Yesterday was a fun and interesting day but it ended on a note of uncertainty. Well, I met this woman on another site I’ll call Abigail. Her real name is Heike but that’s what she wants to go by. I was flattered when she said she was thrilled to meet an author and was all excited to buy my book as soon as the batteries in her Kindle were charged. She said she loved the sample of my book and found it to be what she likes to read. So I was thinking how it was definitely a good idea to join many sites, reach out to people (within reason since I don’t want to come off as pushy or spammy) and spread the link to my book to help promote myself. I was also thinking that we’ve definitely got to hope for some free time to get more manuscripts submitted for publication now that my name’s getting out there, but now I’m not sure I should do that because I’m starting to wonder if Amazon could be ripping me off since there are no DE sales on my reports. God, I hope not and that it’s just a glitch on their end and that Abigail isn’t playing with me. She truly seems sincere enough, though, and I find it hard to believe she’d express interest in the book of someone she just met and then tell them she bought it and had it on her Kindle at that moment if she really hadn’t.

It was actually funny for a while there because when she came out and told me she was from Germany I first thought, “Oh no. Just oh fucking no.” LOL, I will have to tell her about Nane and Barbara sometime. I have no idea how old she is or what she looks like but she seemed so friendly and we got to chatting for a while, again making me wonder if something wants me to really learn German. I told her my last two books have German characters and one is set in Munich (she’s in central Germany). We exchanged some German and she said my German was “GREAT.” LOL, I’m glad one of us thinks so.

Anyway, she didn’t want to do private messaging on the wallpaper site and I was alarmed to learn my email address was public there and I didn’t even know it. But thanks to her, I was able to go in and hide it once she told me it was visible to her when she’d click Contact Member. No wonder I’m the target of every spammer/scammer out there, though most are still no doubt from my sweeping days using that addy.

So when Abby emailed me (the message definitely came from Germany), she told me the reason she’s so big on privacy there and careful of what she says is that she’d been banned from the site before for downvoting. Not sure what the point is in having down or upvoting features if people can’t handle how you choose to use them, but that’s why she wouldn’t talk to me in a PM, and she asked me not to speak German to her on our public walls there or else she’ll fail to “verstehen.”

I told her it was no problem and that I myself have been banned from sites a couple of times for flame-throwing.

I asked Mitch about the reporting issue and sent a message to Amazon itself. Amazon did reply but all they said was that they’d have to get back to me later since adding Amazon.de and Amazon.it has sparked a surge in messages from people wanting to publish with them.

Mitch said that it does sometimes take a while for reports to update but that there are people out there wondering about Amazon not reporting sales.

Oh, great. You mean I could have more sales out there that I don’t know of because I never got credit for them? But why would Amazon rip people off if that’s what they’re doing? Amazon has plenty of money so it shouldn’t need to steal from its authors. But only one of three things could be the case – Amazon’s glitchy, Amazon’s ripping me off, or I’m about to be given a reason to really hate the hell out of Germans!

Then there’s Rasvi, too. He’s so funny. He’s the 20-year-old living in India I met on FB through Adonis. His English is just as bad, too, LOL. Well, he lives on MyOpera like Adonis, stopped into my blog and said it was very interesting to read and “he’s so happy cuz I’m a professional writer,” LOL.