As I sit here taking a break from Christmas preparations (today’s arts and crafts section included making 22 wired ribbon bows for the tree with on-sale Christmas ribbon, floral wire, hot glue, and the not really needed assistance of my cat Jemma. Still, 22 tree ribbons for $7.60 — BOOYAH), I decided to take a look at the sales figures for Empress. I’m very happy to note that it’s made sales every day, and it’s sold in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia so far, which means my legion of readers is growing, muwahahahaha.

Then I got down to business and crunched numbers. My entire production cost for the ebook and print book was $120, and advertising, giveaways, tchotchkes et al racked up another $177.56. So far based on the numbers I’ve gotten from Amazon, All Romance eBooks and Smashwords (I can’t see numbers from Smashwords’s partners and won’t get those figures until February at the earliest) income from the book has completely paid for production and 42% of the marketing budget. Considering that I’ve never written high fantasy before in my life, Empress is an MF book so my MM readers probably aren’t going to be interested, and this is the first Nicola M. Cameron outing so those who don’t know me are taking a chance on a “new” author, I’m kinda pleased with this. Yes, it’s not a huge amount of money, but frankly Empress was, as Ramón put it, supposed to be a quota quickie, something I just did to win a challenge. It turned out to be way more popular than I expected, and more and more people are asking for sequels so I should be making more money once Book Two and Three are out in 2016.

Yes, there will be sequels. Yes, I’ll be finishing the Olympic Cove series as well. No, I’m not going to stop writing MM, just expand my horizon a little. And hey, I may even be writing some non-erotic SF novels in 2016 as well! Because sleep is for the weak, muwahahahahaha…

Okay, back to the decorating, tra la…