2012 Year In Review – ME Edition

It’s been about a year since I started this blog, and since I only have one more day left in this year, and since everyone else seems to be doing a “year in review” kind of thing, allow me to talk about this blog and me for 2012…

In short, it was a pretty good year.  I did not post as often as I expected I might, but I think most bloggers either do it (a) more or (b) less than they plan.  I knew that summer (tourist season) was a no-go, but I expected more of me in the shoulder season and the off-season, but life got in the way.

Speaking of the tourist season, we had a great year at the ice cream parlor (our best yet), so there are no financial worries (well, no major ones) going into 2013.  We have our five year plan in motion (work until “retirement”) and it’s coming along nicely.

The major purpose of the blog was to promote my writing, and in turn, to promote the poker eBook, which became “the eBooks” which is one reason blogging was less than optimal.  When poker remained “unauthorized” in the US in 2012, I quickly put out two other non-poker eBooks, fearing that there would be a very small market for a poker book than concentrated on online small-stakes tournaments.  I was half-right.

The poker book (buy it to your right, if you haven’t already) is still my best seller, and I have high hopes that, once the US actually has an online small-stakes tournament market, it will do better.  The short stories and the blackjack book are doing as well as I expected (the short story book was #1 on Amazon for gambling short stories for a while).  I never did get as many reviews as promised, though the ones I did get were complimentary.  More would have helped sales, too.

Oh, and for those of you who can’t decide among Kindle, Nook, and a tablet, here’s my report as far as what I’ve sold – Kindle is #1 partly because I’ve promoted it the most.  Apple iBooks takes the #2 spot, and Nook – in a word, “meh.”  Hell, I’ve sold more books in the UK via Amazon than I’ve sold in the US on Barnes and Noble. I’ve also sold books in Germany and France, for those of you keeping score.  Pretty happy about that (especially since I did not translate it, and never expected to sell anything there).  Canada and Australia, too (I hear they also speak pretty good English).  Irk irk.

What’s ahead for 2013?  I have two more eBooks planned (one, on the horses, and the other on craps).  I might not get the chance to write them, as I am also considering re-releasing the horse racing program I had back in the 90’s.  I’ve modernized it to work in Windows (yes, it was DOS-based using FoxPro, a so-much-better-than-Access language it’s not funny).  I had success in the BRISNET tournament (just missed the money – 16^th out of 3000+), so I think I’ve got the formula down (it was more lines of code in FoxPro, but it worked so much better than Access queries and VB).  It still needs to be more user friendly.  We’ll see.  And of course, there’s this blog.  No promises, although I do want to continue the short exercises that we started in December. 

School will be back in session next week – see you then, and Happy New Year.

And go give the book a review (any of them) if you bought one in 2012.  And if you didn’t – well, you know what to do.