No revenue either, but lots of satisfaction and the sure knowledge that there may actually be a demographic for my writing.
I understand he started since I know about the book but I’m an unlikely customer. I don’t particularly enjoy sci-fi books, especially random ones. I prefer to know a bit about a book before committing to the hours it will take to read it. My suggestion is to study other self-publishing authors and see how they made their books successful, then model the approach after theirs.
Having it flagged wouldn't be that bad, it would mean that several people noticed it in the new submissions page. Worse would be to get a single downvote with no comment. ;-P
I would ask you for the free epub you mention but in the last years I've found barely any time to read novels. The abstract sounds interesting:
> When her grandfather dies, Alexa Martins simple life is changed immeasurably, going from a humble history scholar to owner of the world’s leading company in AI and energy research and a symbol of hope for millions. The emergence of her company’s sentient AI systems, and science fiction level technologies however do not go unnoticed by world leaders and those behind the scenes pulling their strings, and she and her team find themselves in a race against the corrupt and the powerful to elevate humanity from the sins of its past to a brighter utopian future. However, with this technology and science improving almost daily, there is now another power, infinitely more capable she needs to deal with.
It seems to me that a first release from a casual author with no marketing beyond friends and family has nearly zero chance to even get a single sale. The revenue aspect seems completely moot in such a situation, and effectively what one is doing is throwing the work into a void.
On the other hand, I can see how it might seem demeaning to just to give a work away that so much time was spent on, but at least it then has a chance to get maybe a dozen readers or so, especially if you go out and do some casual posting on forums and discussion boards, maybe go to a local book club, that sort of thing. Of course, there's always a slim chance of it going viral out of the blue, and I suppose that's one reason to attach a price to the work, but to me it seems like the virality chance is indistinguishable from zero if it's just tossed out there with a paywall among millions of other hobbyist books, While if there's a lower barrier to entry, that chance probably goes up at least an order of magnitude. In the infinitely small chance that it does go viral, it would be pretty easy to transition to a Patreon and put a price tag on the second work too.
I occasionally read these stories about authors working so hard and getting no one even reading their stuff, and it just seems so grim to me, even after accounting for the "make lemonade out of lemons" state of mind that OP has.
* If the links aren't there, add it now! Even better, add one in the side bar and others at the bottom of the article.
* It the links are somewhere in the page: Add a more visible copy (or two) for people like me that can't find them.
If someone was interested enough to read your post, they may want to take a look. Make it easy.
