If you’re someone who’s bought one of my ebooks, and you’re reading this post — thank you!

Those sales have made a lot of difference in my writing career.

My first independent title came out at the end of February this year. I won’t go into numbers or trend lines here, because the only curves we care about on this blog are the sexy kind, but progress since then has been good.

It’s been good enough that I can think of myself as having reached a sort of “first plateau” in my career. I’m off the ground. I am at a level that is significant. Erotica sales can’t pay all my bills yet, but they have moved beyond the “beer money and novelty” stage of things, and I am confident that, at the very worst, I could keep myself here indefinitely.

That’s not the goal, of course. The goal is to soar much, much higher (or perhaps “sink much, much lower” would be a better metaphor).

But this is a starting place where the book sales are a stable, significant, non-zero chunk of my income. And that’s a better starting place than “from scratch” for whatever comes next.

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Unfortunately, it does mean that the leap to the next plateau involves a lot of stuff that isn’t just writing sexy stories and getting them out there. I’ve done that part, and I suspect I am close to reaching the limit of what that part, alone, can achieve.

Progress from here involves things like mailing lists, blog tours, review swaps, Goodreads, bundling, promo deals — all the self-publishing things I don’t like, because they treat people who you think of as your friends and peers like potential advertisers or revenue streams.

Which they are. And you can handle that reality with grace and respect, if you choose to. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being someone who is friendly and sexy and wants to sell books. To paraphrase the old joke, we’ve already established what kind of writer I am, and now we’re just haggling over the price.

So I aim to move beyond this first plateau; this stage of accepting “Okay, yes, I can do this and I have done this. I am in this business for real. It can be more than a quaint little hobby if I want it to be.”

But even if I never do, I’ve come to a nice place already. The view from up here is good. Thank you all for being a part of that journey.