I checked out the downloads for Cold Killing, which I uploaded to Kindle in March 2024, about twenty months ago. So, in those twenty months it was downloaded 44 times. The only thing I did to advertise it was to announce that it was there on my Facebook thingy where I have less than a hundred friends. I've just checked that. I thought I had about forty facebook "friends" since I use it to keep in contact with people I either actually know or are related to.
When my friend uploaded my books to Kindle about fourteen years ago, it was a different beast and I actually made a couple of hundred quid from it. These days, as I was expecting, it's like throwing a snowball into a blizzard - nobody's going to notice it.
One of the reasons I had for uploading Cold Killing was to see what would happen if I uploaded The Buddha, The Dakini, and The Dirty Old Man in a similar fashion i.e. just upload it, and that's me done. Cold Killing is a crime book and folk read them. There isn't the same market for weird Buddhist memoirs, so when I upload it soon, I don't expect many downloads.
I must have written a couple of hundred emails to literary agents about The Dirty Old Man and recently one of them actually said they'd look at it. I doubt if they did. Maybe the first couple of pages since they're an agency that specialises in mind/spirit books. Anyway, they didn't want it. It's about two years since I started hustling it, so it's time to quit. I'll be going through it to check for typos and that kind of thing and I should upload it next week sometime.
I don't like looking at stuff I've written a while ago, so it was with some trepidation that I started checking it out. I'm about fifty pages in and I was surprised that I was enjoying reading it. Of course, I couldn't remember some of it.
I wouldn't have stuck with trying to get an agent if I hadn't wanted to make some money for Le Jardin de Meditations in Belgium. When I was Le Jardin at the start of November I told the wee lama that someone was looking at the book, and that it would be a pain in the arse if they actually wanted to punt it since I'd have to do stuff, like go and see them, sign contracts, and all that jazz I did as a young man.
I don't care if nobody reads it. I loved writing it and in a way it's a culmination of forty years trying to meditate and trying to write. If it's still on Kindle when my grandkids grow up, maybe they'll read it, and that would be great.
