Yesterday evening I finally pulled all the elements together to make “Too Old To Play” live at the Kindle store. After I did so, I realized I forgot to put the word count in the description. I like to do that so a potential buyer knows how many words they get for their money, and so there’s no charges of it being a really, really short story for the money. I’ll correct the description tonight. The Kindle instructions say it takes 12 hours for something to go live after submission. That’s down from the 48 hours it used to say. Sure enough, when I looked it up at 7 AM this morning, it was already live, about 11 hours after uploading.

Today I put a notice on my Facebook author page, as well as on my personal Facebook page. I added a promotional post to An Arrow Through the Air. I modified my books available page on this site to list it. With this post I will have completed my internal promotion—that is, those things I can do without going to an outside site. I also added it to my Kindle/Amazon author’s page and to my Author Central page, but have not yet added it to Goodreads. Maybe tonight. I also made announcements at the Ozark Writer’s League and the Christian Authors’ Book Marketing Strategies pages on Facebook. Beyond that, I’m not sure I’ll do a lot for this. In a day or two I’ll mention something that I did a month ago that will give it some publicity.

So now I watch. As of two hours ago I had one sale. Let me check now…still one. I just talked with someone about it at work, and she says she’ll buy it when she gets home and has her Kindle in hands. I’ve had a total of 12 sales of “Mom’s Letter” in the eleven months it’s been out. The “theory of multiple titles” says that the two short stories will feed sales to each other, and that together each one will have better sales than they would have apart. We’ll see if that proves true. Nothing to do but wait and watch, and try not to check the sales board every hour.

Soon, perhaps even tonight, I’ll format it for Smashwords and upload it there. Since it’s a short story that shouldn’t take too much time, and it will then be available in all major e-reader formats. So I do have that small amount of work to do before I will just be waiting and watching.

I’ll still in the waiting period for my query to an agent for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. On the agency website it says if we don’t contact you within 30 days assume it’s a No, but the individual agent’s web site says to assume that after 60 days. Today is day 16, so there’s still quite a lot of waiting to do on that. Meanwhile, the first round of edits is complete, the mss re-printed, and waiting for one more read-through and perhaps a few more edits.

So I’m waiting and watching on two fronts. That doesn’t mean I’m idle though. My next work, The Candy Store Generation, beckons me. I did an hour of research last night, and hope to do two hours of writing tonight. I hope to present it at the next writers group meeting, which will  be either Jan 30 or Feb 6. I would love to have this done in three months, though I may be over-stating my writing capacity. We’ll see.