I've been using Scrivener and most recently did a couple of books for my husband in Jutoh. If you use Vellum for ebooks, what do you do for paperbacks? I always do them at Createspace and don't want to stop...

But then again, maybe Amazon WANTS just a high volume of shorter, cheap works. In retail, we call it the illusion of choice. The more options available, the more likely the customer completes the sale...despite the fact that the majority of the time they will buy the same thing. McDonalds makes 70% of their revenue off of five menu items, and yet whenever they have scaled back their menu sales plummeted. WalMart went through the same thing a few years ago when they decided to "clean up" their aisles by limiting the number of options to those that customers buy most. The result was less foot traffic and plummeting sales.

I didn't know this and it makes prefect sense. Yep, we are part of the illusion!

Scratch one more thing off my to-do list!

Well I am only 13, so that should help your averages pull down.

But I'm 71... raising the average a bit!

For me, it would be plotting. I love to do the writing after I've got a fairly detailed plot... tried being a pantser and ended up too scattered... but on my third cozy now, I'm still struggling with getting the plot figured out.

No, I wouldn't, partly because I need to earn some money and I would probably throw myself into something else. (Crafts on etsy? Umm...)

I finished my first cozy mystery during the July NaNo camp, and got it up on Kindle and Createspace late in Sept... it needed a LOT of tweaking after July. I wasn't exactly pantsing but my plotting was minimal and chaotic. Anyway, for this NaNo I am about 42,000 words into my second one, and I tried a different tack with it, spending a good bit of time in October on my plot outline in Scrivener. So I had a good idea where I was going when I began writing on November 1. I know I'll finish writing by the end of the month, but I may finish what I've got plotted at too few words and need to do more description. At present, it's too strong on dialogue!

I use the NaNoWriMo website to keep track of my word count progress and sometimes to read their pep talks, but I haven't gotten onto their forums. Nobody else doing it that I know of in my town.

I've been happily surprised that my first book, the only one out so far, has been selling an average of 8 to 10 copies a day since it came out about 2 months ago. It's a cozy mystery ("Dead in the Stacks") with a 2.99 price tag, and the only promotion I've done is a bit on my personal page at Facebook... started a blog but am neglecting it for now, haven't even done my author page on Amazon. I know quite a few of my friends bought the book initially and that probably gave it a good start. It got into the top 100 cozy mysteries at Az a few times at first, and that must have helped.

My plan was to start doing promotion after I had 2 books in the open-ended series up, and that should be by the end of this year.