Oy, what a crazy week.

Obviously, the big news is that Action Figures – Issue Two: Black Magic Women dropped last week. The Kindle version and the print edition hit Amazon within hours of each other, and several copies have already gone out.

I’m hoping to see some brisk business later on as a result of the free giveaway campaign last week. I was hoping to hit 1,000 downloads of book one, but I topped out at 850 — which I will not complain about! I’d call that pretty damn good, considering my avenues for promoting this giveaway were social media and an assortment of free e-newsletters and websites that list freebies.

Those results give me hope that I’ll be able to find ways around Facebook’s recent system changes, which suppress how many people organically see posts by business pages (in order to wring a few more advertising bucks out of them). Since I tap a lot of other social media sites, I should be able to continue to effectively promote myself to potential customers, but the Facebook situation is still annoying as hell, since FB is, for now, the premiere social media site.

More reason to stay positive: I recently did an interview with fellow indie author T. Michelle Nelson (the Lily Drake series) — who will get a reciprocal interview with me soon — did a taping for the show Book Talk with Amy Rachiele (the Mobster’s series), and this summer, I’ll be joining an old friend, T.M. Murphy (the Belltown Mysteries series), in my home town for a group book-signing event. Busy busy busy!

The last thing I need to do here is let everyone know that, on top of the new book, I’m be debuting a new Action Figures short story — as in, right now!

If you haven’t finished reading book two yet, take care of that now, then come on back. If you haven’t read either book, don’t worry: you can read the short without getting totally lost (though you’ll enjoy it more if you’re familiar with the characters already).