How many people said "Thank you"?

As some of you know, I’m working at Kalshi now, and I’ve closed the book on my book, Framed. Things are going well at the new job (we are apparently valued at 2.5x what I joined at three months ago) and I hope they don’t ever ask me to write a book about it (we are apparently valued at 2.5x what I joined at three months ago).

One workplace conversation led me to think about how depressing life was as an unemployed self-published author. I was talking about how bad my return on investment (time and money) was if viewed in dollar terms, when I remarked, “Half the people I gave free books to didn’t even say thank you!”

Today’s blog post covers exactly that: how many people, in two different cohorts, acknowledged receiving my book or wrote reviews following me sending them free copies. I probably spent over $1500 on promotional copies, and the return was godawful. Beyond dollars and cents, it’s a cautionary tale of any pursuit in which you need to rely on other people, and perhaps it also revealed something about what my friends thought of me (although I don’t really go there).

Podcasts

I’m happy to share another two and a half hours of podcast appearances. There are still ten supposedly in post-production, so I’ll share those later in the fall.

• Digital Trailblazer (32 min)

• Beyond 80% (1 hour)

• Authors on Mission (40 min)

• Networking Unleashed (32 min)

I’m finished with track writing

To close things out: FanSided ended coverage of Olympic sports, including track and field. The site relies on ad revenue and hasn’t had a good year in terms of organic search traffic (which is a key component of ad revenue). My editor at FanSided was great and twice tossed me extra money because he liked my articles. He was also the only person—the only person—who went out on a limb and connected me with a publishing house after hearing about my upcoming book.

My final article was published last week: an interview with Heptathlete Anna Hall.

A few people here started following me because of my sportswriting in 2024. Thank you! I’m happy that I had a chance to get paid to write, never mind cross the ocean to fulfill assignments. The original goal here was to build enough of an independent audience such that I could do a newsletter or fringe writing while covering costs, but, unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

If you’re so tempted, you can follow me on Strava here. And, you can hold out hope that maybe one day, one day, you’ll see a book about running written by Tim O’Hearn.