THIRTY DAYS OF KINDLE SCOUT – DAY 7

It is Day 7 and KELPIE DREAMS is still on the Hot & Trending list – which is a good thing, I suppose.

It is a little like betting on the stock market or the race track or on life.

One day you are up, the next day you are not as far up as you used to be.

They call that feeling unpredictability. The rare hummingbird of chance flits over your flower garden and waits, unseen.

Ah well – if I had wanted a sure thing I would have attended dental college. I would have learned to pull teeth and worked on my chair-side manner and trained myself to grin and make conversation while I am looking down in the mouth.

Thirty days is a long old sentence.

It can be an awfully long stretch. You start out and you are all – oh, I can do this, this is easy – and then by the end of week one you are that dude going across the desert dropping your belt and your gun and your empty canteen and then by week two you have got your nose planted squarely in the dirt and you are doing a sort of a long drawn-out crawl and you’re so darned tired you are not even bothering to spit out the dirt and you’ve got grains of sand ground into your cavity and by week three you are pretty certain that you have crawled by that particular patch of cactus at least three more times and come the fourth week you’ve stood up again and your eyes are burnt blind from the glare of the sun and you are stumbling across your Facebook page croaking out the words “Nominate me. Nominate me. Nominate me-e-e-e…”

But I am not there yet.

Today I am grinning and optimistic. I have a belly full of leftover Shrove Tuesday pancakes that have not yet begun to taste of ash. I have good dark maple syrup and a tinge of molasses clinging to the follicles of my beard and my blood sugar is yodelling amongst the Alps of ill-health, balanced like a love-sick mountain goat who has not reached his peak.

I’ve got four straight days of Hot & Trending – 101 hours in all, counting the first few days of odds and ends. I am still confident that the book is solid enough to hopefully entice the gods of Kindle Scout to show mercy and to pick up my book for publication.

In the meantime I am working on my other manuscript and I have a rough draft for a Kindle World submission that I want to tackle. The grasshoppers that I call my confidence are happily hopping over tall green grass, unmindful of the bird shadow that crosses above their head.

While I continue to wax philosophically – why don’t you have a look at this Youtube video to learn a bit more about Kindle Scout – this time DIRECTLY from the General Manager of the Kindle Scout Program.