Baffled In Pennsylvania

I'm not sure what I did on August 29^th, but I sold 44 books that day.  I'm not overjoyed only because most of the books were being offered for free, but it is certainly nice to see that there is some sort of interest in the books!

Here is a capture of the graph that shows how many of each title was downloaded each day; it is a little bit tricky trying to figure out which date goes with a particular point on the graph.

This is a 'stacked' line graph, which means that the number of books sold for a given title is color-coded, and stacked on top of the graph point for the book below it.  For instance, the graph (dark blue) that lies under the whole lot corresponds to Helen at the Beach, presumably because it has the most 'sales' overall.  Above it is the graph for Helen's Concerto, and so on, all the way to Helen Versus Handels's Messiah. 

Forgive me for trying to explain a graph, to explain which I have no special training, but which everyone really ought to know how to read!  For example, on the right, we see a blown-up detail of the graph shown above, of which one 'peak' is shown, marked with an 'X'.  That corresponds to October 17th.  Only 7 different titles were downloaded that day: one each of Helen at the Beach, Helen's Concerto, Jane, Jane the Early Years, Helen Backstory: Lisa, Cindy, etc.; Helen and the Flowershop Girl, and Alexandra.  On other dates, multiple copies of certain titles were downloaded, e.g. 9 copies of Beach on August 27^th.

I know you folks are not too concerned about these 'sales', but I like to see these books 'flying off the shelves,' or rather, burning up the Internet!

When I'm not careful, I feel a certain pride in having written so many titles back when I was still teaching a full load!  It isn't easy to write fiction while preparing for classes at the same time; obviously, I wasn't doing either the writing or the preparing very well!  (Neither one, actually.)  Also, I remember that most of the stories are extracted from a single story: Helen, and published some ten years later, so now you know that your blogger is not such a furious writer as it might have appeared at first.

Kay

P.S.: Actually, using this form of graph to represent sales is somewhat misleading.  They should use a stacked bar graph, which uses rectangular bars.  Then the total area of, for example, the dark blue rectangles would represent the total sales for the period.  With these zig-zag graphs, this does not happen, though the graph looks attractive.  (This is the problem with putting a graphic designer in charge of a data project.)

[Added Later:]
I found out that on June 27^th, I had sold a total of 49 books!  The most number of copies was of Helen at the Beach.  The second-most-downloaded title was Helen's Concerto.  Now, of these two, the popularity of the latter is easy to explain; I had been talking about it for weeks before that date, and I suppose some readers had been waiting for the book to come out.  But for Beach, I have no explanation, certainly nothing that I did.  Must go through the blog and see.  I suspect that there is some word-of-mouth advertising going on.

Touching Base: News About Galactic Voyager, Plus Miscellaneous Thoughts

I find it difficult to edit my stories, which is something I really need to do.  I decided to try a new method, namely to read the story as I usually do: on a e-reader, and note down the points that need editing with bookmarks.  I'm sure I have thought about doing this often, but I'm really doing it for the first time.

I just fixed about a dozen minor details, and uploaded the new manuscript to Smashwords.   If any one of my readers is reading this, and has not finished reading, please feel free to hop over to the publisher's website, and get yourself a new improved version, with fabric softener and added Vitamin C.

There are only a couple of full-length stories (novels—I still feel bashful to describe them as novels, though they just can't be anything else) of which I'm really proud.  I'm fairly proud of the whole lot, but these are serious contributions to these genres of literature:

Alexandra, a long story with characters I think are truly admirable and attractive, and with human failings that are entirely forgivable;

Music On The Galactic Voyager, a truly awesome (stop me!) science fiction story.  The science in this one is not close to being magic, as many sci-fi stories become; it is just 20th-century science.  (Ultra-futuristic sci-fi is boring.  And you may quote me.  I mean, anything can happen, and the author can shrug and say: it's future science, kiddos.  Yeah, right.  This is my quarrel with Japanese sci-fi fantasies.)

A couple more are waiting in the wings: Jane, for instance, which really needs to be re-written to have a satisfactory ending; Prisoner, which had a huge following at one time, and Helen, of course.  But these are all projects that are still under construction, though I have recklessly thrown them into publication.  Helen's Concerto only needs polishing up; I'm writing a front-end to Helen & Sharon, after which I will tidy up and slim down Helen & Sharon.  At that point, the trilogy: Helen at Westfield, Helen & Sharon, and Helen's Concerto will be a good piece of writing.  At the moment, there are too many flaws in the Helen saga, though in its large plan, it is already complete.

Kay Hemlock Brown