A funny thing happened yesterday afternoon…

May 28, 2010 – 2:22 PM

I had just finished reading a rather scathing review of Waiting For Spring (How could this person not care about Rachel??? Seriously, hate on Tess all you want. Brian’s predictable? Okay, whatever. But not caring about Rachel? Come on!) and checking my Kindle sales page to see if the negative review had made an impact (it hadn’t) when I decided to head over to Facebook to soothe my wounded soul (okay, maybe it was my ego that was wounded) by starting up my long-neglected Farm Town farm. Before I could don my virtual work gloves, I noticed this item on my news feed:

I’ve been a fan of (or “liked” in the new Facebook terminology) the Kindle page for several months now and always enjoy the snippets of news and links they post, but was (very pleasantly) shocked to see they’d linked MY book. I hadn’t paid, bribed – or even asked anyone very, very nicely – to plug my book there, and yet there it was. Being plugged. I decided to check my Kindle sales page once more, to see if it had had an impact. It had. I’d sold 43 ebooks in twenty minutes. A few minutes later my friend Steve Anderson (who is not only a hottie, but a very good writer) let me know that author J.A. Konrath had used my book as one of 20 examples of why writers don’t need a platform in order to succeed at e-publishing. This surprised me even more because…well, because of this. And this.

I’m not sure if the Kindle page plugged my book because of Konrath’s mention or if it was a coincidence. Either way, the result is that Waiting For Spring is currently ranked #50 on the Kindle bestsellers. I know that a big part of it is the price (.99 is less than a cup of coffee, after all), but I’d like to think the writing has something to do with it, too. I mean, a shitty .99 book is gonna fizzle pretty quickly. But I know that the biggest reason it’s doing so well is reader word-of-mouth. Because of you. Right now I’m a little bit closer to being able to live every writer’s dream, of actually being able to make a living doing something I love so much (although there are quite a few more steps to go before I can Quit My Day Job). And for that I am truly grateful to all of you.