Amazon comes through; book is up and available

Switching to Amazon's Create Space publishing division has been a painless experience. I ran one of my already published books, Brother William's War, through their process to see what it's like. It's impressive. The story is now available in print, online and apparently through Kindle. They seem to be happy I'm aggressively pushing my own marketing, but they're also pushing it, including roping in libraries and schools.
Nice touch: An author's page with all my stuff. Well, it will be all my stuff when I move the rest of it over. I can display this journal on that page without any fuss, and can add pages to it for each book if I want, where people can talk about the book if they want.
Meanwhile, construction of a friend's network on Facebook and creation of "listening posts" to sort through 25 million Tweets every day continue. I've also found a new forum where a lot of Southerners gather; BWW is perfect for them. As I have Hanna Coleman say right in the beginning, she's tired of being expected to apologize for that war because as far as she can tell, she didn't do anything justifying an apology and neither did her brother, whose journal is what the book is all about. That seems to have rung some bells, and it was an angle I didn't push in the marketing of the book the first time around, in 2005. It's amazing what self-imposed restraints invoked on behalf of an employer can get tossed overboard when the employer goes away. :-)
The nicest part about the Amazon experience is seeing the sales numbers start up the same day the book was first listed. OK, it's not like I'm suddenly Stephen King, but anything bigger than a zero is nice at this point. And with that set up, I can consider whether Jesse Ludlam's Wars, a "Yankee book" to parallel Brother William, really needs to go the agent/publisher route or might be better off as another direct Amazon deal. I'll make a decision the week after July 4. In the meantime, I can resume work on yet another book, now that I've figured out where Captain William Kidd hid the bulk of his treasure down near Cape May. :-)