One year ago today I published my short story Four Cats And A Life Improved (https://a.co/d/2kooovy) on Amazon Kindle to pretty rave reviews from those who read it. I’ve since published a second short story called Night Of The Demon (https://a.co/d/aGnTLHz), which got far less traction than the first story.
No one expects to get rich from creating art these days, but I guess I did think I’d sell a bit more than twenty two copies total in one year. For Four Cats I also gave away about twelve pdfs to people who didn’t want to use Amazon, while I think only one person wanted the Demon story (thanks mom!).
So that’s $22 paid by readers, $15 for Jeff Bozo and almost $8 for me. Not too shabby!
I also started this blog in an effort to self-promote, but it didn’t really do much. A few of my blogs got a tiny bit of traffic, and when I went for it last summer, I posted an essay every week for nine weeks straight. The last of those nine got no interactions at all when I shared it on Facebook, which probably means Zuck was upset about me linking off site a few to many times and no one saw the post. That’s what I tell myself anyway, because other links to my blog got some interactions in the way of likes and comments. Less than ten people ever looked at that ninth out of nine blogs posts while I was really trying to gain some traction. And no new subscribers either.
So that wasn’t very fun! With regards to feedback for the short stories, it was universally positive, which felt both great and weird! People seem to actually like what I write when they actually read it, but it’s hard for most people to find time to read for joy underneath the boot of late stage capitalism which we all live under today.
A few people asked if it was possible to get my short stories in a physical format, which hasn’t been possible, but I plan on putting the two stories plus a few of the blogs into a file and trying to figure out how the publishing tool on Amazon can be used to deliver a physical format. It shouldn’t be too hard.
What I need to really do though is to get serious about writing a book, but for the last seven months I’ve been extremely readingpilled and bookmaxing. I’ve read so much since last July. And I’ve barely written anything at all.
The book exists solely in my brain, and that’s really no use. And I’m not really a writer when I don’t actually sit down and write, it’s all theoretical at the moment. Who knows if I’ll ever get serious about this.
Could I have sold more if I was better at self-promotion? Probably? I knew going into this writing thing that most writers trying to make a living off it today have to spend more time self-promoting than actually writing, because everything sucks. I planned on being good at it, but it turns out I wasn’t. I’ve posted about my short stories less than ten times by way of trying to promote them on my main social medias, which obviously isn’t enough if you really want to get anywhere.
Doesn’t really matter though! I’ll just end this blog here. I guess I don’t have that much to say today, but I thought it’d be fun to share the figures made in the first year! I’ve become the cliche writer who doesn’t actually write anymore so no promises on anything more coming!
