What an amazing five months it's been...

Last June, I was worried about how I was going to pay the bills. Some friends encouraged me to self-publish my books on Amazon and Smashwords. I was terrified. I didn't think there was any way I could learn the formatting, and then I worried that no one would want my books. But I buckled down and figured out how to format and published Lean on Me, my very first book and Golden Heart finalist. It sold a few copies but it wasn't setting the world on fire. Then I published Undercover Vices, followed by Satisfaction Guaranteed. The last one caught on and sales started to rise.

In between getting the books up, I had to learn to use Twitter, had to force myself out of my shell and start interacting with people, had to join a couple of groups to learn promotion. Satisfaction Guaranteed sales kept rising. I finished Lone Star Justice and put it up. People were beginning to complain that Perfectly Satisfied wasn't available so I started writing it while working 60-70 hours a week at the day job. Keep in mind that I hadn't written a book from scratch in quite some time, so it was a big deal for me, even though it's a novella.

Satisfaction Guaranteed hit the #1 spot for novellas on Amazon and sales kept rising. Sales of the other books increased as well. Finally, in the month of October, I reached the point in my sales where I felt comfortable enough to make another major change--I told the hubby he could retire. I'll still work for a while, but I'm younger and I spent 5 years at home doing nothing but writing, so it's his turn.

I finally finished Perfectly Satisfied and uploaded it yesterday. I don't know if it will sell like Satisfaction Guaranteed did, but I hope it will. I hope that sometime in the near future I can quit the day job and go back to writing full time. But in the meantime, I'm pretty much in awe of how my life has changed. I've published 5 books, and I'm working on another. I've gone from being depressed about our finances to being hopeful. And I've gone from not writing at all to writing pretty much every day.