Focus on the books, nothing else.

I keep talking about my "miracle year" in writing because it was all about the writing, not the selling.  I wasn't putting any thought whatsoever into selling them.  The entire focus was in the books.

I've lost some of that over the last year.  By necessity, I suppose.  I mean, I had a lot of material at hand and it needed to be dealt with at some point.  I wanted to test the waters. 

But what I didn't see was that the moment I made that choice, the inward focus would shift outward. 

Then it shifted further with the need to rewrite some of the material I had already written.

Both things needed to be done.

I got my first report from my publisher last week.  It only includes 42 days, so it is obviously incomplete.  What I learned was that I sold more on Amazon than I expected, but sold very little on Smashwords.  In fact, Smashwords was alarmingly low considering that I was on "best-seller" lists for a good part of that period.  I had been harboring some illusions there.  Just as my publisher said, the action is on Amazon and Smashwords was inconsequential.

I sold a bunch of my books in my own store, but that is probably coming to an end.  I simply can't continue to be so aggressive because I'm getting to the point where I'm trying to sell the same books to the same people too often.  Yes, I can still mention it to tourists, but I'm finding that the initial excitement is fading and it was that excitement that sold the books.

What I'm trying to say here is -- it is time to shift the focus back to writing the books again.  It appears I can't really affect the broader sales of them by anything I say or do. 

So I'm going to focus on making The Dead Spend No Gold into a good book.  And making Faerylander a good book.

Nothing else.