Monday morning blues (and greens)

Regular readers couldn't have failed to notice ... no post yesterday. For the first time ever. I just spoiled my perfect record of posting every day since June 20th '08 ... well, rats. I had an extremely narrow "window of opportunity" through which to launch a blog post, and when it came around the wifi connection was jacking around. No Internet connection.

It's not till your connection goes down that you realize the extent to which we have become Internet dependent these days. No connection?? Count three, two, one, and we're ready to spit the dummy. I certainly was. No blog post? [screaming sound issuing from general Adelaide area]

Not that there was actually anything much worth blogging about yesterday -- but it's the principle of the thing.

Today, however, there's something quite nice to report: another title is up at Kindle, and also The Lords of Harbendane has been unstuck. So there are now four Kindle titles:





The next titles in the Kindle Store will be The Swordsman, Aquamarine, Twilight ... and then, the big news.

Next week we'll be having something of a launch, because the whole NARC series will be hitting Amazon, all of a piece. Now ... believe it or not, guys, they're actually there now, but to find them you'd have to go to Amazon and search on Mel Keegan. Next week, we'll be having a full-on launch, including a new webpage, a newsletter, a press release, and so on.

But for regular readers ... well, check this out, folks:



That's pretty cool. Right after we launch the paperback range, we'll organize the Kindle copies -- and Mobipocket, too.

So it's going to be busy in the next week or so.

Legends is coming along nicely, with getting close to 50 "episodes" online, and I have to admit that lately it's been getting some very nice traffic, with about 35-40% of visitors coming back to read the whole thing. The only thing that surprises and confounds me is that financial support in the way of Google patronage (those pesky swatches of text that you can never get away from, where the publisher gets about a dime when someone, somewhere, clicks one), Amazon shopping, and Paypal $1 donations, is ... weak. It takes (get this) 3,000 page impressions to get a single click on a Google ad, or a donation; and then Ma Goog pays in copper coins for said click.

Anyway -- the experiment continues, but for writers out there who are interested to see how this turns out, here's what we know so far: you'll be lucky to get about $5 in a week from the advertising parked on the site, but (!) the words DOWNLOAD FREE GAY FICTION bring in new readers by the swarms. Significant numbers of them go on to check out your web page, your blog, your landing page, and you'll notice a steep uptick in your sales figures. So ... the advertising is very close to a waste of time, but the volume of potential readers checking you out is quite large, and a number of them, uh, buy books or ebooks. And that is what it's all about.

Legends has been a lot of fun, and it currently maybe 20 posts away from hitting the spot where you're at "Here Ends the First Book of the Fall of the Atlantean Empire." I will be putting it onto hiatus there but the site will stay up perpetually. At that point, I'll properly format the book and put it into all the PDFs and so forth that people need for their gizmos. Also, there'll be artwork -- screensavers, desktops, cards, mugs, mousepads whatever --

And, as I do believe I've mentioned somewhere, my brain is switching gears already. I'm in HELLGATE mode. Seriously. It's Travers, Marin and Vidal going through my gray cells ... and three more delicious dudes never came alive off the page of one of my novels. I'm looking forward very much to finishing out the whole series in one haul -- two books, not three, and each of them about the size of Dangerous Moonlight. Yes, it's going to be a lot of work ... it's also going to be a load of fun.

Then, next year -- back to the Legends project, get that finished. Then ... we'll see.

Right now, I have to run: work. That other four letter word ending in K.

Ciao for now,
MK