The Evolution of Identity

Here's my February column for AVENUE magazine.  Photography this month is by Annough Lykin.

Recently on my blog I published a short extract from the new novel I’ve been working on, ‘AFK, Again’. In the extract, Second Life® private investigator Definitely Thursday reflects on the various categories of avatar profile she’s encountered over the years, these including the Empty Profile (EP), the Aggressive Profile (AP), the Somebody Else’s Quotations Profile (SEQP), the In Love Profile (ILP), the Promotional Profile (PP) and still more. For example:

“The Poetry Profile (PoP) attempts to map out the personality of the resident in picks via a selection of poems; subsets of this category are the Rhyming Poetry Profile (RPoP) and the Own Poetry Profile (OPoP).”

AFK downloaded over 4,000 times

Whilst I continue working on editing its sequel, a short post about AFK's downloads.  I discovered today that the downloads recorded at Smashwords in the 'Dashboard' area is only the number of downloads from Smashwords directly and the downloads from other book websites which receive content from Smashwords (via the 'Premium catalogue') is recorded elsewhere.  A few clicks later (actually, that's a lie: it took me ages to navigate the system) and I found that the title was downloaded last year from Barnes & Noble an astonishing 1,470 times last year, making the total number of AFK downloads so far at just over 4,000 (the rest being 1,752 from Amazon last year and 821 from Smashwords).  Wow.  If you're published at Smashwords and haven't taken the time to make the numerous tiny edits required to gain entry into the Premium Catalogue, it would appear to be well worth the effort.