It’s available at Amazon. The paperback edition will be available in the next month or two.

So, how do I feel now?

RELIEVED!!! I put a lot of pressure on myself to “get it right” for my readers and I truly hope that I have, because they deserve it. I may not have the number of fans that the NYT Bestsellers do, but my readers are every bit as awesome.

The day I uploaded Postman, I sent an email announcement to folks who had read 4 Gigs of Trouble and emailed to tell me so. Within twenty minutes (no kidding, twenty minutes) of sending one of those emails, I got a reply: “I got it for my Kindle! Can’t wait to read it!”

The next day, I got a reply from another 4 Gigs reader: “I’ve downloaded to Kindle and started reading.” She promised to let me know what she thought, as I’d asked in my email announcement. And she did, a day later, telling me it was “fun, exciting,” and that she was looking forward to the next one.

Ah, those words: The. Next. One.

I tell myself not to even start thinking about The Next One until I’ve delivered the Postman in paperback. But in the back of my head…there’s this foggy vision…it involves an airplane and disappearing passengers and…

COMING SOON:

If you’re in the area, drop in!

And then today, despite that I’d fallen off my blog
wagon, I got a comment from a reader. No, really, a READER. She didn’t want to
sell me Viagra or SEO service and her English was terrific! And so I thought,
it’s time to crawl back on this horse. (Sorry I switched metaphors, but at
least I kept it to farm equipment and animals.)

Thanks BookRooster!

So, how’d the February KDP free experiment go? Moderately OK.
A couple thousand copies of 4 Gigs were downloaded free, which spurred some
sales during the month of February. Some sales, as in dozens not hundreds.

So I tried it again on March 11, figuring I had
nothing to lose. The results were shockingly different, and I have no idea why.
If you’re old enough to remember, or if you watch TV Land or RetroTV, call it
the Fickle Finger of Fate. Whatever.

On March 11, over 22,000 copies of 4 Gigs of Trouble were
downloaded free. At around 13,000 my husband said, “Congratulations. I think.”
I felt the same way. What if there were only 22,000 people in the entire world
that might even vaguely want to read my book? There would be no market for any future
sale of it, ever.

Not so. (Whew!)

By hitting #2 in the Top 100 Free and #1 in
Mystery/Thriller Free, the free downloads powered the Amazon algorithms and 4
Gigs got attention after it went off free. That attention resulted in over 1300
actual sales. As I posted in Dave Kazzie’s blog, that’s hardly stratospheric.
John Grisham probably sneezes that many sales. But for me? Compared to my
former abode in the basement, 1300 sales in five days feels pretty high-rise to
me!

I know the promo push won’t power sales for long. I’m
noticing a definite slowdown in sales today, after five days of fairly robust
movement. But that’s OK. I’m thrilled and grateful.

And completely mystified.

Sign me up for crazy.

I’d heard about using Amazon’s free eBook promotion to
help catapult a book higher in the sales rankings, where the book could stand a chance to
be seen by customers trolling the bestseller lists. From what I’d read, such
promotions had worked surprisingly well for some authors. I’d been considering
giving it a try…someday.

And then, today, I read this, from Dave Kazzie’s blog. It
made me ask myself: what am I waiting for?

So I did it.

Want 4 Gigs of Trouble for FREE? It’s going to be 100% off on February 1
and February 2, from the only place you can get the eBook, Amazon.com. Now that’s what I call a sale.

My number crunching told me I had to give it a shot, so
last week I removed my ebook from all other e-tail sites, verified they were “Item
not found” when searched/buy button hit, and sent an email to my wonderful
webmaster to change the info on my website. For at least the next 90 days, 4
Gigs of Trouble is an Amazon eBook exclusive. I enrolled it in the Select
program this morning.

We’ll see if this affects my sales and I’ll the share the
outcome here. Now, back to writing the next book.

I’ve read a lot of the “other Clark” (Mary Higgins), but
hadn’t read anything by Mary Jane. Of course you can’t go to an author program
without having read the author! So I checked out the first book in her wedding
cake series, To Have and to Kill. Because I’m an eBook only reader of fiction
now, I was happy to get the book from my local library’s eCollection.

Anybody out there with a nasty cold right now? Both my
husband and I are fighting one and I decided the perfect prescription was a
warm bed, a cold Diet Coke (everyone’s got some kind of addiction), my ball of
purring fur snuggled next to me, and…a good book. I powered up my Kindle Fire
and jumped into Ms. Clark’s wedding cake.

Yum.

The book was like the airy, sweet confection the main
character, Piper Donovan, makes. No spoilers here, so let me just say, it’s a
cozy—perfect for me as I battled my sniffles. It kept me engaged, and guessing,
until the end.

As a librarian, I love that fiction is a buffet with
something for everyone’s taste-of-the-moment. Sometimes you crave a thick
steak, like Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. Sometimes you long for tangy salad,
like Darcie Chan’s The Mill River Recluse. And then there’s the time you need
something that goes down easy, comforting and sweet. A time when you want a mystery
thick enough to keep you turning pages—or tapping your eReader screen—and light
enough to soothe. For those times, I heartily recommend a nice piece of wedding
cake.

For more about Mary Jane Clark’s Wedding Cake mysteries,
visit her site here.