When I got up this morning that planter box was a small pile of lumber in my garage and the 450 pounds of dirt inside of it were in my car in the driveway, so I figure I’ve accomplished all necessary Grown Up Shit for the weekend.  Note the post hole digger in the background; the posts in the corners are six inches deep in the ground, so the box ain’t going nowhere nohow.  (Also note that one two cubic foot bag of soil claims to weigh 40 pounds.  This is bullshit; maybe if it’s completely bone dry, and this soil was very definitely not bone dry.  I’m estimating 75 lbs. per bag based on being too lazy to just weigh the shit and feeling like the internet’s estimate of 12o lbs. is insanely high.)

Anyway, point is, soon there will be tomatoes growing in here.  I like tomatoes.  They’re tasty.  And that, shit, I still have to mow, so I guess I’m not done with Grown Up Shit after all.  God, I hate outside.

I made Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 free again yesterday and didn’t tell anybody.  This was an experiment; I wanted to get some idea of how many sales/downloads I would get absent my own promotional efforts, if I just let Amazon and the whims of the Internet determine how many copies moved.  There’s probably some interference happening from the day of the week, although I’m not sure whether Amazon would be busier on a Wednesday than a Saturday.  (I am less likely to order from Amazon on the weekend because Sundays add an extra day for stuff to get to me; I don’t know if other people think like I do.  The Internet seems to think that Wednesday is slower than Saturday.)

Anyway, point is: there were 84 downloads on the free day earlier this week, which I hyped heavily and repeatedly on every online venue I had available to me.  Yesterday, with literally no promotion whatsoever, there were 21 downloads– all of which, presumably, were to people unknown to me, since unless someone from the blog or from Twitter or whatever just happened to click through and notice it, there’s no reason for anyone to have known about it.

This tells me that Amazon is not going to help me very much with promotion.  This also tells me that I’m probably going to have to invest in some sort of paid advertising if I want sales/downloads to grow beyond the people I have immediate access to– because the first 100 or so copies downloaded (free or otherwise) appear to have gone almost entirely to people either from the blog or from my actual life, which means that my supply of additional humans who I know that might download my book is probably dwindling.  The next time I do this I’ll keep it free for a couple of days and see what happens on day #2 of the promotion.  Don’t hold your breath, though; I’m likely not going to make it free again until I make back what I paid for the cover, which will take a couple more sales if I don’t pay attention to the fact that I have to pay taxes and maybe another ten if I do.

I feel like there was one more thing I wanted to blog about today, so there may be yet another post later tonight.  Otherwise, enjoy the rest of your Sunday.