My 48th birthday was February 15th. I feel very blessed this month, a year after releasing my first novel. Hoping that saying something out loud doesn’t ruin it… I have sold a piece of writing for everyday of this month. Yes. 28 sales. Split between pre-sales on Toils and Snares, All Is Silence in print and in all three major e-book markets, two copies of Just Desert and one copy of the Outward Bound Collection. That doesn’t come close to matching the first few months All Is Silence the first few months after release, but sales had fallen significantly after the summer. My total for January was 14. December was about half of that.

Funny thing is there has been no significant up-tick. Has all the promotion I have been doing for the past 18 months finally started to pay off? Am I reaching critical mass? I could learn to live with this steadiness, especially considering I will have a new novella out the day after tomorrow and a new short story in March on Kindle format: Another Kind of Ignorance. Planning on releasing a short story a month until Straight Into Darkness comes out this summer.

A few of those sales can be attributed to my activity on Wattpad. Tonight I hit 400,000 reads, Over 62,000 people have sampled my novel. Several thousand are working their way through it serially with a fairly passionate core of about 1000 readers who makes comments, complaints and compliments. Not coincidentally, if the trend continues, I will have 1000 Followers on Wattpad by March 1st.

I started uploading the first draft of Toils and Snares to Wattpad in early December. I uploaded the first four chapters in two parts each over 8 weeks. Then, I updated it with the second draft. Tonight I finished uploading the final draft and have Chapter 5 — Part I, the last section I will upload for free. It would be interesting to know how many of the folks who read All Is Silence and/or Toils and Snares on Wattpad purchase Toils and Snares on Amazon. I wish I had a good way to track those numbers.

Thanks so much to all the folks who gave me feedback on Toils & Snares, especially, Elena, Donald, Jesikah, Amanda, Dave, Peter, Katie, Nichole, Pam, Shann, Kole, and my Mom & Dad. I’m afraid the one thing I forgot in the pre-sale upload was an acknowledgement and thanks page. So, once it goes live, I will update that to reflect the support of you wonderful people. Since I will need to do an update anyway, I would love to hear about any typos anyone may find in the story.

Next week I will start revealing some of the rough drafts of cover art for Straight Into Darkness. I will say the cover, designed by Pintado, the same artist behind All Is Silence has created another awesome cover that captures the bleaker, colder feelings. Let’s just say it’s a little blue.

Thanks for coming along for the ride. I hope you’ll follow me Straight Into Darkness. I promise there will be a light at the end of the tunnel that is not an oncoming train.