Another Mystery Model

Sunday, August 29, 2021

Flying Off the Shelves Once More

Heh heh.  I had hardly got finished blogging that I had reduced prices on several of my books, than I 'sold' a couple of dozen of them!  This confirms that the stories are technically worthless, or at least worth less than 99 cents, which is the minimum that Smashwords will allow!  No, I'm not upset or insulted; I know that a reader has to have a peculiar mix of interests (classical music, girl-girl relationships, children, etc) for the Helen stories to grab them.  (The non-Helen stories are a lot of fun, and don't have anything to do with music, except for Music on the Galactic Voyager, which is sort of vaguely a Helen story.)

Listen, you guys: come on, now; spread the word!  I don't need the cash, honestly; but I do like to see people buying the books!!!

(I get the sneaking suspicion that a single person has bought all the books that were downloaded yesterday.  Well, thanks, whoever you are!)

Kay Hemlock DarkBrown

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

What's Going On?

A few days ago, I made several of the stories on Smashwords either free, or priced very low.  Yet, the sales have not exploded like I expected!  Perhaps it takes time for the news to percolate to the people who want to buy my stories and haven't got them yet!

Maybe I didn't reduce the prices on very many stories; I need to go and check.

Meanwhile, as I said, I have hit a roadblock in my writing, and not a whole lot of new material is forthcoming.  I will get around to it eventually, but it won't be soon.

Kay

Friday, August 13, 2021

Two Days, When the Stories Flew Off the Shelves!

Smashwords sent me an email some time ago, saying they're having a Summer Sale.  They wanted me to "sign up," which meant that they would sell my stories at a reduced price (which I had to approve,) an then, on August 1, the prices revert to normal.

Well, since nothing was moving, and since I suspected that a few dozen Kay Hemlock Brown fans have been hoping something like this would happen, I signed up.  Since they were already at the minimum price of 99c, this meant that they were now free, which means Smashwords would not make any money from them!  It was already July 29th when I signed up, so for two days, 25 copies of my stories were sucked up by various people.  What they did with those stories I can only imagine; they're probably putrefying in various hard drives across the USA (and other parts of the world, but I suspect that in other lands, people actually read the stories).

And Now For Something Completely Different.  I have hit a block in finishing up the various things I had wanted to do with the existing stories and story lines.  Having said that, I have various issues on my mind:

  1. What with the recent interest in racism across the country, I feel that there are too few people in my stories who are non-white.  There certainly are a few; in Jane, there are Italians, Hungarians, and Jews, who must certainly be considered as contributing to racial diversity in our society, but not many others.  In the Helen stories, there are Indians, for certain, and French, and Germans, too.  But the stories are too white.
  2. The changing weather patterns--climate change--are really in our faces; it might be appropriate for fiction to reflect this.
  3. I wanted to incorporate COVID into a story.
I forget what I wanted to say.  More later.

Kay