Well, I am still recovering from all the excitement of launching the Survival Guide yesterday. I had so many shares and hits and views, tweets and likes, it was a little overwhelming. As all of you who have ever self-published will know, shares, likes, views, hits and general love doesn’t always equate to direct sales – but I have sold quite a few now and the numbers are continuing to rise so that’s the main thing. I just have to keep on plugging, keep on plugging…
At one point I was number 3,151 out of 6,000,000 books on Amazon.co.uk yesterday (in fact I think I even got to 2,000 and something but neglected to get a picture of it) – which goes to show just what the competition is! 
It’s a little easy to get carried away with the numbers. In this age of instant results, I am starting to get a little too addicted to updating and refreshing. How many have visited my blog? How many have liked on Facebook? How many have bought now? What’s my latest author rankings?….
I am sure I will get bored of it eventually (after all, I do have other work to do, plus the marketing doesn’t really stop – I need to get back to writing more articles and posts). But in the middle of it something did happen that made me stop and think. I recieved an email from someone who just said: “From a struggling expat, thank you!”. And I realised this is what it’s all about. It’s not about shares or likes or sales or numbers. It’s about helping people. This book isn’t ever going to make me a millionaire (or even a thousand-aire) but that isn’t why I wrote it. I wrote it to help others going through what I went through, to support them and to hopefully make them feel just a little bit better.
If I can help just one expat partner/trailing spouse/accompanyng partner – call it what you will; if I can make just one person feel better then I have met my goal.
Having said that, I would still like you to buy the book 😉
expatpartnersurvival.wordpress.com 
You are right–the numbers are good (and do need to be your concern!), but I love the fact that people still take the time to say a simple ‘thank you’ for what you do. That is just wonderful.
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I clicked on your image at the end of this post, expecting it maybe to take me to Amazon or something, but it just opens the image full size. Assume you maybe intended a different link? Feel free to delete this comment once fixed 🙂
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Oh thanks it’s meant to take you to my buy the book page… Will update.
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Thanks!
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Hmmm when I click on the “buy the book” image at the bottom it takes me to my buy the book page – strange. Did you meant the book picture in the middle? Anyway if so that also now takes you to Buy the Book 🙂
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It was the “if you like this – click here to buy the book” image. Still doesn’t work for me 😦
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How frustrating! I’ve noticed WordPress has been acting a bit oddly. I’ll see if anyone can help.
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OK Good luck. Can you post the link in a comment in the mean time – then once it’s tidied up and working you can delete this whole thread of comments.
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It’s at the bottom now but just in case – http://expatpartnersurvival.com/buy-the-book/ – will try and work out what’s going wrong later, thanks for letting me know 🙂
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