pick up the receiver i'll make you a believer

I should have gone to bed ages ago, but I procrastinated after getting home from the glorious south bay, and I had a bit of promo-related stuff that had to be done tonight. Today was, on the whole, quite nice. I woke up this morning and was disappointed to see that my book's sales ranking hadn't improved significantly yesterday, even though yesterday was the official launch, and so I drove south in a slightly surly mood. But, training with Alyssa was good (even if she did work out my upper body to the point that everything now aches as though I'm getting the flu), and I showered after and went to Joanie's Cafe for a celebratory Cobb salad. I then spent the afternoon working in a variety of cafes, with marginal success; I tried going to Stanford library but couldn't find parking, so I took part in the cafe scene instead, which was somewhat annoying today.

I would have just come home after working out, but I had dinner plans in Palo Alto. It was my semi-regular Friendship Renewal dinner with Tolu, Joann, and Jane, and we went to Reposado, which was as tasty and classy as it was overpriced. But my skirt steak really was absolute perfection, and the tamale I split with Tolu was great even though my stomach seems to be indicating that there was some gluten somewhere in my meal. So we all caught up for a couple of hours, and they gave me a little mini chocolate gluten-free cake thingie with a little congratulations sign, which was super cute.

When I got home, I messed around on the internet, answered email, took care of some giveaway stuff, and brainstormed a blog post for a guest blog that I'm doing on Thursday. I kept refreshing the stats on B&N even though I didn't expect anything to change -- and at first I thought it was a typo when I noticed that my ranking was in the 800s rather than the 32000s. It must not be, though, since my book is now #12 in Regency romance and #38 in historical romance!! This is exactly the kind of progress I want to be making -- it's really key to get into the top rankings in your category, since readers browsing for new books are much more likely to stumble across it, which then becomes a virtuous cycle that should keep your book selling for awhile. We'll see tomorrow -- it could all just be a fluke, but I hope not.

I probably won't keep sharing numbers here in the long term; you can expect me to go back to my regularly scheduled drivel soon. But since this is all publicly available on B&N, and since I'm too damned excited to shut up about it, you'll have to bear with me this week. You've borne with worse drivel than this and kept coming back, so I live in hope that you'll forgive me for this too. Goodnight!