Once a quarter, I gather all of my spreadsheets, run all of my reports, and calculate the royalties owed my wonderful authors. Considering that BooksForABuck.com sells directly, through Fictionwise, Mobipocket, All Romance eBooks, the Kindle Store, Amazon itself (for paper books), Amazon's Advantage program (for a few of our older paper titles), and we're adding more distribution, this can get a little complicated. So, I always assume it'll take me an hour or so but it takes all day. Today was that day for the 1st quarter--and I didn't even finish. I've got our two anthologies to go. I'll do those tonight or tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, my work is being slowed by my ongoing battle with a virus--something that Microsoft's live scan doesn't detect.

The fun thing about royalties is paying them (sort of fun). Actually, the fun thing is giving the news to my authors that people are reading and buying their books. Obviously, this is more fun when a lot of people are buying and reading and less fun when that number is small. The numbers vary widely but were down for the quarter. The weak economy is hurting even little BooksForABuck.com. I did take a break from royalties to do my little critique group with Karen--who's loved every scene I've given her before now but had some problems with today's. I think maybe I need to do some scene re-arranging. I'm more and more sympathetic with poor Jane Graves's approach to writing--it's painful.

I finished a couple more books--adding to my to be reviewed list. Wednesday tends to be impossible so look for reviews on Thursday.

I'm going to make TOUGH LOVE by Amy Eastlake the www.BooksForABuck.com book of the day. When a reporter visits a prison, she sees a chance for some Pulitzer-winning research. The prisoner she settles on, though, sees her attention as certain death. And the attraction between them is something neither wants. Available in HTML, Adobe Acrobat PDF, eReader, and Microsoft Reader formats). Check it out here: www.booksforabuck.com/rompages/tough_love.html . Here's the cover (cover design by Jane Graves).

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