So around a year ago Google froze my account (along with several hundred thousand other people, if memory serves) for about a week. Last Sunday my Gmail account froze up and it's still out of order a week later. Fortunately, last year I got smart and backed everything up on Hotmail, so this has been less of a problem than it might have been, but I think I've pretty much had enough of Gmail. Too bad; it worked beautifully for years.
March has been fairly blah; sales are down from February although I really can't complain as I'm still headed for several hundred dollars at the end of the month. Nowhere near many of the indie authors out there, but it's still amazing for me considering what I was pulling in a year ago. And it's simple economics that things like this only go up, never down, right? :)
My breakthrough for the month--hell, the year--was that yesterday I found out how to set up a macro in Word to go through and replace all my italicized text with html markers. Previously I had to go through the Word doc page by page and insert the markers myself (truth be told, until very recently I was doing so in a text document until I realized that I could do it much easier working directly in Word), but invariably I would forget to insert an end tag and thus screw up my formattting--something I wouldn't see until I was using the Kindle previewer. So for my second novel, just this process of formatting my italicized text took hours. Now, however, I should be able to have it done automatically, error-free, in literally seconds. Huge improvement.
I released my second novel last month and I can see what Konrath, et al. have said: there's more money in novels than in other lengths of work. Of course, the majority of my sales have come from my other works simply because I have more of them (I only have two novels up, versus over twenty shorts, novellas and collections), but looking at the income per title, the novels are clearly way ahead. So far in March I've been selling two per day (not two each yet, unfortunately, but a total of two novels daily) from all channels combined.
