Updates & Rankings

Sick update: Drue is doing better today, but both girls are still in their pajamas and won't be leaving the house. I hate sickness. I do not love being stuck in the house. But so is life.

Weather update: We woke up to a stormy sky, then a quick snowstorm; now it's a bright, sunny day out there. I've learned that "Oklahoma weather" is not so special as we might have thought, for in Delaware we had "Delaware weather," and now in Michigan, oh, do we have "Michigan weather." I think Michigan weather is the most dramatic of all. A snow storm followed by a sunny day...and then probably another snowstorm later today? That's pretty awesome.

Back to work. I'm ready to start sending out letters but waiting on pages. I realized last Friday that the first few pages of TMI just aren't up to par. The editing schedule at Tate was such that I only had the chance to edit a book ONCE. My "second look" at the book was really just me going through and cleaning up my edits plus the author's corrections/edits. I didn't have a chance to actually reread the work.

Disgraceful.

So as I've gone back through TMI, which today, thanks to new metadata, is having a great rank day at Amazon (more on this), I've noticed areas where I would have changed or challenged things had I had the chance to read through the book more than once.

This begs the question: was I ever really a professional editor? Okay, let's not go there, because clearly, to some extent, I was. I just worked at a company that didn't have, shall we say, the best business model.

Back to the point: Friday night, as I was finishing everything up and readying to send queries and pages out early this week, I realized that those first few pages I would be sending needed more work. I was thrust back into grad school and heard professors telling me: the pages need to be alive, PERFECT. But there were places in the text where I stopped reading to think about what could make the text better! Wait...I don't want any agent, ever, to stop reading anything - no, no, no. They must want to keep reading. Therefore...more work.

Amazon update: I sent new metadata out to the book's publisher, and I'm assuming they've updated it on Amazon and B&N, because hello, it is working for us. This morning, TMI is ranked 213,756 in Books. WHOA. Whoa whoa whoa. Yes, please. And thank you.

To work!