Today I received my first sale from SmashWords. I had given up on this site. They have a huge inventory, but do not have the traffic that Amazon or Barnes & Noble have. I have 7 books for sale there, but this is not much “shelf space” on a site that has millions of books. I tried to find out how many books are listed at Amazon, SmashWords, ePub, B&N and the other sites, but this information isn’t anywhere where I googled.

The story that I sold was “A Familiar Christmas” which is a Christmas story. I have a feeling that SmashWords may have reported this 45 days after the fact. If this is the case, I might see more sales from SmashWords, now.

This weekend I sold a short story through SmashWords, a couple of paperback books through Amazon/CreateSpace, and two of my Kindle books on how to play harmonica through Amazon. This is pretty good, I guess. I don’t do any advertising. I don’t have any channels that I can use to push my books, so these sales are to random people who find me by accident.

I hoped to make some significant sales, at least $100 a month, but that is not going to happen. I priced my books high, thinking that I would get fewer sales, but make more money than I would a bargain price at higher volume. I still think this is right. I will, however, make beer money, and it looks like my stories will make more money as eBooks than they ever did when I submitted them to magazines. It looks like $20-$30 a month is what I’ll get for at least a few years.

I can improve on this by publishing more collections and short stories. I need to increase my “shelf space” on the virtual eBook stores.