Silver James

I survived RWA. I survived the flights there and back. I didn’t get to as many panels as I would have liked but I got to spend quality time with Jen Apodaca-Lyon, one of my favorite authors and a good friend. I met with my HQ editor several times. I had an agent tell me to write the romantic thriller I pitched and send it to her. I took pictures, which I’ll be sharing here and on FB as the week progresses.

No, I haven’t finished RDR#3 yet, so I won’t be real active around the intrawebz but I’ll be around. I need 4,520 more words (as of the time I’m composing this to post for today) to meet my minimum word count. I’ll have it done today or tomorrow. I made myself cry yesterday afternoon, writing a scene. It was a “throw-away” scene. A press conference. But I got sniffly and teary-eyed. I had to quit writing for a bit.

Which leads me to my current “reading crack” addiction: All things Kristen Ashley. Holy crap, people! I started with her Mystery Man series (Mystery Man being the first book), transitioned into her Chaos MC series (DYING for the next book to come out!) and now I’m backtracking to her Rock Chick series, because these characters have appeared in the other two series. She’s killin’ my book budget. The Rock Chick books aren’t available in my library, thought the later books are. Oh, who am I kidding? I loved them enough to just buy them. There are parts of the books where I’m laughing out loud–I mean I can’t drink coffee and have to make sure I’ve pottied before reading parts of them. This is a godsend at this stage of my writing. RDR#3 is a deeply emotional book. When it gets to me, I can back off and read a chapter of Ashley’s books–oh, who am I kidding, several chapters because…crack!–and clear my head so I can come back to Clay and Georgie. Georgie is surprising me. I originally saw her as rather shy and demur. I’m learning she has a wicked sense of humor, a huge heart, and isn’t afraid to stand up for the man she loves against the media. She’s perfect for Clay, even though they have a lot of shitstuff to work through.

If you aren’t an author, this next bit might not interest you. In June, Amazon changed the way they pay for book “borrows” for those titles in the KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited program, which would be all but two of my self-pubbed books. This means the books are only available at Amazon. Before, authors were paid a dollar amount for each book borrowed, and read through at least 20%. It didn’t matter if the books was 25, 250, or 500 pages long. This meant that if someone borrowed a book 25 pages long, read 2 pages, the author would get paid. Yes, there was a lot of gaming of that system. My books average 40-45K pages. Some are 70-80K, some are 25-30K. I usually made a couple of hundred dollars each month.

Now, Amazon is paying a dollar amount for each page read. Authors were concerned about how this would affect their bottom line. July is the first month this program has been in effect. Here’s a quick rundown from my inner statistician. I almost had 100K pages read, coming in at 99,073 pages total. My lowest daily page read count was 931, my highest 6605. The median page count is 3768, and the average is 3196. Amazon has not announced what the payout will be. Rumor has it that authors are looking at .0058 cents per page. If this is the case, I’ll either make or exceed what I made under the old program, and there’s a possibility (because I haven’t gone back to truly add up the borrow numbers from previous months to compare my royalties) that I’ll double my usual take. I think I like the new formula. Of course, I may hate it by the end of August. 😆

In other publishing news, I got a huge surprise last week. COWGIRL’S DON’T CRY sold through. What that means is I sold enough books to cover my advance plus give me a royalty payment. Since THE COWGIRL’S LITTLE SECRET has better numbers, it should sell through as well. This has me doing happy dances and fist pumps. It also paves the way for even more RDR books. Hopefully.

And one last note. I have cool stuffs to give away. Be sure you’re signed up for my Newsletter because there will be a giveaway there with the next edition, plus some giveaways here and on FB. I enjoyed my stay in NYC but I’m really glad to be home and back to keeping up with all y’all. Mostly. I’ve lost three weeks on FB and won’t catch up, which makes me have a 😦 . But I’ll try to stay abreast of the news starting now.

So, what did y’all do while I was hibernating? I want to know!!!!!!!!!!