Monday blues

I gotta go back to work today, and while I like my job, I'd really rather get to the point where I can stay home and do things that actually interest me, like gardening, cooking, housework (yes, I'm nuts, I like cleaning my house), writing and crafting. Homesteading is hard work, but it's so much more fun than the competitiveness of a regular job. The only competition is my to-do list, and I can usually crank the daily "work chores" out in about 3-4 hours. Then it's nothing but fun on days off. Ah well, one of these days.

Writing is starting to pick up a tad - with the latest mini-book up on Kindle, and having done a couple of promos over the weekend, I gave away nearly 700 ebooks, but I also managed to sell a few and made almost $5.00 in royalties. Woop! Better than it has been lately, at around 50c a month, lol. I need way more things to sell though, between Kindle books and Etsy. I have discovered a mistake in my thinking on Etsy, which means Selz will go by the wayside.

Selz doesn't have a combined site like Etsy or Amazon or eBay do. What you see on an individual's storefront is all you see. You can't search the whole site for related stuff or anything like that. I was going to keep them for ebook sales off the Kindle platform (since if your book isn't enrolled in the KDP Select program, you can sell it elsewhere), but having found out my mistaken thinking about Etsy and digital items, everything is going on Etsy. I though Etsy would only allow five digital items per seller, but I had been misreading. It's five files per digital item, so you can sell as many digital items as you like, as long as they fit into Etsy's policies for acceptable items. Since the great majority of my ebooks will be for cooking and crafting, they can go there as well, when they are not being promoted on Amazon, and hopefully I can get more sales that way.

And Etsy will allow food items that meet it's requirements, so my "Gifts (Not) In A Jar" category will be able to go there as well as seeds once I have some to sell. Hee hee. My Etsy store is going to EXPLODE with stuff now that I've got it figured out. Having time to sit down and work on reading a lot of the help files last week made a big difference. And at only 20c to list an item, then the 20c to auto-relist it if you have more than one of an item (like the bracelets I do from kits are 6 bracelets, but I only get charged 20c to list until one sells, then another 20c, etc., instead of the whole $1.20 right off). I have a bunch of finished stuff here that needs to get put up; my goal is one new item a day, so I have plenty of things up and ready to go. Lots of photos to take!!!! (Another thing I like about Etsy vs. eBay ... five FREE photos instead of one and figure out how to link them from someplace like Photoshop to the description in eBay to avoid being charged for extra photos!) I am going to be BUSY for a long time to come, and hopefully, this will be the start of making a living online even better than I have been doing. Just goes to show what happens when you are able to get cracking on what you love to do vs. what you have to do!

Now, for those interested in more free books that aren't on Amazon, I do have a few resources, and most of the books are available in Kindle format. The new Kindle Metro on Windows 8 won't recognize them because of how it's set up, but if you have the older version of Kindle for PC, it will, because your ebooks are all stored on your computer in a directory (now called a "folder," but I am old school and will always call it a directory) called "My Kindle Content." Hence why I kept the install file for the PC version and don't use Metro. Heehee. I am a sneaky little thing sometimes! The other sites for freebies (also can be found there often in PDF and other non-Kindle formats, by the bye) are:


Harvard Classics and the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction - As this is Project Gutenberg, there are over 45,000 books on there alone. Never mind their partners:
Project Gutenberg Partners - where you can get over 100,000 MORE free ebooks, and also:
Open Culture, which is free ebooks, audio books, online courses, certificate courses, K-12 educational resources, movies ... you get the picture. And if you're interested in homeschooling, this was a great resource for me when the kids were little:
Enchanted Learning, which has LOADS of printables!!!!!

KINDLE FREEBIES OF INTEREST