New Book My Facebook Notes is Out

My latest book, My Facebook Notes, is finally published and is available at Smashwords, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. I expect it to appear soon in other online bookstores that Smashwords distributes to. So, what's it about?

When I first joined Facebook back in 2009, I immediately noticed the Notes feature. My friends were using it to post inspirational articles, but I wanted to be different. I decided to use it to write about my experiences with my travels. Those series of posts later became my first book, Funny Stories from My Travels (now retitled, Travel Mashups and Mishaps).

Then, I began writing smaller stories, funny anecdotes, inspirational notes, and various other things. I had dozens of those notes and might have gone on and on if not for a change on Facebook.

Around September 2020, Facebook announced that they were discontinuing the Notes feature. People could no longer make new notes, but the old notes would still be available for viewing.

I was saddened by the loss of an outlet for my creative juices. I immediately began copying the notes to MS Word files and kept them on my computer in case Facebook decided to delete them. One day, a little more than two years later, I got the idea to compile these notes and put them into a book. That's how My Facebook Notes came to be.

I pasted them into a single Word file and arranged them by topics. There were my speeches, my tips on public speaking, memories, tips on writing and publishing books, and other notes and stories. There are 150 of those notes in the book.

After the book was finished, I uploaded it to Smashwords and soon got the message that it had been accepted and was now being distributed to other ebook distributors.

I chose the title My Facebook Notes because, first of all, it is a compilation of my Facebook Notes. Second, I thought it was unique that other people might not think of sharing their own notes. I later learned, I was wrong.

While searching for the book by Googling it, I discovered that there were other books with the same title, and they too, were about notes that the authors converted into books. It was not an original idea after all.

No worries, though. Titles cannot be copyrighted, so it's common to find books that have the same titles. There are even movies that have the same title. I can change the title, but I'm not going to do that just yet.

Earnings from My Books

Every month, around this time, I get an email from Paypal that Smashwords has deposited a certain amount of money in my account. That money represents my earnings from royalties from the sales of my books. These days it ranges from $4 to as much as $11. It's hardly an income but it shows that writing books can work for people who are willing to put time and effort into it.

I'm writing another book that I hope to finish in January 2021 and another two more that I'm planning to finish before the year ends.

When I started out on this journey, my only intention was to write a book...just one book. Today, I've written seven books with another three in line.

I've talked to people who expressed a desire to write one book...like me, just one book. I tell them to just hunker down and do it. I hear all sorts of reasons why they can't do it:

• I've got no time
• I don't know how to write
• My English is terrible
• What if nobody buys it?

There are more but these are the four, most common reasons.

I thought I didn't have time either. I was spending time on Facebook during my rest hours and was writing stories in my Notes. So, I decided I'd take those stories and put them into a book. I spent time improving it, editing it, proofreading it, and poof! I had a book. Well, it was an e-book but it was the same to me. After uploading it and seeing it in online bookstores, it was a proud moment. I had written a book.

Then, sales started to come in. Not bad! It wasn't much, certainly not enough to live on but people were actually buying the book!

Then, I decided to write another one, and another one, and another one. Soon, I had seven books. My sales were between $1 and $2 and sometimes months went by without any sales. I started in 2010. By 2020, it was up to an average of $7 per month.

Do I have any dreams of making a best seller? I'd be lying if I said, no. But it's not a priority. I just write because I want people to enjoy the books. 

Earning a living writing books? That would be the dream. Doing something you love and earning from it. That would be heaven.