Other than being mildly ill–the Theraflu helps–today continued to be pure awesome. I went in to town to mail stuff, swung by Borders and Barnes & Noble to sign books, and found myself holding, in my hot little hand, a sixth edition of Dragonbreath.*

Good lord!  I just found that they’d gone to fifth a month ago! Apparently Ninjabreath sales are kicking the first volume along as well–I have no idea what the initial print run of Ninjabreath was, but every copy I’ve seen has been first edition, so presumably they printed a fair number. (The marketing department claims that when you get a whole trilogy together, sales get even more dramatic, and that Wurstbreath will mean the series starts getting some signficant shelf presence–I have no idea if this is true, or if it’ll work out like they hope, but I guess we’ll know in September.)

This is on top of the fact that last week, during my reading at Flyleaf Books (who are awesome, awesome people) I discovered that Nurk has FINALLY gone back to press.** Who knows, in a few years it might actually earn out…

Kevin’s off with his kids at a church thing, so I treated myself to sushi at Domo for dinner. The owner sent me out some complimentary sake. Heavens.

At this point, the day had almost been too good–I mean, I got in Spectrum, my book is in the sixth printing, the weather is glorious AND I got free sake?–and I was kinda expecting to hit a rare Carolina moose on the way home, or find that the house was on fire, Kevin had sudden-onset leprosy and the beagle had eaten one of the cats. You expect, particularly on April Fools Day, that the universe is gonna smack you down for too much good fortune. However, most of the cats seem intact, the house is resolutely not on fire, and Kevin has not reported any unexplained limbs falling off, so perhaps I did just get a fabulous day out of it after all.

*Note for prospective authors: The best way to find out what printing your book is in is to go to the bookstore and look at the publishing info. In something like Dragonbreath, you’ll see a row of numbers in descending order, usually 10 through 1. If the lowest number is 1, it’s a first printing. If the 1 is missing, and the last number is 2, it’s a second printing, if the last number is 3, it’s a third, etc. Get through ten printings and they’ll change the line to 20 through 11, and so forth.

Theoretically, your editor knows what printing the book is in. In actuality, your editor is very busy and the left hand sometimes doesn’t know what the right has been printing, so just go to the book store and surreptitiously check the publishing info page already. Then e-mail your agent and say "Dude! Did you know we were in the sixth printing?"

**They did not, however, remove the "first edition" line on the information page. It took the bookstore owner and I poring over a copy to figure out that it really was a second edition.