Overwhelmed again!

It's always a crapshoot, according to other indie authors I've spoken to, when you upload a book. It could be ignored. It could do OK. Or it could totally take off.  I always wanted other people to read what I wrote because I enjoyed reading what other people wrote, if that makes sense.  I'm hypercritical of myself, so it never occurred to me that people would actually buy my stories and like them. I'm not sure why.

Then I uploaded Wildfire.  I get royalties from it, which is super cool.  Not a lot, but enough that it has paid for the shutterstock photos, part of my photoshop subscription, part of my website upkeep, my web domain, and part of my ISBN numbers. Yes, I do my own covers. It's an even more humbling experience than writing. I'm not artistic. Anyway, people have read it and they like it! I don't have a ton of reviews yet, but the ones I do have are positive. I redid my search terms recently and it kind of took off.  For me, anyway. It hangs out in the 100-200's in the Amazon.com rankings for its genre. Except for on amazon.de, where it's at a solid #30. Awesome!

Well, then I uploaded Common.  I anticipated a similar response to Wildfire.  The books have a different voice. Common is slower paced and not quite as "racy." I figured I'd get a lot of, "Is there a plot?" comments when I got them. Well maybe they're coming because Common took off like crazy. It gotten as high as #26 in its genre on Amazon.com and is currently in the 60's-80's (#30 on amazon.de... Yay Germans! Danke shon! Darn blogger won't make an umlaut...). It's currently ranked higher (at least for the next hour) than Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. ROFL at that one. I have also finished paying for everything I've spent bringing these books to my readers, which is amazing! Which means I might be able to get fancy with the covers for Earthquake (The Program #2) and Rarity (I think that's what Lora Fletcher #2 will be called, but don't quote me on it).

So.... THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!!! All of you strangers who have read my books and are seeming to like them are phenomenal.

Map issue resolved

I love how Amazon has people working on such trivial matters at 4:45 in the morning!

Anyway, the corrected content has been uploaded and should go live sometime today. Thank you so much for making Common #26 in the teen fantasy category in spite of this! It's always daunting to click that upload button.  No matter how many times you review something or how many people edit for you, it seems like there's always something that gets missed. I found like 15 errors in Wildfire when I read it on my phone (yes, I read my own work because when you read in a different format it changes your whole perspective), but this error in Common had me totally freaking out. I may not have the most readers (yet), but I don't want to disappoint anyone. Thank you again for your patience.

Map issue

There appears to be an issue with the map. Trying to resolve it with Amazon right now.  Thank you for your patience!!

Common is live!

It's available on Kindle and KU now! Createspace (paperback on Amazon) is still in process. If you have a KU subscription, it's free with that. If you do not have KU, it's $2.99 on Kindle and will be $11.78 as a paperback. The weird price was not my idea!! Amazon sets the prices based on the length of the book and its content.  Since Common is set in a fantasy world, it has a map, so that makes publishing a tad more complex.

Thank you so, so, so much for making this my best day yet for sales and KU pages read. I am overwhelmed by your kindness and generosity!!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06WVVPSF3/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487809862&sr=1-1&keywords=andrea+irving

I have a cover!

Well, for the kindle version anyway. Still working on the paperback version, which is always more difficult. And I'm still in the midst of edits.  But I figured I'd share. Enjoy!

MIA

Sorry I've been a little (a lot) MIA for the past month. My goal is to try and update this every couple weeks at a minimum, and I'm falling well short of that :(

I'm on a second edit of Book 1 in the Lora Fletcher Chronicles. I'm now 99.999999999999% sure it will be called Common. Things can always change.  I'm not great with titles, so... I'd be further along with this, but the new semester hit me harder than I expected.  Plus both my boys are doing 2 sports and wow is that taking up a lot of time! A round of applause to my husband because the brunt of that is falling on him. I'm really blessed to have him in my life. He contributes way more than I do to our everyday needs and continues to support me in my goals and dreams on top of all the chaos I bring to our lives. Anyway, I have a cover photo for this which I really like. It's sitting down and using Photoshop now to make it into an actual cover that is getting to me. I'm not great at Photoshop, but meh. You do what you gotta do.

I've made a little bit of progress on Book 2 of The Program. I'm still pretty sure it's going to be called Earthquake. The majority of the progress, I think, will come at the end of April. And then into the summer. I don't think I am going to teach over the summer, but you never know. If I don't, I will have more time for writing and editing.

Thank you for your continued support. I've about broken even on my costs to publish Wildfire, which is pretty darn exciting, considering I have had zero advertising. Advertising costs money, so I rely a lot on word of mouth, Amazon and Goodreads reviews, and people scrolling down and checking out what other people have viewed and bought after they read other YA fantasy books. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Until next time...