The Nothing Within is one month old!

Debut month for The Noth­ing With­in has been a good one. To every­one who helped make that pos­si­ble: Thank you!

Here’s what happened:

My supporters were awesome

So many friends and fam­i­ly mem­bers snagged a copy of the book, shared their encour­age­ment, and spread the word through Ama­zon reviews, Goodreads reviews, Face­book posts, and word of mouth. In par­tic­u­lar, my 20 beta read­ers have been hero­ic through­out the edit­ing and pub­li­ca­tion process.

Publishers Weekly reviewed it

I was sur­prised such a major pub­li­ca­tion con­sid­ered it, and even more sur­prised when they pub­lished a pret­ty glow­ing starred review.

People read it

I’m aware that’s the whole point of this exer­cise, but it’s still cool to see it happening.

A cou­ple hun­dred peo­ple bought the book in its var­i­ous forms. Also—as new authors often do to grow their audiences—I ran an Ama­zon pro­mo­tion, tem­porar­i­ly offer­ing the Kin­dle ver­sion for free. Dur­ing the 3‑day pro­mo­tion, over 4,000 peo­ple down­loaded it. Because of that, it hit the #1 spot in five Ama­zon cat­e­gories. And for what­ev­er it’s worth, over 1,200 peo­ple at Goodreads have it list­ed on their “To Read” shelves.

I learned about the F‑bomb

The Noth­ing With­in isn’t an obscene book, but it does con­tain some swear words: rough­ly 50 (out of 118,000), most of them in PG ter­ri­to­ry. Even so, that’s lead a few peo­ple to leave angry 1‑star reviews. And if those words upset them that much? Fair enough. As Mom used to say, “In mat­ters of taste there’s no dispute.”

How­ev­er, this had a sil­ver lin­ing. It lead me to read the Wikipedia arti­cle on the his­to­ry of the F‑word—which was eye-open­ing, espe­cial­ly the part about the first known Eng­lish use of the term around 1310. (Do not click that link if the F‑bomb dis­com­forts you.) I’m a bet­ter per­son for hav­ing read it. Per­son­al growth comes from unex­pect­ed sources.

Pho­to Cred­it Max Pix­el under CC0 License.