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


Income report
1st of June 2013

My book was on sale for 6 days. Well, it was 3 days really; I did a free promo since 29th of May.

 

A personal Mission Statement: Your Road to Happiness is very short, about 9k words. I priced it at $1.

 

The very first day I sold 4 copies. My friends bought them, although I shared the book with them prior to the publishing.

I didn’t expect them to buy. I was even a bit angry on them that they did 😉

 

27th of May 2 more copies were bought, also by my friends. I’ve got a first review. Four stars.

On May 28th I sold 1 copy and I couldn’t pinpoint which friend made the purchase. Maybe, just maybe, it was an anonymous Amazon client’s purchase.

Hopes and fears

Prior to publishing the book I was of two minds.

On one hand, I sincerely hoped my book will become a bestseller, I will become a millionaire and I will live happily ever after.

On the other hand, I was afraid that people will judge my book as a product of a literary wannabe.

True to tell, I was most afraid that nobody will even notice it.

The first free promo

On 26th of May I submitted my book to a few freebie sites which didn’t need to submit the info 10 days prior or didn’t require several reviews. It took me a couple of hours. I wasn’t familiar with the process.

I was so naive then! I didn’t even check out later if they in fact posted my book. All in all, they wanted free books, so they would surely be happy to publish one more ad?

I also believed that all who download the book for free will read it.

After one year I’m more inclined to think that only 20% of the downloader’s become the readers.

 

I found several freebie Facebook groups and posted there about my promo.

Promo results:

29th of May: 123 downloads

30th of May: 181 downloads

31st of May: 183 downloads

The bright side

467 people got my book! The ‘bestseller scenario’ clearly didn’t realize itself, but I was thrilled to put my work in front of so many readers.

It was my first work ever published! And people were willing to read my stuff!

I was happy with that. Nah, I was elated! 😀

The Income Report Breakdown

Income: Still zero.

I sold 7 copies of my book, but I consider as “income” only the money which materializes on my bank account. Right then I had just a promise of future income. And it was shockingly low promise as well. For each copy I would get just 35 cents, after the Amazon’s hefty cut. Well, not exactly, US government got their cut too. My “cut” was only 24 cents.

Thus my overall publishing income, which I would see on my account only after a few months, was $1.68.

The encouraging fact was that my $5 investment in the cover would return within a single month at that pace. And if I could sustain it, I would earn about $205 a year on this book. After about 10 years I would break-even on my time investment too.

 

Costs: Zero.

I already included the cover cost in previous report.

Well, I invested a few further hours in spreading the word about the premiere and a free promo.

I topped that with tracking my sales and downloads on daily basis.

 

The first several days of my writer’s career brought me down from the dreams realm to the reality. But the reality was not so bad. People were reading my book.


Previous Income Report: The First One || Next Income Report: June 2013

Second Income Report – a Few Days of May 2013

2 thoughts on “Second Income Report – a Few Days of May 2013

  • June 5, 2014 at 2:02 pm
    Permalink

    Thank you for keeping it real. I’ve been toying with the idea to publish on Kindle but the fear of the unknown or what the reviews would say it’s paralyzing. I’m going to finish my manuscript this month, that will be my goal. Look forward to your next report.

    Reply
  • June 24, 2014 at 12:36 pm
    Permalink

    You’re welcome Yoly.

    There are only 2 kind of negative reviews:
    – the ones which will help you improve your book
    -the ones that indicate the problem is the reader, not the book

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *