I’ve been able to stay a little more focused on writing for the first third of the year, except for April… Let’s not talk about April. Without adding in my sales on Smashwords, B&N and all the foreign amazon.com sites, I was able to rake in quite a bit more than I did in 2011. I know, 99 bucks wasn’t hard to beat, but it was a start.

My sales peaked in March when I was putting out a short story every 5 days or so. I got my $299 payout for the month of March a few days ago and it lit a fire under my writing chair.

Here’s a tip for all of you e-pubbers out there -

Keep writing! Seriously, that’s the key. Good covers work, good blurbs work, all that social marketing helps, but more product helps the most. Don’t worry, amazon won’t run out of ASIN’s any time soon.

Starting in June, I’m going to commit to 1700 words a day. Minimum. It will be a constant NANOWRIMO session for me for six months. I don’t know how many words I’ve churned out so far this year, but by Dec 31st it will be at least 300,000. It’s not that hard for me to get 2,000 decent words in a session, but after reading Rachel Aaron‘s post, that feels anemic.

For any of you that aren’t into my alter ego’s short stories (ask if you really want to know), I have 3 longer works that are in the editing phase. I’m going to get those polished up by the end of July, even if that means I have to drink more coffee!

I’ve been working on some new projects in e-publishing and those should be coming online during the month of January. I’ve got a trio of books under a super secret pen name that will only be made public if they start to sell. Here are the titles of the ‘books’ that are for sale on amazon.com right now:
Cheap Tequila
Free Candy
Randagrams and Anagrams – Geography Edition
Randagrams and Anagrams – Food and Drink Edition

I put together the files to sell Cheap Tequila and Floating as actual paperback books, but the Randagram books wouldn’t really translate well to a hard copy.

I’m going to try to commit to keeping things lively here on the blog, and maybe even setting up another under a pseudonym I might use for some alternate genres. I didn’t really do any massive marketing in 2011 for the ebooks and I’ve been a little slower on production that I had hoped, but I’m going to be a speed demon in Twenty-Twelve!

My commissions for all ebook sales on Amazon this year were $99.48, which is more than zero dollars. With some luck and some concerted strategy about the types of stories/projects to sell, I’m going to increase that quite a bit.

Wish me luck!

Now if the people at the film studios would just make a few movies that are worth putting on my DVD queue!

If only I could read and ride my bike at the same time!

Floating - A Seattle Mystery

Join a quirky cast of characters as they navigate themselves through the streets and waterways of Seattle.

Sheila Jackson works on a crab boat with her brothers in Alaska, but spends the off-season cracking jokes while she drives tourists around in an amphibious vehicle.

Steven Munchausen keeps trying to strike it rich but his schemes always seem to circle the drain.

The novel begins:

Nestled in between the cold, gray waters of Puget Sound and the dark green wrinkles in the earth, Seattle is often shrouded in mist and rain. All that moisture has a way of getting under your skin, or invading your thoughts. Some people can take it, some folks can’t. The short, dark days and long nights of the rainy season push those folks too far. The perfect summers beneath the bluest skies you’ve ever seen can even help tilt a mind past the point of no return.

Of course when you’re normal, you don’t think about the weather like that, but who’s normal anyway? With all the bluffs and high rise condo towers in the city, lots of people think that all that rain looks pretty good when it finally pools into the lakes and runs into Puget Sound. When you’re floating face down in the ship canal, you don’t get to continue the debate about where normal stops and crazy starts.

GreenCine and Blockbuster’s pricing was similar to what I pay for 5 discs and Streaming from Netflix, and I could try to replace the DVD by mail with one of those services, but I don’t want to keep two accounts straight! Hear that Qwikster? I don’t want two accounts! I only want to go to one website!

The only reason I get movies from the Redbox up the hill is that there is nothing to remember save bringing the thing back. I swipe my card and watch the DVD and that’s it. It’s simple and I’m in control. We have Hulu. We have the CBS website. We have the PBS website. We have access to the vast majority of television programming and movie releases and we’re running out of things to put on our Netflix queue already!

“Hey, why did this Doctor Who DVD show up? We just watched that on instant view!” I say as I open the red envelope from Qwixster.

See? I already have a hard time keeping things straight between my queues on the Netflix website. So now I’ll have to look at another website (that will look exactly the same…) to check my instant queue and see if that disc I just picked from Redbox is available. Whatever…

This split is a dumb idea, and I do get a vote. I get to choose every time I see that $36.24 show up on my bank statement.