Pushing it like it's crack, yo

OMG. So back when the book came out I sent in a copy to the San Francisco Book Festival, a kind of book competition for independent publishers. I got word yesterday that it took runner-up in its category! Yay! The only thing is...I'm looking at the list of winners and there's a wildly differing number of Honorable Mentions in each category. Fiction has like twelve. Some categories don't have any. I strongly suspect that they named a winner and a runner-up, and then any other book that was entered got an Honorable Mention. Which means that in my category, there were only four entries.

But I don't care. I'll take it. I'll also be entering the New York Book Festival this month.

In the meantime I'm working on my Amazon.com addiction. Addiction to refreshing my sales rank, that is. I'm looking into some kind of a twelve-step program. But it looks like the book has reached some kind of self-propelling critical mass. At the start, it was at #200K, then at #300K, then it'd come up to #80K, and such. The highest I've seen it is #13K, which meant #6 in the Gay Fiction bestsellers. But the last week or so it never falls below #100K, and mostly bounces around between #15K and #60K, keeping it on the bestsellers most of the time. To me this means there's people buying it fairly regularly, every time the rank bumps up, and the more it stays on that bestseller list the more people will see it.

I'm also becoming really glad to be with Dreamspinner. Based on what I see and what I'm hearing from readers, DSP is getting a real reputation among m/m readers for publishing good quality books that are about more than the steamy mansex (not that there's anything wrong with that). I think the strong reviews and sales for recent releases like Sean Kennedy's "Tigers and Devils" and Isabelle Rowan's "A Note in the Margin" have really done a lot for the label's cache. I'd like to think I helped a little, too.

More reviews coming in, all of them very strong. I'm collecting them here. I'm also kind of amazed at the reader reviews...5.00 average over 6 reviews on Amazon, and 5.00 average out of a whopping 10 reviews on Goodreads.

So now...I have to think about more writing. I'm writing the sequel. I've started a focus group of beta readers who'll be reading as I write. I've got a new Web story half done. I have a half-formed idea for a non-Zero-related novel as well, we'll see if that goes anywhere.

I may need oxygen here pretty soon. Oh, and I might be going to MediaWest in a few weeks.

I need a nap.