If you look at the Fiction tab on this blog, you’ll see I’ve not sold a great number of short stories. Of those published stories, I’ve made three available online as PDF files – many months after they were originally published, of course. A fourth story, a flash fiction piece, I self-published on my Space Books blog as part of my Apollo 40 celebration (albeit somewhat delayed).

At the beginning of July, I decided to put copies of those four stories up on feedbooks.com, a site for free ebooks. You know, just to see. Would anyone read them? Would I get any comments?

The first has certainly happened. But not the second. No comments, but a large number of downloads. In fact, the respective popularities of the four stories has surprised me quite a bit…

Since the first of July, the stories have had the following number of downloads:

• Thicker Than Water – 288 downloads
• The Old Man of the Sea of Dreams – 394 downloads
• The Amber Room – 884 downloads
• Black Rain – 1,756 downloads

Black Rain has been the most popular by quite a margin – more than double The Amber Room. But if I had to rate my own personal satisfaction with the stories… then Black Rain is the one I’m least satisfied with. So I’m slightly boggled by the mismatch between my own expectations of a short story and readers’ responses to it. If I did something right in Black Rain, I don’t know what it is…

While I published my stories on feedbooks.com more as an intellectual exercise than as a serious self-publishing strategy, I’m happy with the results. I’ll to continue to re-publish my fiction there – a suitable length of time after each story was initially published, naturally.