Whew. It’s been six days since November 1 hit and Rocktober ended and I’m still hungover as anything. What a month! What great books!

I hope you guys found some; there sure were enough of them.

I’m busy downloading Rock Fiction that many authors and friends were kind enough to send me. So kind, I don’t know how I’m going to get it all read — let alone which order to read it all in. Right now, I’m grateful for my Nook, which will save me from lugging all the books around and deciding which to read by using that old method of throwing them down the steps and reading whichever lands near the top ’cause I’m lazy.

Lots of Rock Fiction surprises await during the upcoming year, so stay tuned. The goal is to use the Rock Fiction genre as a lynchpin for some really cool changes and opportunities. After all, no one knows Rock Fiction or champions the genre more than yours truly (although Deena at e-Book Builders? Wow.)

Mid-month, I took a look at how the Smashwords Summer/Winter July sale was going for me. The results were interesting, so if you missed it, head on over and see how the month was shaping up.

Now that the month is over, I have even more fascinating facts to report.

First is that even though I have one new title out since last year’s sale, I sold eight fewer books. This is despite having two books for free that had never been free before, including Trevor’s Song.

Demo Tapes 1 and 3 tied for top seller. If you recall, mid-month, Trevor’s Song was tops. It actually came in fourth of my six books, trailed only by the standalone short story, Mannequin, and my non-free title, King Trevor.

Conventional wisdom holds that novels sell better than short stories, especially short story anthologies, and the Demo Tapes are, I think, marked pretty clearly that they are short stories. Not only are they short stories, they all appeared on The Meet and Greet in a less-edited fashion.

I don’t know. I don’t get it. Maybe the opening of Trevor’s Song is too rough for people; he’s too hard to like. Maybe you really do need that intro of the Demo Tapes to come back for the novel. I’m not sure. Maybe it’s that The Demo Tapes were more visible, since more people write novels than short stories. Maybe it was the phase of the moon, the severity of the sunspots, the colors of the Northern Lights…

In short, who knows? Only the people who bought the books know for sure what they were thinking, and even if they leave reviews, we may still never know what led them to their purchasing choices. We’ll only know what they thought of their reading experience — and so long as that experience is good, that’s ultimately all that matters. It’s those reviews that help power sales. We all know this.

Which means I’ll wrap up with a big thank you to the people who’ve joined the Trevolution for the first time; a lot of gratitude for the repeat offenders, so to speak; and a reminder to leave even a few words in a review. “I liked this because… but I didn’t like…” Fill in the blanks, folks. That’s all it takes, and us authors will be your fans for life.