarming, Harvest is good Halloween reading— a short story of down-home fantasy and a fairytale for grown-ups best told in the dark!

Okay, to recap last week’s update, my first published eBook Angel reached the #5 spot on Amazon’s One-Hour Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Short Reads. I was stunned and never expected that to happen.

Now it’s a week later, and Angel didn’t stay that high in the Amazon ranks for long. I have no insight into the mechanics of their seller rankings, but I think it factors extrapolated sales: My theory is that if a title sells decently for short period, the algorithm will extrapolate future sales projections from the spike and the book shoots up the ranks. If those speculated sales don’t hold true, then it ebbs back down. In Angel’s case, it slipped off the top 20 in a couple of days. Although I won’t know what the online sales were for about a month, I very much doubt I’m a millionaire now. Or a thousandaire. Maybe a hundredaire, but that remains to be seen. ;-)

And that’s okay.

It’s okay because my publishing debut far exceeded my expectations, and that’s a really good feeling! :-) And I can legitimately say that my first published story ranked as a bestseller in the competitive Amazon marketplace, and that’s an accomplishment many reach for and don’t attain.

Moreover, this is just my first step, and the first story release of a long-term plan: The Harvest eBook is up now on the ‘Zon and Kobo, will be available elsewhere soon. The print and eBook versions of Angel can be ordered on many sites now, with more on the way. I’m on Goodreads now, with an Author Profile, and Angel has been ranked well by several people so far on the site.

Things are off to a good and stable start. :-)

Our first batch of Angel paperbacks should be in our hands by this weekend— I can’t wait to open that box! And the Harvest paperback is shaping up to be a dapper little novelty for 4.99 that we should have copies of in time for my October 27th reading and signing event.

The paperbacks are neat: They are pocket sized at 4×6 inches and not super thick because these aren’t long stories. Angel is 82 pages long and Harvest is 30. The interior layout and design looks superb in the proofing sheets, and in this format we have absolute control of the presentation of the text (font, headers, footers, etc.) so we can do a lot more than in the eBook versions where a lot of how it appears is at the whim of whatever reader/service you are using.

Angel has a modern typeset design that’s slick and tense. Harvest is printed on cream paper with an old-style font and flourishes, giving it a classic feel like an original L. Frank Baum Oz book or fairy-tale, which is very appropriate for its whimsical and occasionally dark fantasy.

Again, I don’t have our first shipments yet, but the proofs are very detailed, so I don’t think it’s likely we’ll be getting a nasty surprise.

This weekend, I’ll start editing my long fantasy drama novelette A Contract in Azure and Indigo for a late November or early December release. I’m looking forward to it, and I’m looking for some betas if you’re interested.

Have a great week everyone, and keep writing!

~Jason H. Abbott