A couple of observations:

• Releasing a book on the Saturday before Mother’s Day probably wasn’t the smartest marketing move I ever made in my life.  I went through the whole registration process on Amazon thinking that at some point it was going to have me pick a release date for the book to go live and then it became clear that “Okay, you’re published!” was the only option I had left.  Because I have no patience (and had already said, a whole bunch of times, “This weekend!”) I went ahead and did it.  Whee!
• It’s an incredibly heady feeling seeing something you did available on a site like that.  Granted, self-publishing ebooks are kinda Amazon’s ghetto, but it’s still real estate.
• That was a crappy metaphor.
• Current sales rank is #43,315.  Which isn’t very high, until you realize that there are a  few million books on the site.  It gets me wondering how high I’d climb in the rankings after, say, a couple dozen sales.
• There are over 2600 of you, supposedly; read between the lines.  🙂
• One scary thing that happened:  I got an email from Amazon pretty promptly saying that there was content from my book available free on the Web and that I needed to reconfirm they owned the rights or they’d delete the book.  And my account.  Which: yikes.  That said, going through their process and pointing out in an email that the website that was hosting the free content was also linked from the back of the ebook got me a polite email from what appeared to be a human this morning confirming that everything was fine, so I’m gonna go with “I appreciate this service” even though it nearly gave me a heart attack.
• That said, I’ve pulled the first-draft version of BA 5 from the site, both to avoid future potential Amazon drama and because I made some pretty massive revisions in the actual ebook and don’t want both versions floating around.  You can still read the first BA story using the “Look Inside” feature if you like.
• Happy Mother’s Day, if you’re into that.  🙂  I’m making breakfast for folks soon so I won’t be able to babysit the internet as much as I really want to today.
• Who am I kidding, of course I will.
• I have an author page over there now, which actually publishes bits from Twitter and from the blog through RSS.  I am not convinced of the wisdom of allowing them to do this but it’s active at the moment.
• On the non-book front: Kosovo, what’s your deal?   I’ve been chasing hits from you for like three months and you’re starting to hurt my feelings.  I got two hits from Libya this week, ferchrissakes.  Does Libya have better internets than Kosovo?
• Also, I’m thinking of buying a Rams jersey.  I don’t have a favorite pro football team so I might as well be political about it.