I’ve been holding my breath since the last time I blogged. Holding it about a couple of things. One has turned out very well so far. The other not so good.

I began re-releasing my novels November 1. I cleaned up the language, rewrote some things I thought were weak, designed covers, etc. I started with “An Innocent Client,” which I gave away for forty eight hours and then put on sale for 99 cents. I sold seven books the first day, but over the next few days, it started picking up. Two weeks later, I did the same thing with “In Good Faith.” Ten days after that, I let “Injustice For All” fly into the bookmosphere. ”Reasonable Fear” went up a couple of days ago. I’m doing a 24-hour giveaway with it on Amazon as I write this.

The numbers have been encouraging. At first, I only looked every couple of days. Then I sold a hundred in a day and I started checking more often. The books started steadily climbing up the Kindle charts. I tweaked the categories by communicating with the people at Kindle Digital Publishing. (They’re fantastic to work with, by the way, vastly different from the ”traditional” houses.) By the third week in November, I had two books, “An Innocent Client” and “Injustice for All” in the top ten in “legal thrillers” on Kindle. “An Innocent Client” is currently #6, “Injustice for All” is #8, and “In Good Faith” is #15. How does that translate into sales? Twenty-five hundred sold in November, and the numbers are growing steadily. I sold over five hundred the first two days in December. “Reasonable Fear” will go back on sale at midnight. From the way things look right now, if the sales numbers stay right where they are, I’ll sell around 8,000 in December.

And that’s just in the U.S. They’re also starting to sell in Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and India. I’m cautiously optimistic, to say the least.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that since the books have started selling well, Amazon is promoting them from within, and they do it for free. I don’t even have to ask them. It just happens. I typed in “Legal Thrillers” on the Amazon home page the other day and “Injustice for All” was at the very top of the list. “An Innocent Client” and “In Good Faith” were both on the first page. I made a loud and joyful noise, one that I’ve repeated several times over the past couple of weeks.

I was going to release a new Dillard book in December. It’s finished – sort of, I can’t help tinkering – but I’ve decided to let the four I have up roll on through the month. I’ll release the new book in early January, then I’ll release “Russo’s Gold” in late January. I’ll have another Dillard book, the sixth in the series, ready to go by mid-March or early April. I almost hate to write this for fear of jinxing myself, but I honestly believe that by April, I’ll be rolling. Big time rolling. As in 20,000 or 30,000 books a month rolling. Maybe more.

After all this cool stuff happens, I’m going to write one more blog about how worthless agents and publishers are, and then I’ll never mention them again.

And now for the bad news.

My beautiful wife, Kristy, was diagnosed with breast cancer a little over five years ago. She endured months of chemotherapy and radiation and three botched reconstructive surgeries, but we thought she’d beaten it. Two weeks ago, we found out that the insidious disease is back. It has metastasized to her bones.

She’s back on chemotherapy, this time in pill form, and she’s taking other drugs to help her combat the cancer. We were, of course, devastated by the news, and it took a couple of weeks for the initial shock to pass. But now we’re all (and I’m talking about she and I and our two children) on board to line up and fight again. We know it’s going to be difficult, we know there will be ups and downs, and we know what the statistics are. But Kristy is strong and she’s tough and she has no intention of becoming a statistic.

Before we received this diagnosis, back in mid-October when I was rewriting the books, I decided to rewrite the dedications. This is what I wrote:

“This book, along with every book I’ve written and every book I’ll write, is dedicated to my darling Kristy, to her unconquerable spirit and her inspirational courage. I loved her before I was born and I’ll love her long after I’m gone.”

That dedication is in the front of all of my novels and will be in the front of every novel I ever publish. I may have been shafted a few times during my life, but I’ve always considered myself to be one of the luckiest men alive because I was fortunate enough to find a woman I truly love.

So we take the good with the bad and the bad with the good and we soldier on, right? That’s what we’re doing. We’re soldiering, and we’re reminded again that love is the most important thing on this earth.

I wish each and every one of you a joyous and love-filled holiday season. I probably won’t blog again until after the first of the year. Hopefully the news then will be all good.