Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul

You may think with all the painting excitement I've forgotten about my writing duties, but not true!  I've been working on a 1300-word piece for The Toastmaster on "Promoting Yourself As a Public Speaker," and am busy setting up interviews for future Art Jewelry marketing articles.

I received 4 e-mails yesterday from Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul. These were the 4 rejections for my stories that didn't make it.  No surprise there as I knew only 2 of my pieces had made it in.  And far from being depressed by the rejections, I was elated. 

Out of thousands and thousands of entries, only 150 stories make it to the final cut.  Six of my humor stories made it in, which means 4% of the final entries were my work.  That's awesome.  Then out of those 150, 101 stories are selected for inclusion in the book.  Two of my pieces made it in, so almost 2% of the book is by me.  (Okay, this is one of the pitfalls of being a writer - How long do you think I spent playing with a calculator and admiring these figures?  Yeah, pretty long).

I actually think they would have taken more but they have to strike a balance among topics and works and authors.  I got a kick out of the assistant editor who, when she accepted my 5th and 6th stories e-mailed me, "Welcome to the Dena Harris show."  I e-mailed her back and asked if she thought they would mind changing the title of the book to that, because it sure would help me out.

So promotions go on.  I checked out the web stats for this blog for the month of June and had 230 unique visitors.  Not bad, considering I haven't really tried to promote this blog as I'm waiting until the book is closer to coming out.  For my main website,www.denaharris.comI logged 653 unique visitors for the month of July or an average of 22/day.  I think that may be for my denaharris and Lessons In Stalking websites combined.  And some of those hits are robots, but that's still pretty cool. 

I just went in and looked at the stats and it's showing 33 unique visitors in the past 2 days.  Stats are fun.  For example, so far this year I've had 7 visitors from United Arab Emirates, 6 from Australia, 4 from Hong Kong, 5 from South Korea and 9 in China.