There's a few random things going on.
Thing #1: The paperback books are gone!
Exciting, isn't that? That's because I redid the covers--CreateSpace now takes your books off the market until the new covers are OK'd.
They didn't used to do that. Changing covers is free with them, and I think they got tired of indecisive people changing their covers a gazillion times. So now you have to go on a time out so that you can think about what you've done.
I also got my first payment for paper books, like, ever. So I do occasionally sell paper books--I even sold a large-print copy! But it doesn't happen enough for the time out to bother me. The other impact is that if you search for Trang on Amazon, the large-print cover shows up. Eh--still don't care.
Thing #2: The paperback books are still gone!
I got the proofs back from CreateSpace today, and oy. It's a bunch of piddly getting-the-hang-of-GIMP stuff that needs to be fixed on all the covers. Crap like, if you scale the jacket copy to make it the right size, it's going to be blurry.
So, that will be tomorrow's task. Believe it or not, I was actually reading through Trials today in preparation to (gasp!) start writing again, but that will have to wait until after the covers are sorted. Still, what I read today didn't suck, so that was nice....
Thing #3: There's a new tag!
I went ahead and made a tag for the posts on music. I'm not trying to turn this into a music blog, but from an industry perspective, there are a lot of similarities--musicians basically went through what writers are going through now a decade ago, so their experiences can be instructive. (The "audio" tag will still be used for audiobook-related entries. Presumably I'll start making those again, someday.)
Thing #4: Speaking of covers....
OK, this isn't a thing of mine, but Isobel Carr has a nice post up about making a cover for a historical romance. That's a genre where cover expectations are fairly rigid and potentially expensive, but although Carr hired people to do her cover, she approached it as a learning experience (imagine!) and wound up with some good pointers for those who can't afford to do much more than jazz up stock photos.
I should add that there does seem to have been an uptick in sales since I uploaded the new covers. It's not a huge jump, but hey, I spent a lot of time on those covers, I want to believe it was worth doing!