Glitches and Gratitude

Yesterday was a huge day for me. I had three holiday anthologies release into the world: Let's Get Naughty, Wanted: Mistletoe, and Christmas Wishes & New Year's Kisses. Let's Get Naughty, in particular,  was a huge labor of love for me because all of the authors in the group were hoping to make the USA Today Bestseller's List. Becoming a USA Today Bestseller is a serious deal for any author, and it requires an enormous number of preordered sales and at least a year of promotion and marketing by at least 40 authors. 

When I went to sleep on Halloween night, our preorder numbers for all the anthologies were great and we thought that we might have a chance to "make the list". Then, when I woke up yesterday morning, we learned that one of the largest booksellers in the world ("The 'Zon") had experienced a glitch. A glitch that wiped out thousands of sales in under a minute, leaving us with unfilled orders. A glitch that could destroy our chance to "make the list" and halved our income. 

For the last 24 hours, all we've been doing (in all three anthologies) is letting people know that their preorders were cancelled. But since thousands were cancelled, and we don't know who these readers are, we're really struggling to make up these numbers as well as to sell new books. Then, during the process of dealing with this chaos and all of the disappointment that a year's worth of work might be for nothing, I realized this situation has reminded me of a few things--things that I am so grateful for. 

• First, how much I appreciate my relationships with all of my readers. The readers I've been able to contact directly have been so supportive and have gone out of their way to share the situation on Social Media to help us restore out numbers. 
• Second, although I've only known some of these authors in my anthologies for just a short time, they've become great friends and have taught me so much about resilience in a tough industry. 
• Third, I've realized that writing romances that make readers happy is what I want to do with the rest of my life. So if these books don't do as well sales-wise as we'd hoped, I'm not giving up on writing.

If you preordered any of these anthologies. I'm asking kindly to check your order status. Thousands of sales were cancelled, including my own (and I'm one of the authors!), so there's as good chance your orders were cancelled as well. Thank you so much for all of your support. We have until Sunday night to make up for these lost sales, and all of the authors in these anthologies appreciate every sale, review, and social media share. We couldn't afford to spend the time writing these books without readers to buy them!