Day 1 as a properly published author, and…
Well, it feels like most other days, to be fair. But, yes, things are happening – I have a few sales now on almost all of the currently available distribution channels, and a green light from Smashwords, meaning that the rest should follow in their own sweet time, some quicker than others. I’ve been quite good at keeping away from the various dashboards and so on – I know I’m not going to be selling hundreds of copies every day, so there’s no point in obsessively refreshing the page every few hours. Mainly I need to keep busy with all the other things I should be doing. There’s the mystery of how to get Shelfari working properly, for example – it seems to treat the Kindle and paperback versions as two completely separate objects, written by two different people, only one of whom is me. This needs more head-scratching.
And reviews. Reviews are the key to this whole enterprise, I’m told. And it’s no good soliciting them from people who share my last name or IP address – that’s kind of obvious. So, there is much behind-the-scenes work going on to deliver my book to people who will not only read it, but give it an honest review. That takes time, though – you have to let them read it, and then formulate a review.
Patience. The word of the day is patience.