Are you curious about a half-year delay? I explained it in my first income report.


55th income report October 2017On the 1st of October, 2017, I was going back from a get-together organized by my employer. The whole way back, I chatted with my director. We discussed corporate policies, personal development, my road to becoming an author and my future half-time in the day job. That was an interesting time.

Failure

Once again, I’ve heard somewhere that video is on a rising tide. I decided to produce 30 FB live videos in 30 days.

I failed terribly. I recorded over 15 episodes when a retreat with my church community broke the streak. Then the ‘what the hell’ effect kicked in, and I made a one-week pause. Then I recorded several more episodes. It’s February now, and I still need to record two or three episodes to finish the challenge.

Family

My wife enjoyed the freedom from a day job. The whole family enjoyed it. She and my eldest son went to Poznan one week after I got back from there. They were on some computer games fairs. Well, my son was. My wife sightsaw the city.

Going through my journal, I noticed we were at a theatre and on a concert of a band which concert we attended the last time when we weren’t even married.

My schedule is always full, but with her day job with irregular shifts, we simply had fewer opportunities to meet together.

Somewhere in the middle of October, my wife took over the first ever part of my business tasks. She started downloading the data of my clients’ ad campaigns every day. This needs to be done in approximately the same time of the day, in the morning, when I am at work. It was always an effort to me to remember about it and to smuggle this task between other tasks.

Well, that was as far as my wife was willing to help. Whenever I tried to show her other things I would like to outsource, she was always “busy” or “tired.”

However, I didn’t mind it at all. Pat Flynn often mentions that his wife is the most important person in his business, because she mitigates him from many household chores and children care.

This is so true. I remember when I kept a time journal in 2012 and found out that life’s trivia takes up to four hours of my days. Chores, shopping, preparing meals and so on, consumes a huge chunk of our lives.

Thanks to my wife, they consume less of my days now. I almost don’t do shopping anymore. I almost never see kids off to school anymore. I help them less with homework now that my wife is at home for the full time. It all sums up to many hours that I can dedicate to neglected house fixes, my business or quality time with my family.

Permafree Experiment

Once again, I started advertising my two permafree books via AMS. I wanted to check if increasing the number of downloads of free books does in result cause more purchases of my paid titles. I ran those campaigns for over one month, and I couldn’t find a clear correlation between those two metrics. I paused them again at the beginning of December. The only thing I concluded for sure was that it cost me about 8 cents to generate a download.

A Headline Story

Till October, I reviewed about a hundred book pages looking for the signs of low conversion. I explained to authors dozens of times what the best practices are. I often used my books’ pages as examples. And I discovered that some of them are poor examples. “99 Perseverance Success Stories” had no headline in the book description.

A huge mistake! Your headline is responsible for at least 50% of sales. At that time, this book wasn’t doing very well. After the successful promo in August, the sales shrunk to about 60 copies a month. I quickly brainstormed a headline and included it in the description.
55th income report October 2017
The sales took off immediately. In the next month, I sold 100 copies. I was pleasantly surprised that my stuff actually works. As I tell every author who inquires about my services: “A book without a headline cannot be successfully advertised.”

Lesson:

If you don’t have much traffic to your book, this may not be so obvious. But I advertised “99 Perseverance Success Stories” when I added the headline to the description. I already had people landing on the book’s page. Thus I had seen the effects immediately.

You never know when a tide of traffic will arrive to the shore of your book page. Prepare in advance. Fix your book page according to best practices ASAP. Otherwise, when the traffic will arrive, you will regret it converts so poorly.

Networking

In October 2017, I followed up folks from The Progress Fairs which I attended in September. Nothing tangible came out of it, but I got the proof that people are interested in getting on American Amazon.

One small publisher and two authors met with me. One author was too busy for the proper launch in the USA. Another one has to translate his book into English first. I had enough on my plate, so I didn’t follow them up again.

But those leads are still warm, and I have them all in the back of my mind.

In the middle of the month, I also had a retreat with my church community. I was able to work on my mobile with my coaching clients. I also remember recording a live video using the hotel’s Wi-Fi. The advance of technology is amazing. When I was going to retreats 20 years ago, I didn’t even have a mobile phone. We were completely separated from the world.

Resurrecting Books

I got a referral inside ISI, and I got the order for a full book’s page revamp once again.

This time, a rewrite of the book description was necessary. I discovered that my proofreader is also a copywriter! How awesome is that? And what were the chances that a woman who volunteered to proofread my stuff several months ago also had skills that I would need in several months?

She changed the book description (she had to do it twice, because the first iteration wasn’t exactly what the author expected), and I obtained the author’s password and changed everything on his page: formatting of the descriptions, editorial reviews, etc. I also created an AMS account for him, an editor’s account for him and started ads.

It was another case of a book that resurrected nicely and retreated to a ‘zombie’ status. Nowadays, it is selling about a couple dozen copies a month. Before I took it, it sold a copy in the last three months.

But advertising was not all roses. I had to split with a children’s books author. My ads simply didn’t deliver enough results to be profitable.

Another Case Study of Providence

In October, I had to start paying for the Iron Sharpens Iron mastermind. Our budget shrunk, because my wife quit her job. I had no idea how I’d pay for that in the long run. I felt lucky that my business ventures brought a stable income, but the growth was very slow.

Two weeks before the ISI payment, my other mentor dissolved a mastermind I was a part of for almost 20 months. That was a huge surprise for me. I didn’t see it coming at all.
However, I could use those $265 toward my ISI payment. Suddenly, ISI mastermind became almost affordable. I paid for three months in advance in hope that it would be beneficial enough to afford future payments from the income generated by being involved in the mastermind.

I’ll spill the beans a bit, because this three-month period is about to end: yes, it was worth it. My business generates right now enough revenue to cover the ISI mastermind cost. It looks like in the future, I will easily make up for this initial three-month payment.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:
Amazon royalties: €844.56 ($979.69)
CreateSpace royalties: €720.04 ($835.25)
Coach.me fees: $437.96
Draft2Digital royalties: $14.98
Audiobooks royalties: $94.88
PWIW personal coaching: $167.07
AMS service remuneration: $416.64
Affiliate commissions: $92.92

Total: $3039.39

Costs:
$29, Aweber fee
$20, InstaFreebie fee
$265, Business on Purpose mastermind
$108.07, royalties split with co-author
$75.38, my editor’s share in profits
$653.4, Amazon ads
$110, RAs’ (RAs = Real Assistants; my sons 😉 ) remuneration
$101, proofreading
$207, BookAds
$64.23, order of my books from CreateSpace

Total: $1633.08

Net Result: $1406.31


Previous Income Report: September 2017

Fifty Fifth Income Report – October 2017 ($1406.31)

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