How do you define a successful attempt at self-publishing? How do we define whether or not we’re successful at this writing business? We’re still answering that question for ourselves and I doubt we’ll ever figure it out. Lately, our definition of success hinges greatly on a new Amazon feature, a chart called “The Sales Dashboard” and its three jagged lines. Or as we like to call it, “Our pulse.”

The three lines represent book sales, book borrows and free books. In the beginning, we were just happy to have a single blip for any of the three represented on the chart. Now we’re getting greedy and watching the graph bob up and down, heart crashing when it’s near the bottom and feeling like rock stars when it rises. It’s heady stuff.

In an effort to make that graph lines rise, we just finished up our latest Kindle free promotion. This time, we gave away copies of our science fiction short story, Gaia Uprising. While sales of our Renna Olsen novels, particularly Creek House, have taken off in the UK, our H.R. Olsen science fiction novel, Exiles of Gaia, has failed to take off. We hope that the giveaway will spark interest in that book. Only time will tell.

We don’t have insight into the current market and we’re too cheap to pay for book marketing in the United States at this point in time. So for now, we’ll just have to be satisfied with our tiny pulse. We’re alive and that’s good enough for us.

We’re nearly finished with our latest Renna Olsen work-in-progress, Holly Virginia. Nancy is off on a writing retreat, trying to hammer out the ending. (Really, she’s camping in Eastern Oregon but it sounds better if we call it a writing retreat.)

We’ll keep you posted. Thanks for keeping up with us.
Anne, Nancy and Eric