Welcome to 2025 – let’s take a moment to discuss lessons learned from Smashwords. Drumroll please – final score from Smashwords is ….
353 books! That’s right, I gave away 353 books this month – over double what I gave away last time. Huzzah! Some interesting takeaways from the experience before I move onto the business of writing other stuff. Here’s what they are:
- Focus on promotion instead of creation – You’ll notice that I was pretty dry on the blog posts (sorry!) but I made a decision: I can’t be everywhere at once. The Smashwords success had a direct correlation to the amount of times I was posting about it on social media, or looking for meaningful ways to talk about it. Blog posts don’t sell books, it seems.
- It’s not about the money – So yeah, the giveaway resulted in big giveaway numbers – how much did I actually make? A number so low that I’m embarrassed to share it (but it isn’t zero … so there’s that). It’s gratifying to rise from regret, validate my vision of being a storyteller that made people feel better – even if only for a few minutes.
- The story about my stories is changing – The feedback is becoming more positive. Instead of ‘how dare you spam us,’ the community is becoming more positive (e.g. “Always looking for new authors, you are now in the backlog. Looking forward to a new voice out there.” and “gratz on 1st writing the book, 2nd on getting it published, 3rd on selling them.“) Awesome that this is happening, it’s important to express gratitude for the wins you get.
So now that we’ve talked about that, let’s discuss what’s next:
- New short stories – I’m working on two new shorts, one of them to be converted into an audio book almost immediately and the other is a bit of a professional risk. You’ll understand what I mean when you see it.
- New year, new focus – I’m still pushing toward the future where good stories help good kids do great things. Everything I do and say here in 2025 is built around that idea. More on that later. Continuing to make new friends on Mastodon and BlueSky – please feel welcomed to say ‘hi!’ 🙂
That’s the news for now – thank you so much for being a part of this journey – please invite your friends to come along with us.
