Google Alerts - and my author copies

Something weird has been going on with my Google Alerts. You know - the system you can set up so that you get notified whenever your name, or any of your books, are mentioned on the internet? I hope I'm not the only one who uses them - it already makes me feel a bit vain and self-obsessed, but I'm so pathetically excited whenever one of the books gets a mention, even if it's because it's being sold for 0.1p on E-Bay and described as 'in perfect condition' (in other words, nobody's even bothered to read it!).

Anyway - I had a couple of Alerts come through today, and suddenly realised I haven't had any for ages. I suppose I'd just assumed nobody had mentioned my books for a long while! :( Well, by the time I'd finished reading those two - a whole lot more were coming through, until my in-box was almost full of Google Alerts! What was it all about - some kind of backlog? I checked my Google Alert settings (I have to admit, I had to look up how to do it), and the instruction was still as I set it up - to check once a day. Nobody had sneakily changed it to once a month or whatever. So I can only assume there had been a log-jam or some sort of constipation going on in Google Alert Land.

And yes - most of them were offers for sale on E-Bay, although there were a couple of mentions of one of the books being stocked in a library in the USA - which is always an exciting thought. Oh - and a posting about one of my books being left in a pub. Not by accident, but by someone taking part in 'Book Crossing' (where people with good intentions but no thought for impoverished authors not getting their royalties, leave their used books lying around for other people to pick up, and post the location of the 'drop' on the website). Well - I hope someone picked it up and enjoyed it, and goes on buy the others!

Never mind - I feel quite cheery today, having got my six free author's copies of 'Tales from a Honeymoon Hotel' in the post. And the cover looks even better 'in the flesh' so that's a good start!