I don’t keep track of book sales on a regular basis. I’ll check sometimes once a week and sometimes once a month. Sometimes I go for longer stretches.

I’ve been pretty up front that sales – someone dropping $3 on one of my Kindle books – don’t happen that often. I’ve gone whole months without selling any books.

So checking sales figures can get to be a pretty depressing sort of thing.

I expect when I make it to England for a book signing tour the crowds at Trafalgar Square queuing up to get an autographed Jackson Speed book will look something like this.

Lately, however, my sales have been more consistent. Even before Jackson Speed on the Orange Turnpike was published I was seeing an up-tick of sales of the first and second books. In fact, there were times when I could see what appeared to be direct correlations of sales of Jackson Speed and the Blood Tubs (Volume II of the Jackson Speed Memoirs) two or three weeks after sales of Jackson Speed: The Hero of El Teneria (Volume I of the Jackson Speed Memoirs).

That’s great fun for me. If the conclusions I’m drawing are correct (and I’ll tell myself they are) then it indicates that someone enjoyed the first book enough to get the second book.

June was a great month for book sales, though. Usually I’ll see a spike in sales after I publish a new book, but I saw that spike in May when Jackson Speed on the Orange Turnpike was published at the first of the month. I expected things to slow down considerably in June.

But they didn’t. By my standards, I sold a lot of books in June.

I was interested, so I got deeper into my numbers, and I realized more than half the books I sold in June were sold in the United Kingdom. All three volumes of the Jackson Speed books had (for me) significant sales in the UK during the month of June.

This was a trend I saw a couple of months ago, too, where a large percentage of my sales were coming out of the United Kingdom, and several of the Kindle copies of Orange Turnpike that sold last month sold in the UK. In fact, someone in the UK bought the very first paperback of Jackson Speed on the Orange Turnpike.

Again, we’re talking about handfuls of books here, not boxes of books. I’m not getting on any NYT lists with my sales.

Nevertheless, I’m starting to wonder if I’m not destined for international stardom.

While I don’t look at my book sales regularly, I do look at my blog stats two or three times a week. I’ve posted a couple of times about the World Cup, and my hits from all over the world are unreal.

In the last 30 days, my blog has been visited by people in Brazil, Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Ecuador, Canada, Romania, Bangladesh, Iceland, India, Colombia, Germany, Slovakia, Morocco and Macao.

I’m starting to feel like the old joke they used to say about celebrities whose stars had faded and who looked overseas to revive their careers.

“What’s Rob Peecher doing these days?”

“I hear he’s big in Macao.”

I’m not exactly sure what any of this means or how it becomes useful for introducing more people to my novels (since, ultimately, that’s the only reason I write a blog), so I’m just going to file all of this under the category: The internets is super cool. It just boggles my mind that I am able to write novels about a 19^th Century American scoundrel that people in England are interested in buying or that I’m able to make predictions about the World Cup that are read by people in Slovakia.

It’s a weird, wonderful world we’re walking upon.