We’re supposed to top 100 degrees Fahrenheit for three straight days this week, so another heat wave is on the way here in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. I’m writing this from my back patio, where it’s a pleasant 80 degrees, a bit warm but nice in the shade. I’m hoping this is the last major heat wave of the summer, but experience tells me there are more hot days ahead before the cooler Fall weather arrives in earnest. And of course, if we listen to climate scientists (and we should), who knows what kind of weather extremes we’ll see going forward.
The second Karen Pantelli book, Lethal Beauty, is out in the world. Those are my author copies up there pictured above. While I sell far, far more ebooks these days than print books, I have to admit that the former bookstore owner in me still loves holding that print copy in my hand. Even after publishing a couple dozen books, it never gets old. More familiar, maybe. But never old.
For those of you who read the book and left a review somewhere, thank you. Even for those of you who didn’t like the book and wrote a review somewhere, I appreciate you too, because in a world where there are somewhere in the vicinity of 17 million ebooks on Amazon alone, more than half of which have not sold a single copy,* I appreciate that someone would care enough one way or another to share their opinion about it. Attention is the new coin of the realm, as they say, and if someone gave some of their finite attention to something I created, I am very grateful.
I wish more writers thought this way. Heck, I wish I thought this way more of the time, but paraphrasing what my friend Kristine Kathryn Rusch once told me, most writers are a combination of ego and insecurity. And why wouldn’t we be? It takes ego to put something out in the world and think someone should read it. And only a writer who never risks making any part of themselves vulnerable would not occasionally feel insecure. That’s not the kind of writer I want to be, at any rate. Call me whatever you like, but just don’t call me bland.
In any case, I’m writing something a little bit different right now, a book aimed at younger readers (and as I like to say, the young at heart), then I’ll be back to my cranky friend Garrison Gage for a bit. More soon.
*While 17 million may seem like a gross exaggeration, it might even be on the low side. Amazon does not make finding this information easy, but I arrived at this with some deft Google searching, both including terms that appear on every Kindle page and then excluding those that have ranks (since only ebooks that have sold a copy have a Kindle rank). Amazon’s Kindle ranks go up to about 7 million right now. I was frankly astonished that so many books haven’t sold a copy . . . until I started looking at them. Yikes. But still, they couldn’t even sell a single copy to their own mother? A more important question is, do I have too much time on my hands?
