Six Years Later
Thoughts on Net Assets
By Carl Bussjaeger, March 23, 2008

Recently, I've been going over the web stats for bussjaeger.org, mainly for family tree download info for my father, but also out of general curiosity. A couple of items caught my attention.

One of those is downloads of my résumé. A lot of people d/l that. But judging from emails and phone calls, they're all Massachusetts-based recruiters trying to fill jobs in Massachusetts. A fair percentage of them sound desperate, yet resigned upon hearing that I don't want to live/work in Mass; apparently they all hear that a lot. A whole lot.

But more interesting to me are the downloads of my old novel, Net Assets.

Net Assets released about six years ago. I originally charged for it, but gave up on that after some weasel apparently uploaded an unlocked copy to various file-sharing networks. I basically wrote off Net Assets as a loss. I have my own doubts about the value of copyrights, but did point out that without recompense, I'm unlikely to go to the major effort of completing the next two novels in the Net Assets universe. (Yes, both actually exist in drafts and outlines. And there are still unpublished short stories.)

Back when I was trying to attract readers, Net Assets was available in a variety of download formats: HTML, text, PDF, Palm, .zip, self-extracting .zip. When I gave up on sales, I started paring down the options. By now, PDF is all that's left.

I used to work the search engines to drive Net Assets traffic. I stopped that years ago. No more advertising. No more endorsements or prize nominations. I even shut down the Net Assets website, and put the download in a small corner of bussjaeger.org.

And yet...

Six years later people are still finding and downloading the novel. Dozens of them every month. I admit that does my ego some good.

And I can't help thinking -- with a grin -- that someone over at Baen Books may be regretting that they never even bothered to use my SASE to send a rejection letter.