72015

Made it to 72015. Didn't get as much done this week as I would have liked because of the two book signings. The booksignings were important, though, and I'm told that a significant chunk of stock was sold from both stores, and I have a report from the Cary Barnes and Noble that sales of my book have been strong leading up to this Tuesday's signing.

I feel caught in a Catch-22. The time frame for writing Dragon Forge is so tight that I have to stay at home and work on it most nights of the week. I'd love to travel around more and do more signings, but finding the time is a real problem for me. On the other hand, if I don't travel around and do more signings, am I undercutting Bitterwood's chances at success? At my signing last Thursday, I was told the store had ordered about fifty books in advance of the signing and sold half from the in store display leading up to the event. I sold another five or six that night, and signed all the rest, and Angela, the community relations manager, seemed pretty confident they would sell out of these in a few weeks.

Selling fifty books from a single store seems pretty good to me. I mean, it's not Harry Potter numbers, but if I could get out there and visit twenty bookstores in the next couple of months, that would be a thousand books sold that might not have sold if I hadn't made the effort. Realistically, my schedule is going to limit me to stores within an hour or so of my house... I doubt there are a dozen, let alone twenty. Still, nights when I stay home and write, I feel guilty that I'm not out there doing signings. Yet, nights that I'm out doing signings, I find myself feeling the pressure of words unwritten.

Of course, if my past self were here right now, he'd dope slap me for complaining about this. This is exactly the sort of problem I dreamed of having for well over a decade, to be under contract for multiple books. And, 72015 words written in under three months is nothing to sneeze at. I just need to schedule as many signings as possible, keep punching the keys, and think about sleeping sometime in early 2008.