And so it's over...and now rebegins

Many thanks to all who 'dropped by' for the Open House to download copies of my books.

Was the event successful? By my own standards, happily so. Thousands of copies of my six ebooks found their way to Kindle readers. And, to put this in perspective: in my first event, way back, I gave away 50 copies of The Vanishing Magic of Snow.

But talk about numbers is cheaper than cheap. I also learned some cool lessons, which I'll try out some time next year:
1) Twitter's a useful platform for any writer with more than, say, 10K-20K-plus followers. But we don't achieve results by ratcheting up the volume or the frequency of our promotional Tweets. For occasional special events, followers may tolerate our persistence. But too much will quickly turn into white noise.
2) The World Literary Cafe's Tweet Teams offer a strong alternative to endless streams of rank self-touts: on any given day, one can join a team of ten other writers--each one committed to RT'ing the other nine writers' Tweets. Numbers? If each writer has anywhere from 10,000-30,000 followers...Well, you do the math and you'll see the potential for reaching a huge base of readers.
3) Don't rely on Twitter exclusively. Other venues can help get the word about: free or bargain books. I'll publish a short list of such links soon.
4) Again and again, I have learned that readers have tried my books because they liked my Tweets--especially the pithy wit. They hoped to find the same thing in my books. They responded to my use of Twitter as a form of entertainment--vs. aggressive requests for their dough. Another way of putting this: use Twitter as a form of social engagement. And earn sales by winning hearts.
5) High on my agenda must be maintaining a far greater presence on at least a half-dozen forums: from Amazon Kindle to Goodreads...and on. 
6) Further develop this blog as a happening go-to place for useful information and pure entertainment. Not just talk of You, not MeMe.

I think that'll do it for lessons, for now. Six is enough to begin with.

Now the great adventure rebegins as I have at the second draft of my next Boss MacTavin mystery. Difficult but doable to write daily while working full-time and watering the garden of social media. But I'm in good company with other grizzled gladiators who do the same...and persevere...battling their way through the blues to the cheers.

Thanks for your support.