I finished the year 2020 with 16 self-published books

Written, edited, illustrated, designed and produced all of them as ebooks and paperbacks without spending a dime. I still have two more months to complete one year.

Superfans of author V. Subhash

In the beginning of 2020, I was trying to get my 2020 jokebook published by a traditional publisher without success. Without much hope, I created a subset with 400 jokes and published it on Amazon KDP. This was in March. It did not sell at all, as I was not promoting it anywhere. (Later, I made its ebook permafree and it remains one of top free humour books there.)

Meanwhile, I contacted a NY editor by mistake and she suggested I split the books – one for kids and one for adults. I suggested that I will create a subset for kids but the full book will continue cater to both adults and kids. She said okay and asked me to send the manuscript. After that, no answer. The lockdown was imposed at that time and I decided to wait for it to be lifted.

While I waited, I decided to write a book with my editorial cartoons. I had 149 cartoons at that time and self-published them in a 400+ page book! Both color and grayscale. The price of the color book is over $60.

Knowing that the price of gold would shoot up, I rushed to Palakkad and bought one sovereign of gold at Rs. 30,000. The price today shows a profit of Rs. 20,000!

As 2020 was slipping by and with no end to lockdown, I decided to publish the two jokebooks. That was in July. I should not have waited. I began writing one book every month. Later, the pace picked up and I now have written 16 books! A total of 18 titles including the two subsets. I created some other children’s books under the pseudonym Ólafía L. Óla.

One day, I was going to update my FFmpeg article that I had written for Open Source For You magazine when it struck me that I could write a book on FFmpeg. This was a good decision. The book is I think the best book on FFmpeg.

By then, I had half a dozen books. I made a few books free for some time or permanently, and posted their Amazon links on Reddit. That is the only promotion I did outside of my website. Purchases slowly picked up.

My run of bad luck had other dimesions. The website got lost. It went down with Net4India, the domain and hosting provider, after its owner was arrested or whatever. I had to start a new domain: www.vsubhash.in

Now, there is almost one sale every day and double that number when including free books. I will be making the FFmpeg ebook free in April. There will be some drop in sales because of that. Overall, things seems to be looking up.

The rest of my books are published under some other pseudonyms.

In other news, I made another trip to Chennai on my bike. The trains and stations were deserted. I later went to Pazhani. Lockdown was lifted and everything was looking normal. In Kerala, lockdown continues.

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