After the fuss dies down

It's been two weeks since i published. After a couple of days of good sales it's settled down to one every couple of days. I've just hit twenty copies sold, which i'm really pleased about.There are a few more expected from facebook contacts who are reading other stuff but the initial burst is over.

When i started down the publishing route, i set some goals -
1) Sell one copy - tick
2) Sell a copy to somebody who's not a friend - tick. The comms department asked me to write a guest blog on the PCT site and people whose name i've seen in emails got in touch and said they'd bought a copy
3) Sell a copy to somebody i don't know - tick
4) Sell a dozen copies - tick
5) Break even - there's still some way to go on that one. I need to sell around 60 copies in the UK to do that. (I've sold a copy on Amazon.com but, unless huge numbers of US readers start buying, i'm unlikely to see that money as Amazon will only pay up once they owe me $100)
6) Get a good, independent, review. I was really pleased to see Jim Graham get a fab review on Republicbot.com. Somebody wrote that writers only feel jealousy when other writers do well, but i really don't think that's true. There's room for all of us. Ross and a couple of other people retweeted about Jim's review so i'm not alone in thinking that. So, as soon as one of my readers puts a good review on Amazon, i'll try and use that as a tool to get a review site to have a look at Echo.

So future sales will be a long haul and i'll need to work at if i'm going to cover my costs and be able to pay Cathy for the cover to book 2

Happily it's not about sales. I wanted to be both a writer and an author. I've ticked the author box now, which makes me happy, but the real pleasure is in being a writer. Book 2, which has the working title Clarke (as in Arthur C Clarke) hasn't progressed too far as i wasn't sure what themes i wanted to explore. But i've had the space to give that some thought and i've got some ideas about that now.

7) Get an actual copy printed - loads of people are raving about Kindle and one person bought a kindle just so they could read it (i'm really flattered - happily they think it's a great thing for their holiday reading as i didn't want Echo to cost them £91). ebooks are great, but i think there's still something about having a book in your hands. Particularly if it's mine.