I'm in exhausted start-up mode, which is what I need to be in, but that doesn't make me less tired. I didn't blog last night because I went to bed at two a.m. after having used all my words on other tasks, and I was falling asleep over proofreading the first half of Nick and Ellie and couldn't keep my eyes open any longer. But between yesterday and this morning, I managed to write 4000-ish words (15-17 pages), which replaced two early scenes entirely, and was able to get the first half of Nick and Ellie to my agent by around noon today. So that's good news; it's a relief to be done with that part, even if I still have the second half to whip into shape (sob).
After finishing that, I took a shower, loaded myself up (er, I mean I loaded my car, not that I drank excessively), and drove down to the south bay. I was supposed to have dinner with dear respected madam, who canceled on me; she'd said to tell her if I still ended up coming down, but I left here much later than intended (two p.m.) and had enough tasks to accomplish that dinner wasn't really in the cards. I had a v. belated lunch at Chipotle, stood in a half-hour line at the post office to mail some of those $*%$*)(^ excerpt booklets that have been a thorn in my side for three months, and then went to Stanford library, where I spent three hours taking notes from some books that I needed to return. The freshmen arrive tomorrow, so campus was humming with anticipation -- or, for the summer staff and people like me, humming with surliness, since the lovely peace and relative solitude of Stanford in summer will come to an abrupt, unavoidable halt tomorrow. Boo.
I wrapped up my work around eight, grabbed food at Starbucks on campus, and drove home, where I found Terry in absolute bliss because network tv is back to original programming. She went to bed sometime after ten, but I stayed up until now working on an email to my reader mailing list (which may not go out until Wednesday) and debating whether to run a contest in conjunction with the newsletter (part of why the email may not go out until Wednesday).
The big news on the book front is that, in a strategic decision to create a loss leader that will hopefully induce people to buy my second book, we tricked Amazon into making 'Heiress Without a Cause' free on Kindle. It's also free on Google Play, if you're more into that (or if you have a reader that is epub compatible, since you can put Google Play books on Nooks, Kobos, etc). It switched over to free sometime this afternoon (long story short, but you can't set the price to free on Amazon unless you sign an exclusivity deal with them, but they aggressively try to price-match other vendors, so if you set the book to free elsewhere, they may eventually set it free themselves. I've heard of this taking weeks for some people, since Amazon doesn't want to encourage people to bypass their exclusivity system - but for some reason they picked it up for me in less than a week). And it's already in the top 40-ish free downloads for historical romance, and top 600 overall in the entire Kindle store. I'm still a little torn over whether to give away content for free, and whether this devalues my work in the long run - but the play right now is to get more loyal readers who will buy Scotsmen, and Marquess, and everything after that, so hopefully it works.
So if you were cheap and didn't buy my book at some point in the last nine months, now's your chance to get it free on Kindle (or the Kindle app for phone/ipad/computer). I'll even indulge your laziness even further and give you the download link here. You're welcome. And share it with your friends - the more people who read it, the happier I am.
And now, after that shameless descent into crass commercialism (is it crass commercialism if you're not making money?), I must sleep - goodnight!
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