Written Wednesday...

I sold four books today. That's nice, but in itself not why I'm blogging.

At the end of the day, I felt blessed not by the purchases themselves, but the various routes people took to get their hands on my book.

Book #1: A good friend and colleague had asked for a copy several weeks ago, so I slipped it into his box at work. He showed up this morning, requesting a signature on the book for his nephew and a second book for himself. Having such support from a person I see nearly every day, whom I count among the reasons I love my day job? It's proper cool.

Book #2: My mother met me in Willmar to help me set up a table at the regional Education Minnesota (Go union!) Fall Drive-in. I wasn't allowed to sell books, but I could give out information to teachers about Skyping with me, getting free Kindle versions of the books for classroom use and discounts on class-set purchases, and such. The very first woman to approach our table squealed in glee, "Oh! I just bought that book from Amazon and it arrived this week!" (So she was the one, I thought.) We had a nice chat about how she'd heard of the book, which was a conversation she'd been in where others told her it was a wonderful read and recommended it to her. I blushed. I felt humbled. And proud. Random people in Morris are chatting about this little project on which I embarked a few years ago... And they liked it. Wow.

Book #3: Meanwhile, the mother of a current student, who is "me" for all intents and purposes at a neighboring district as she teaches the same curriculum there as I teach here, asked me to slip her a copy surreptitiously and vowed to send a check along tomorrow via the aforementioned student (her daughter). She is an amazing teacher -- one for whom I have so much respect and admiration. I don't know how people do my job and always have a perfect haircut and run marathons and raise families, but they do. And they do it well. She is such a person.

Book #4: The phone rang after 9:00. My first thought was, this will be a phone solicitor. Do I even want to crawl out from under the covers to check? On the off chance that it was NOT a phone solicitor, I did manage the crawling bit, and was delighted to see a local number on the caller i.d. Turns out it was a retired teacher who wanted a copy of the second book for her grandson in North Dakota. She offered to drop off a check at the high school in the morning if I'd leave her a copy in the office.

So. I've done a fairly meager amount of marketing, resulting in fairly meager sales. But each sale is a story that I enjoy hearing and making happen.

PS I tried having a nonpublicized "free" Kindle day last week, just to see the difference between the first free day, on which 238 copies of the book were downloaded, and what would happen when I didn't do any promoting. In other words, I wondered approximately how many of the first free day's "sales" were random ones from Kindle owners trawling the free books list and nabbing whatever sounded interesting. Turns out that number is 40. This means that most -- 200ish -- of my giveaways on the first day were from loyal friends and supporters. How cool is that?