Unexpected Spike

I was waiting yesterday for the illustrator to put up a horse on Fotolia for me.  I was hoping she would do Bigstock as well but then decided that if it was 9 pm in Italy it probably wouldn't happen and I couldn't work on the new book if I was preoccupied with the cover issue.  So I bit the bullet and did Fotolia.  (They make you buy credits and price everything so you buy more credits than you need to purchase an item.  I don't like that.)

I think it's a good change.  Now it has nothing to do with the Dream Horse cover which is bad for branding but they're both in the top 10 of children's books horses or whatever it is, they always are, so there's not much room for improvement.  I doubt if the general audience is ever going to find horse books that interesting so it's a niche audience, and those 2 books are there.  I would like to see Summer Horse do a bit better so maybe this will help.

So as all this was going on I checked the sales at BN and Her Cold Kiss had sold 7 copies.  I don't think all the sales since publication all sites combined equals 7, so I was shocked.  Now less than 24 hours later, that figure has doubled to 14.  (I know peanuts compared to fill in the blank).

Why did this YA suddenly get found?  Unfortunately it's at BN where I can't even find the top ranking lists.  The book is still in the 300,000's.  If it was Amazon and there were 14 sales in 12 hours, the ranking would have improved by about 275,000 places and I'm serious.  Amazon's algorithm works on numbers and speed.

It's fun to have that happen.  I don't know what made it happen.  I don't know why it would be on a list.  Maybe someone read it and it was mentioned on a blog.  I certainly didn't do anything.

One of the great mysteries of digital publishing.