pbray

The good news is that I received the interior page design for THE FIRST BETRAYAL yesterday, and it's gorgeous. There's a wonderful lizard on the title page, and as the graphic next to the chapter headings. It's absolutely perfect. The folks at Bantam do a great job.

The bad news is that I'm here to tell you about this. I had been scheduled to fly down to Fort Lauderdale today to visit my brother, his wife, and my two nieces. But Fort Lauderdale is right in the path of Tropical Storm Katrina, and the odds of my flight making it down there were pretty grim. So I had to cancel today's trip and reschedule.

Disappointed, but that's the way things go. Better to reschedule now than to get stuck en route and burn up a valuable vacation day going nowhere.

Received the royalty statements from Bantam in yesterday's mail, along with a nice check. The royalty statements from my previous publisher were virtually incomprehensible, containing almost no detail, and were usually weeks (if not months) late. While I was with them they changed the royalty software at least three times, as I recall, and each time the change to new software created delays and confusion.

On the other hand the Bantam statements are fun. Pages of detail. For example, since Devlin's Luck has had three different cover prices, I get separate pages showing the performance at the $5.99, $6.50 and $6.99 cover prices.

There's tons of data, with details by month, so I could make graphs to chart out the sales history against time for each book, allowing me to think deep thoughts about the selling patterns of a multi-book series, or perhaps how publicity efforts impacted sales.

Will I do any of this deep analysis? Hell no. That kind of stuff consumes me during the day job, and the last thing I need to do is start cranking spreadsheets at night. But it's nice to know I could, if I wanted to.