Saturday, July 07, 2012

but i've gotta let it go

I'm exhausted, which means I got nothing done tonight - yes, I realize that theoretically I should probably take Friday night off, but that phrase is not computing in my head. I slept something less than six hours last night, which is never good for me, but I happened to wake up an hour and a half before my alarm and see an email that I needed to respond to with a phone call. Since I am v. bad on the phone in the morning, I took the time to wake up, brush my teeth, put in my contacts, and make some tea before calling the person back. And it all turned out good - it's a well-known (in the industry) book blogger/reporter/general connector of people who hosts a reader event in Milwaukee, and my publicist had suggested that I try to get into it as an author. I'd emailed last night, she asked me to call her this morning, and it turns out that I'm invited - so yay to that. It's not until next spring, so it's nothing urgent for me, but she wanted to lock down the last slots before putting her site up next week.

Basically my whole promotion strategy is to pretend that I'm a big deal until I am a big deal, and it seems to be working -- HEIRESS is now #77 in the entire Nook store, which is pretty incredible. I have no idea what that means in terms of units sold since my agent is off for the weekend, and it's obviously a much smaller number dollar-wise than it might have been since it's only $0.99 -- but the goal is attracting new readers and stimulating interest in future books in the series, so hopefully that works. And I will happily celebrate being in the top one hundred books on Nook for as long as it lasts!

Anyway, after the call, I took care of a bunch of stuff for the awards ceremony, answered a few other emails, and drove down to the south bay to run errands. Yes, ridiculous. I had to go to Home Depot to buy a collapsible hand truck to haul around all the thirty-pound boxes of excerpt booklets that have been the bane of my existence. Then I grabbed lunch, went to the post office and mailed six boxes of those books (thus making them the bane of the postal workers' existences) plus a couple of other giveaways, exchanged $25 of loose change for an Amazon giftcard at a Coinstar machine, and took my car to the carwash to try to get the egg off it from the unjust egging it received in Menlo Park on the Fourth of July (verdict: my paint job may never be the same - may be time to file a claim). Then I went to Stanford library and checked out a bunch of books on 19th century painters, and another bunch of books on the East India Company. I was all excited to start reading them tonight, too, but by the time I got home all I wanted to do was sleep. So I crawled into bed, but since it was still slightly light out, I forced myself to stay up - and I read an entire romance novel (of course).

But now, I really should go to sleep - I need to write tomorrow, and I plan to avoid all distractions until I'm done. Goodnight!

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