All Over the Map

The folks who contribute posts to this blog have access to a cool feature: Down at the very bottom of this page there’s a little oblong box surrounding the word “sitemeter”.

If you, as a visitor, click on it, all you’ll get is an ad for the service.

But when I, and the other registered administrators of this blog click on it, we get information about our readers.

We don’t get email addresses, or anything confidential like that.

We get general information.

Information like how you got here.  (Did you have us bookmarked? Did you find us through Google? Did you access us via a link from someone else’s site?)

Like how many visits we got in the past hour, past day, past week, past year.

Like which of our posts were most popular, most read, most stood the test of time.

But coolest of all, I think, is the map feature.

When I click on that one, I get a world map.

I can zoom in on a particular area, or I can choose to look at it by continent.

I can choose the last ten visits, twenty, or fifty, or a hundred.

And every visit is indicated by a little dot on the map.

For the last three days, I’ve been doing regular checks to see where you, our readers, dropped in from.

Turns out, it’s all over the map.

You’re on every continent and a lot of islands in between.

Just in the last seventy-two hours you’ve been checking-in from Korea, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Malaysia, Singapore, The Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, The United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Anguilla, Antigua, Hungary, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Iceland, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the UK, France (including one visitor from Corsica), Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Tunisia, Cyprus, The United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Jamaica, The Netherlands Antilles and Vanuatu.

Vanuatu?

Yeah,  Vanuatu.

Honest.

Murder is Everywhere is…well…truly everywhere.

Our books, alas, are not.

The two great impediments to that are language (translations) and availability.

If you’re reading this, you obviously don’t have much of a problem with English.

But, if you’re our reader on Vanuatu (I’d find it hard to believe there’s more than one) you might find it difficult to get your hooks into a copy of Yrsa’s latest, even in English.

That’s changing.

And what’s changing it is ebooks.

Ebooks are exploding.

I just got a royalty statement from my publisher and discovered that my ebook sales doubled in 2009 over 2008, and, to date, have more than tripled in 2010 over 2009.

These days, it doesn’t matter where you live – as long as you own an ebook reading device, you can get Yrsa’s latest.

Last week, I did something I should have done earlier.

I digitalized my first book, Blood of the Wicked, and put it up on Amazon everywhere in the world where Kindle Books are sold, and where I hadn’t already sold the rights to a local publisher.

And I’m going to do the same with my other books at the rate of one book a month.

The cover image, because of copyright restrictions, is very different from the versions sold in places where the book has already been available. Here's what it looks like:

And, if you’re a reader of this blog, you can get it for free.

Not forever, but absolutely free until the end of this month.

Own an ebook reader?

Haven’t yet read Blood of the Wicked?

Live outside of North America, the U.S. Possessions and the Philippines?

If the answer to all three of those questions is “Yes”, then all you have to do is contact me.

Write to me through my website (you can get there by clicking on my photo over there on the right).

In your email, simply specify whether you’d like to have the book in Kindle or epub format.

And I’ll write back, attaching a free ebook.

Again, because of copyright restrictions, the deal isn't available to residents of the United States, Canada, the U.S. possessions and the Philippines - and it expries at the end of the month.

Write now.

Wherever you are in the world, it'll take you less than a minute to ask for it.

And only seconds to download it once you receive my reply.

 Leighton - Monday