Sunday, September 15, 2013

Update - Bestseller! (But Still No Computer)

The Good News Is...

Even though I haven't yet officially announced my new book, The Ride To Save King, a friend broke the ice on it and bought it for her daughter.  So, I decided that, in spite of the fact that Smashwords hasn't got around to distributing it to other vendors, I would go ahead and mention it a few places, because it doesn't take all that many sales to get a book onto certain "Best Seller" lists.  One of those lists is the Kindle list for children's horse stories.

So far, it has gotten up to #57 on that list, and I think there is still at least one sale outstanding on the bump in rankings.

The bad news is my computer is also still not functioning, so it's really hard to do links on the iPad (especially if I'm trying to do the kind of specialized links to each country and vendor, as I like to do with a book announcement.)  So I'll do a real, and more extended announcement when the computer is back online, and maybe by then I'll have some other vendor links too (such as Barnes and Noble -- Apple will take forever).

But for now, if you're in the US (or any country which uses the amazon.com store) and are inclined to buy a little story about a girl, her mother, their horse and an impending hurricane, purchases within the next few days should help it stay on the best seller list, and move up the "new books" lists.

The Ride To Save King

(Even doing artwork is pain in the patoot with the iPad.  Blogger doesn't like scrolling or selecting or displaying or options -- so I finally managed to copy the code from when I put up the rough draft of the cover image a few weeks ago.  There are some slight changes in the finally, mainly with hair and mane.)

The Bad News

My computer has nearly one billion blocks on the hard drive.  I got me a spiffy new hard drive utility, Drive Genius.  It will scan all those blocks and mark the bad ones.  It's very fast...with scanning the good blocks.  However with each bad block it stops, thinks about it and marks it.  Now, out of a billion blocks, ten thousand or so bad blocks aren't very many.  But do you know how long it takes to pause and mark every single freaking one of them?  Five days.  Maybe more.

So I am computerless for a while longer.

Oh, and things keep getting more thrilling.  Spent last night in the ER with someone (all is okay now).  Got home and, once my shoes were off, I immediately stepped in a large, squishy mound of cat puke.  At which point, alpha cat decided it would be the ideal time to chase b\poor feral girl kitty all around the house, while I'm hopping on one foot swearing.  (Luckily he's not an evil top cat, just a frustrated one, because feral girl won't play.)

But. in spite of all this, I shall make a valiant attempt to post on Wednesday about how I came to write The Ride to Save King, back in the 1990's.  And maybe also a little about a person who inspired one of the secondary characters.

See you in the funny papers.

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