I have finally found a kind of groove in my marketing of books, such that people are finally reading them, and that is good, because I find out both what's good and bad. With the short stories, for example, I have nine volumes, and have gone almost fourteen years dropping them in the infinite Amazon sea, with very little actual reader response. But now readers read them, and I am slowly being recognized as a short story writer. Maybe not a great one, but at least a prolific one, one who has nine volumes out there.

I've begun to study the people who run the sites that are most successful, because they are inevitably authors too. By running the sites they get to always have their book up there among the ones that are being chosen, and if their book is chosen and actually read regularly, their ratings stay low, which is another way of saying high (lower numbers are better). They take lots of abuse, though, I'm sure. One thing I've noticed is that if you take a wide swath of writers who are out there trying to plug their own work, not all of them are truthful or even scrupulous. And the site owners carry the brunt of the problem.

One thing I'll say, though, and that is that there is a lot of really good indie stuff out there. There's a lot of crap too, since anyone can publish anything, but I have faith that the cream will move to the top and the whole world will be healthier for letting us indies figure out how to compile the whole thing on our own every time. I feel in many ways like I'm just getting started, and I am. More coming.