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


48th Income Report March 2017March 2017 was a good month. First of all, just at the end of February, the royalties from December (Kindle) / January (CreateSpace) came. Here is an entry from my journal to illustrate what it meant:

179% of my salary, a nice bonus. I smiled when I recalled my director telling me I should hustle more if I want to get a 10% salary raise.

In the middle of 2016, I had a conversation with my director about my eventual salary raise. She told me to hustle more because she couldn’t justify my raise with my current attitude at that time.

My attitude got much worse after the conversation 😉

It was a straw that broke the camel’s back. At that moment, I finally decided to split with the concept of working for somebody else forever.

I’ll be eternally thankful to my director for that. 😀

Writing

Nothing significant in that field… other than I beat my monthly word count record!

I wrote 37,228 words in March 2017. The usual stuff: Quora answers, email broadcasts, articles and blog posts.

Failed Projects

I remember at least three instances of things that didn’t work out at all.

  1. A small publisher from Philippines contacted me on Quora and inquired about From Shy to Hi.

It was a small press of a Catholic religious order. I sent them the manuscript, but it wasn’t what they looked for.

They asked for another book, this time Master Your Time, probably of a negative review on Amazon that said “Too much God.” Well, it was apparently too little God for them, because they never got back to me.

  1. Aaron Walker shared in The Community a document, “101 Random Acts of Kindness.”

It inspired me to brainstorm “101 acts you could do for a fellow Community member.” I wrote several hundred words, saved the doc on my hard drive and let it lie there. Only after half a year, I started doing something about it and sharing with other members of The Community. Who knows? Maybe it will be of some use yet?

  1. Patreon.

Somehow I got an idea to get more independent from Amazon. I knew about Patreon for a long time, but I finally started to seriously research what it involves.

I did quite a lot of the job, researched the platform, created an account, brainstormed and laid down my goals and rewards for my supporters. I went as far as writing the profile… and I put it all on hold.

This project has been on hold since then.

Lessons:

  1. Failure is a natural part of any entrepreneurial process.
  2. If you buy into thinking that each of your endeavors should end with an instant success, you’d better become a manager in a corporation. They don’t have a streak of successes there as well, but they copy with that exporting the blame for failed projects to other departments, employees or even clients. Only successes are solely theirs. 😉

As an authorpreneur, you don’t have such a luxury. You are responsible for all your outcomes.

  1. Only the finished project may yield some profits.

Till you actually finish a project, “ship it,” it’s only a learning experience at best and waste of your time and resources at worst.

Maybe one day I’ll launch my Patreon page and use it for what it is designed for: to connect with my supporters and get more independent as a creator. Before that day, however, all I have from this project is reflection about my message and my audience.

New Proofreader

After quite a dramatic broadcast (I felt really low at that time) one of my readers volunteered to proofread my content, because she wanted to support me out of the goodness of her heart.

The serendipity was amazing. I was about to split with my current proofreader; however, I had no idea about that at that moment.

At the beginning, I gave her a few income reports of mine to proofread. I didn’t have much energy, so I wasn’t able to process much more anyway. I was delighted by the gentle way she proofread my texts, while getting all my stupid grammar mistakes related to tenses and articles. Punctuation isn’t my strong point as well.

Lesson:

I never planned for the failures I instanced above. But I never planned for many successes that happened along my way – like hiring this proofreader. When my current proofreader quit, I had a replacement immediately available.

We are still working together and she is really a pleasure to work with. She proofread over 50,000 words of my content, and I found only a few cases where she didn’t understand my intentions. No other proofreader had such a great ratio. I’ve worked with about a dozen proofreaders so far, and our level of mutual understanding is mind blowing.

Income

I still rode a Christmas wave of royalties. Kindle royalties from January came, and they were my best ever. I earned more in a single month in 2015 after the launches of Trickle Down Mindset and The Art of Persistence, but only thanks to Amazon’s program of compensations from borrows that existed at that time.
48th Income Report March 2017
Over 16 hundred dollars from Kindle sales. CreateSpace wasn’t bad in February 2017 either – 1,282 dollars from 241 sales.

Third month in a row, I registered 4-digit revenue and net income. I was seriously considering transition to half-time or even quitting my job.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:
Amazon royalties: €1498.91 ($1603.83)
CreateSpace royalties: €1082.79 ($1158.59)
Coach.me fees: $217.04
Draft2Digital royalties: $29.96
Audiobooks royalties: $37.4
PWIW personal coaching: $143.85

Total: $3190.67

Costs:
$36.9, View From the Top Community fee
$29, Aweber fee
$20, InstaFreebie fee
$265, Business on Purpose mastermind
$246.44, royalties split with co-author
$862.73, Amazon ads
$63, RA’s (RA = Real Assistant; my son 😉 ) remuneration
$125.53, proofreading

Total: $1585.7

Net Result: $1604.97


Previous Income Report: February 2017

Forty Eighth Income Report – March 2017 ($1604.97)

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