Update

Today brought cheering and unexpected news: I’ve sold more books than I thought I had, because apparently the Amazon and Book Depository orders all come through in one lump at the beginning of the month. Who knew? Not me, because self-publishing is a continuing voyage of discovery. 🙂

The beginning of the week brought a letter from the British Library acknowledging receipt of the books, and describing them in that book-title-as-sentence way that always irrationally charms me – look in the front of the nearest book (if you’re anything like me, the nearest book will be within easy reaching distance, unless you have an ebook reader and are very tidy) and there’s a good chance that in the front there will be some additional information as well as the ISBN, and the title formatted with a capital letter at the front and a full stop at the end, thus:

The maker’s mask.
The hawkwood war.

(The second one just makes me think ‘The Hawkwood war on who?’ though actually anyone who knows the Hawkwoods could supply the answer ‘Anyone they think they’re hard enough to take down’)

I always wonder what happens when book titles have punctuation of their own – does Can You Forgive Her? turn up as ‘Can you forgive her.’, for example? I thought I had a copy of Angela Thirkell’s What Did It Mean? that I could use to check, but unfortunately either I borrowed it from someone or I’ve shelved it away from the other Thirkells.

Last night when I couldn’t sleep, I had an idea for a non-Requite project. This is the first time my brain’s jumped to worldbuilding in a while – I think the last time was when I was designing a world for the long-running D&D game I run – and I’d forgotten how much I missed doing that kind of thing. So, yay! Though it’s very much in the ‘writing down ideas in a Word document’ stage at present, along with continuing to work on Heavy Ice.

To everyone who’s finding that their device doesn’t like PDF ebooks – thank you for letting me know about this, and I’m looking into ways of making the books available in more formats. I’ve decided not to go with Smashwords, though I have nothing but praise for the quick and friendly way that they deal with queries submitted via their site. A friend recommended lebrary.com as a resource for new writers looking to get their voices heard, and I’m going to be looking into that.

As you may have noticed, for a little while now there’s been a ‘New? Start here!’ widget in the sidebar with links to posts that might be useful to newcomers to the blog. If you can think of any other posts that belong there, please drop me a comment.

Finally, books on my radar that I’m looking forward to reading: Kate Morton’s The Distant Hours (described to me as being a bit like I Capture The Castle which is one of my very favourite books ever) and Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, which I am probably the last person in the northern hemisphere not to have read, but I’m looking forward to it anyway. What’s on your book radar right now?