Yesterday I paid the invoice for the hosting of this site and the domains that go with it. That’s what prompted me to finally complete that post on streaming services that I started writing back in February. It’s not expensive, but I guess some would see it as unusual for someone like me—just a normal bloke with nothing to sell or anything like that—to pay for a website when there are so many free options out there. Particularly when I’m not exactly a regular poster. It’s not like I’m writing a new entry every day or even every week.
Hell, I’m not even averaging a post a month.
Well, it’s a long(ish) and not particularly interesting story, so here goes.
I’m a hobbyist author. Under a pseudonym, I have over thirty works self-published through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform (KDP). There are seven full-length novels (I class “full-length” as about 70,000+ words), four novellas (between about 30,000 & 50,000 words) and about twenty short stories of less than 10,000 words.
Do they sell well? No, not really. Typically I can expect to sell a few hundred copies in the first couple of months after a release then it slows to a trickle, maybe a dozen or so copies per novel per year, something like that.
It’s certainly not enough to live off – and believe me if I could make a living out of it, I would.
Are they any good? Well, that’s not for me to judge, but I’ve had some very good reviews on Amazon and some very nice comments sent to me by readers.
I’ve been writing as a hobby since the mid-noughties. Actually, I’ve been writing since I left university in ’96, but only really started to take it ‘seriously’ as a hobby and share my work with others since the mid-noughties. And that was the point I first set up a website for my author persona. It was crude back then, built with a simple, free, WYSIWYG site builder and hosted on a free, ad-supported hosting service—Yahoo! I think it was.
Of course, that was around the time that “blogging” became a thing and I supplemented my Yahoo! Site with a Blogger blog. I was young enough and had enough free time back then to actually blog regularly.
Towards the end of that decade, I was able to start selling some of my work. An illustrated story website, which sadly no longer exists, picked up a few of my short stories and an online, indie publisher picked up a couple of my novels & novellas too. It was all very exciting but made me realise I needed a “proper” address for my website and a more professional-looking email address. So I bought a domain and just pointed it to my Blogger, which, by now, was my main site.
In the early 2010s, I upgraded my domain to a hosting package too. It wasn’t a massive amount of space but it was enough to move both my Blogger and Yahoo! sites to a WordPress installation.
All of this was focused on flogging those books published by that Indie publisher and the ones I’d started to release via KDP.
Over the last decade or so, my hosting package has gone up in price (but not by much) and has much, much more space and can now host up to four different domains.
So I bought some more domains. This one, markgeveritt.uk, but also the .com to my author’s .co.uk (they are the same site—one domain just redirects to the other) and one for my family too. I’ve now got multiple WordPress installations on my hosting package—one for each family member, although I’m the only one that uses it, and one for my author persona. I also have the ability to give us all email addresses that aren’t “Gmail” but I’ve never really gotten around to that. I need to, I just haven’t.
So that’s how I’ve ended up with a WordPress site where I can occasionally pontificate on the state of the world or whatever.
I told you it wasn’t that interesting.
