So I finally fin­ished Ele­men­tal Assas­sin #5 and shipped it off to my agent to read. Huz­zah! There’s noth­ing quite so sat­is­fy­ing as finally turn­ing in a com­plete manuscript.

Also, a quick update: Some folks have asked, but I don’t have titles for Ele­men­tal Assas­sin #4 or #5 yet or release dates, although I imag­ine both books will come out in 2011. That’s what I’m hop­ing for anyway.

Another quick update: I’ve writ­ten two free short sto­ries to go along with Web of Lies, com­ing out on May 25. I’m going to try to get those posted to the Web site soon. I’ll put up a note here on the blog when they go up.

That’s it for now. Enjoy your weekend!

I’ve talked about Wal­mart and Ama­zon. Now, it’s time to look at all the other places that I buy books — namely Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and eHarlequin.

My book buy­ing at BAM and B&N is pretty much the same. These are the places where I buy the mass mar­ket paper­backs that I’m inter­ested in, mainly because I have a 10 per­cent dis­count card at BAM and get e-mail coupons for the same amount from B&N. So what­ever store I’m in that day gets my business.

As you’ve prob­a­bly guessed by now, I like coupons and dis­counts and deals. My mama taught me never to set­tle for buy­ing some­thing at full price unless you absolutely have to.

That’s one of the rea­sons that I love eHar­le­quin so much. The site has some really great deals prac­ti­cally every week –things like free ship­ping, buy two books, get one free, etc. If you read romance, you should def­i­nitely check out eHar­le­quin. Most of the time, I can get three paper­backs there for around $16-$17, which I think is a pretty awe­some bargain.

And I’ll admit it — I also buy books at my local used book­store. Every two months or so, I’ll sack up all the books that I’ve read, trade them in for store credit, and come home with half a dozen new books to read. Yeah, I know that authors don’t get roy­al­ties on sales from used book­stores, but if I read some­thing, I fea­ture it here on the blog, so I fig­ure that it all evens out in the end.

What about you guys? Where do you like to buy books and why? Share in the comments.

So in con­tin­u­ing my lit­tle minis­eries about buy­ing books, I thought I would turn my atten­tion to Ama­zon today.

Ah, Ama­zon. So many prod­ucts avail­able in one place. With a click of a but­ton, they’re mine, no mat­ter what time of night or day it is. I have to admit that I love Ama­zon — free ship­ping on orders more than $25, no sales tax, and they have great dis­counts on hard­backs and trade paper­backs. Not so much on mass mar­ket paper­backs, though.

And, of course, like other authors, I obses­sively check the rank­ing of my books on Ama­zon to see where they stand. Since Spider’s Bite came out on Jan. 26, my Ama­zon rank­ing has pretty much stayed above the 10,000 mark, which I’ve been thrilled about. I’ve even cracked the top 100 con­tem­po­rary fan­tasy books a time or two and been as high as in the 3,000s.

But you know what? It’s only trans­lated to about 500 copies sold at Ama­zon, accord­ing to my edi­tor. I have to say that this sur­prised me. I’ve always won­dered what the Ama­zon rank­ings really mean (if any­thing) and how many books they actu­ally sell. Appar­ently, since Ama­zon sells every­thing, they don’t nec­es­sar­ily sell a lot of one par­tic­u­lar thing, if that makes sense.

Spider’s Bite has sold more copies at Wal­mart, Barnes & Noble, and Bor­ders group than at Ama­zon. Of course, I’m sure that more pop­u­lar authors sell more copies on Ama­zon, espe­cially as more and more folks buy Kindles.

In recent weeks, I’ve also signed up to become an Ama­zon Affil­i­ate. That means when you click the Ama­zon link to one of my book cov­ers, go to the site, and buy the book, that I get a small per­cent­age of the sale. I’ve made about $8 so far this year. You have to accu­mu­late $10 before you can cash it in for an Ama­zon gift card. I’m not sure what I’ll do if (or when) I hit that $10 mark. I might do a give­away here on the blog or some­thing. We’ll see.

Any­way, these are just some of my gen­eral thoughts on buy­ing books at Ama­zon. What do you guys like or dis­like about Ama­zon? Share in the comments.

So, as some of you know, Spider’s Bite is avail­able at Wal­mart, so I’ve been check­ing out my local Wal­marts to see if they have they book. Some of them do, some of them don’t. But it’s got me think­ing about books and Wal­mart lately.

I think that if Wal­mart really wanted to, they could give Ama­zon and Barnes & Noble a run for their money in the book busi­ness. (Or maybe they already do, I don’t know). I never used to look at the books at Walmart. I was there to get gro­ceries or office sup­plies or what­ever – not books.

So you can imag­ine how sur­prised I was to dis­cover that most paper­backs are at least $2 cheaper at Wal­mart than they are at B&N and other book­stores. It’s like a whole new world has opened up to me! I bought Plea­sure of a Dark Prince by Kres­ley Cole at my local Wal­mart for $5.97, along with The Bet­ter Part of Dark­ness by Kelly Gay. Now, every time I go to Wal­mart, I swing by the book aisle just to see what they have.

My only com­plaint? It’s hard to see what they really have or find a spe­cific title that you’re look­ing for. It seems like the books at Wal­mart fall into four cat­e­gories — inspi­ra­tional, romance, best-sellers, and west­erns. (I think they had more west­erns at Wal­mart then I usu­ally see at B&N.) The books are loosely grouped into sec­tions, but within those sec­tions, there’s no real order. All the authors/genres are just jum­bled together. I think that if Wal­mart put in a few more rows of books and had them all orga­nized, that they could really put a hurt on the other book chains. I’d go there if it meant sav­ing $2 on a paperback.

I asked the folks in my local cri­tique group about this, and they said that they all cruise by the book shelf at Wal­mart on a reg­u­lar basis just to see what they might have. Looks like I was the only one out of the loop on this. LOL.

What about you guys? Do you ever buy books at Wal­mart? Why or why not?

Okay, I’ve gone in and cre­ated a fan page on Face­book. You can check it out here.

I’ve also signed up for Goodreads. (And was a lit­tle shocked to see that I already had an author page set up over there.)

I’m going to keep doing my reg­u­lar book review posts here on the blog. Over on Goodreads, I’m just going to do a quick lit­tle sum­mary of the books that I read since folks can see the blog feed over there too.

I think Goodreads is really cool, though. It’s a neat way to keep track of all the books that you read and what you thought about them. So if you haven’t checked it out, you might want to.