Google AdSense is a system that allows regular bloggers to host ads on their sites, or advertise their own products on other sites. Given that it’s a Google product, it’s one of the largest systems out there. And yesterday, I got kicked off of it.

To give you a little background, I very rarely blog anything. I have a fairly popular YouTube show that I partnered with AdSense, giving them the right to put ads on the show, but I never really checked it. It was a passive income stream that, to be honest, made me no income at all. I got a card in the mail from Google, offering me $100 in ad promotion revenue, and using that, I determined that ads didn’t help me sell my stuff at all. I’d basically forgotten that it existed.

So, Allison convinced me to read a bit of Jane Eyre each night, before I sit down to edit “Invito Rex”. It’s made a huge difference in my writing. Check this out:

“As the boy becomes the man, so he must bear new burdens of sufferance and sacrifice. A monarch’s duties are, I find, no more heavy than those of a common man; they are, however, more devastating in the breadth of their effect. It is, therefore, with a heavy heart that I must commit these words, that they be recorded truly, and I pray, never acted upon.

Something strange happened to me yesterday. I was reading through Google+ when I saw someone ask, “Are there any Indie e-book authors I can throw money at?”

Now, an offer like that is music to my self-promoting ears. So, I responded in the comments, adding links to my books on Amazon, with short synopsis of each. She responded with, “Those sound great, but I don’t think Amazon Germany will take PayPal. Are you on Smashwords?”

So, let’s stop here for a minute. Of course, I sent her a link to my books on Smashwords, but that’s not the point. The point is that a reader asked, specifically, for a distribution format… and it wasn’t Amazon.