(no subject)

watervole and I have been LJ-deprived, because it was not accessible from Chez Waveney and it took a while to realise that it was an internal LAN issue rather than Yet Another LJ Outage. waveney has rebooted the DSL, and we can see LJ again...

Turned in the second draft of Dolphin Dreams to my editor on Sunday night, so I am temporarily free of deadlines. Only temporarily, because she said in her reply that she'll have her edits on Lord and Master to me this week. This is the tycoon/secretary contemporary romance that grew out of the short story published by Clean Sheets last year. It's going to be released first, as it's got a specific theme release date so takes priority in the editing. Unfortunately it doesn't have either cover art or an entry in the Loose Id catalogue yet, which is causing a certain amount of confusion to readers when I mention it. I should probably take this as a sign to Do Something about my own website, starting with putting up a draft page for the book.

I sent a last minute submission to [redacted]'s <a "slash with the serial numbers filed off" anthology on Sunday night. I would have mentioned it at the time in case anyone else was interested in submitting, but this was how I discovered that LJ was invisible to this LAN...

Make Money Fast...

I have just received a genuine, honest-to-god, in-the-wild, Make Money Fast spam at my gmail address. It's years since I last saw one of those. They've been updated -- this one is using Paypal to receive the money. What's the betting that the spammer owns all five of the Yahoo email addresses on the "send money to the name at the top, cross it off, and add your name to the bottom" list?

It's all about ME...

Today I have discovered a brand new way to indulge in authorial "me, me, look at me!" behaviour. Never mind Amazon rankings, how many of you have checked to see if your book is on any Amazon wish lists? I stumbled into this purely by accident, I swear, although I'll admit I *was* ego-surfing on Google at the time. It seems there are several people out there who have added The Syndicate to their wish lists...

Speaking of Amazon rankings, it reached the giddy heights of 22,000 or thereabouts on the US site yesterday. And a copy or two sold on the UK site as well. Maybe the pimping session on a mailing list last week did some good, or maybe it's coincidence. Nevertheless, I continue to follow the general advice of rasfc -- the best promotional tool is Writing The Next Book.

Other signs it's slowly getting out there -- not only is there someone not personally known to me who is listing it in their LibraryThing catalogue, there are people putting it on their swaps wanted list on at least one of the bookswap websites. And speaking of LibraryThing, I got a nice warm fuzzy glow when I checked my author profile page and found that someone had added one of my books that isn't even out yet, complete with "want" tag.

Cat-vacuuming? Me? Never...