I will do the unthinkable. I'm going to do nothing about selling copies of my book. I can already see the "savvy" experts shaking their 20th Century heads. You watch a show like Shark Tank and the mill-billionaires always ask the novices, "How many have you sold?" And "What are you doing to market your product? Which in my case the product is a novel called The Black Butterfly Woman. I would have to answer the Sharks, "Six books in six weeks". Now they will look at each other knowingly. And my marketing is this blog, "New Novelist". When I tell people about my novel they almost invariably respond with "I don't have a Kindle reader". And then when I tell them how wonderful and revolutionary the Kindle Fire is and even easier to read than a real book, which was way beyond my expectations, I begin to feel like a Kindle salesman. The truth is I don't want to be involved in the act of selling anything. It's not in my nature to be a salesman. I have no joy and therefore no enthusiasm for barking and huckstering and therefore no time for it. All of my passion is burning hot for writing.
In my novel, Vo Tuyen, the Black Butterfly Woman, tells the weary soldier, "You must move beyond motion." It is a mystery, one that takes the soldier many years to resolve.(The other big question The Black Butterfly Woman answers is "Why do the Vietnamese fight us so hard and not love us?").Move beyond motion means to do all of the work necessary and then let it go. If it is meant to have force in the universe the universe will align with it and everything that is supposed to happen next will happen next.
In Wolf Totem, Jian Rong says the same thing after the student and the master have set all the wolf traps perfectly and after great preparation. The student asks if he should check the traps. The old master says if you have done all of the work, God will do the rest.
And so I rest my case and my novel and do the unthinkable and move beyond motion.

Here is another thing Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) has done for me: it has given me the gift of time, or rather, freedom as an author from the slavery of time. When a printed book is published people need to be paid: the printer, editors, publicists, agents (not to mention the author). The book has three weeks to get noticed and "take off''' much like a racehorse--otherwise it is out of the race. Everyone loses interest; everyone loses money. The author loses credibility. Not so with the KDP e-book. It is more like a seed. There is time for the rays of reader interest to reach into infinite soil of e-space and e-time and to slowly grow and find the happy warmth of a glowing audience. The audience for the book can grow at its own pace without the need of the book being unnaturally pushed forth with hypered advertising. In one month I have sold only six books and yet I am thrilled. No "real" publisher would be thrilled with me. Yet I know I have written a very good book, a book of wonders, The Black Butterfly Woman. A very good seed. And I am granted the gift of time and freedom from time for that good little seed to grow into a beautiful tree that stands on its own deep roots from which it was drawn. It can take six months or six years for it to reach the sunlight. That is a great gift. I thank KDP for this small private space from which I now reach out to the world of e-reading people.

It is done. I have published an ebook, The Black Butterfly Woman, through Amazon.com's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). It was fairly easy to do even for me and I highly recommend KDP. The website for uploading your work is very friendly. You imput your title, your name, your front matter, your book cover and upload your document. You chose your price point between $2.99 and $9.99 and receive a 70 percent royalty. I chose $4.99. For each book I sell I will get about $3.50. The revolution is here. Why exactly would I want to sell my book to a "real" publisher for a 5 percent royalty? Let's say the real book sells for $20 just to keep the math simple. For each book my author's share is $1. If I need an agent to get this deal my profit goes down to 85 cents. Somebody pinch me. Somebody tell me what I'm not seeing. Another great thing is that, when I downloaded a copy of The Black Butterfly Woman, much to my amazement I still found a few typos and paragraphing problems. I was able to make the corrections and upload the book again and now it is a perfect copy. I did not hire a copy editor and I challenge anyone to find a mistake in it. I did not have a company of house editors slashing my story and I challenge you to find a better written or more interesting story. Somebody smart, please come burst my balloon. What is the dark side, what is the awful truth about Kindle Direct Publishing that I am too wildly happy to see?