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


44th Income Report - November 2016
In November 2016, I could finally take care of several small projects that were sitting in the back of my mind for weeks and months. I had a bit of time and brainpower saved because I stopped even planning publication of further books.

Other Formats

I finally published my last paperback – for Bulletproof Health and Fitness. If I recall correctly, I also fixed a few formatting issues in my other books. In October I purchased some of my paperbacks from CreateSpace and noticed that the cover for 99 Perseverance Success Stories was off a bit. I didn’t care about this very much. But when a few dozen copies were purchased, I contacted HappySelfPublishing in emergency mode, and we fixed the issue within one day. Eh, the blessing of urgency!

Derek Doepker narrated an audio version for Know Yourself like Your Success Depends on It. Before the end of the month, I submitted it to ACX.

Writing

I had been keep writing Quora answers. I also wrote a few blog posts, including an affiliate post (more about it below). In November, I wrote my guest post about Amazon ads for Kindlepreneur. I wrote quite a lot of content for my email broadcasts, coaching clients and corresponding with my readers.

Subscribers

I tried to keep my email subscribers engaged. In November, I organized two or three habits challenges, I created a FB group and interacted with some folks there.

Not much came out of that, I hoped for more massive response to the challenges. But you never know the results of the ripple effect. One of my readers started a gratitude diary and, following my advice, shared this activity with her grandkids. She was super stoked how much this simple habit improved their wellbeing and mutual relationships.

Coaching

I got a few new clients, and the November’s payment from Coach.me was 3-digit for the first time. Judging by my income, I coached 4–5 clients in October (thus the amount) and 6–7 clients in November.

The satisfaction from observing my clients’ daily improvement was enormous.

Paperbacks Revenue

One of authors from a FB group I’m active in shared a great tip with me: if you price your paperbacks very high, Amazon will most likely discount them significantly, but royalties will be paid based on the full price.

I checked it out, and it worked for all of my books but one. I priced my paperbacks at $25, but readers were getting them for as low as $8 or $11. It had some psychological effect (“wow, a discount!”) on the sales. I sold over 140 copies in November. What is more, I earned over 14 hundred dollars on them.

PromoRepublic

I bought a lifetime access to a software called PromoRepublic. They work in a similar fashion like Buffer, allowing you to schedule your social media posts in advance. At the beginning, they included only Twitter and Facebook, but those were the two platforms I was the most active on.

I taught my son how to use it, and he began to schedule inspirational quotes and links to my old blog posts on my FB page and Twitter feed. I didn’t get much traction, but also it didn’t cost me much, both in terms of time and money.

Each of those posts on FB got a few to several impressions. I noticed a small trickle of traffic coming from Twitter to my blog, maybe one visit a day, but it was one additional visit a day. You never know which visitor will become your next raving fan.

Podcasts

I gave at least one podcast interview (maybe a few) in November, for My Kitaab, the biggest publishing podcast in India. As usual, the podcasts’ hosts reached out to me, not the other way around.

I love podcasts for almost a total lack of preparation for it. I only need to schedule my time and mobilize my wits.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Second year in a row I organized a sale of all of my books during the weekend after Thanksgiving. It was quite fruitful. I sold a few dozen copies both on Friday and Monday.
44th Income Report - November 2016
I wonder if my great December results weren’t driven to some degree by that promo.

Ads & Sales

In November, I created five new Amazon advertising campaigns, which was almost 50% increase (so far I had 11 of them). My sales had been stable since September, like never before. I observed a slight decline in November, but I made up for that with the huge promotion after Thanksgiving.
I sold in November 439 Kindle copies on Amazon.com alone, plus about 50 copies on other markets, and 140 paperbacks.

I attributed most of those results to the ads. It wasn’t an accident that my sales stabilized exactly when I started to advertise my books on Amazon. Besides, I had a clear comparison between the books that were advertised and those that were not. The books from the second category sold only several copies a month (Master Your Time with 10 copies was the leader). Advertised books sold a few dozen copies each (Directed by Purpose, which was relatively ‘young’ sold 103 copies).

I was happy with those results, and I planned to expand advertising as soon as I tackle numerous smaller projects.

An Affiliate Post

As an effect of my great results, I pitched the guest post to Kindlepreneur, but I also decided to write a review of the program I learned AMS advertising from – KD Sales Machine of Derek Doepker.

I wrote the detailed post, included detailed numbers and screens from my “before” and “after” results and published it at the end of the month.

Of course, I secretly counted on making an easy fortune. Of course, the reality was different. During seven months, three copies of the program were sold via my affiliate link, and I collected a couple hundred dollars so far. It’s hardly a fortune. On the other hand, I earned money for writing something I wanted to write about anyway.

Had I been paid for each of my blog posts as handsomely, I would have already been rich.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:
Amazon royalties: €469.42 ($497.58)
CreateSpace royalties: €739.48 ($783.85)
Draft2Digital royalties: $12.59
Coach.me fees: $136.9
Audiobooks royalties: $5.12

Total: $1436.04

Costs:
$36.9, View From the Top Community fee
$58, Aweber fee
$20, InstaFreebie fee
$265, Business on Purpose mastermind
$28.28, royalties split with co-author
$419, Amazon ads
$70, RA’s (RA = Real Assistant; my son 😉 ) remuneration
$3.26, FB ads
$75, Office 365 license
$14, PromoRepublic

Total: $989.44

Net Result: $446.6


Previous Income Report: October 2016

Forty Fourth Income Report – November 2016 ($446.6)

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