Seventeenth Income Report – August 2014 ($276.76)

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

August felt quite unproductive.

House renovating consumed my time; between that and my 9 to 5 job, my writing business got the crumbs.

However, that didn’t stop me writing every day. I wrote more than 31k words of blog posts (mainly income reports), my next eBook (“The Art of Persistence”) and each Sunday I wrote some more of my novel.

I continued to solicit reviews, with some success, and I organized a free promo of my speed reading book.

That was about it. But I could afford the time to renovate, because I had a publisher now, who was supposed to take care of the mundane publishing grind. I didn’t have to look for freelancers or spend my time researching categories and keywords on Amazon.

Communication

However life wasn’t all roses. Almost daily, there were issues to resolve, or at least talk about. Publishing involves a zillion things, each trivial in their own way, and most are handled almost subconsciously when it’s your own business and you’re doing it all yourself. But all of these small issues do matter, so I found myself in endless dialogue.

You can imagine how tiresome it is to have to clarify, through email, details like fonts and formatting. But all those things had to be done if progress was to happen.

I unpublished my two books from Smashwords, so they could be published on Amazon in the KDP Select program. On the last day of my free promo, I was asked to unpublish my speed reading book, so it could be published it as the first of my old titles. It was stressful. Our communication could have been better, that is for sure.

Gigalaunch

The first launch, under my new regime, was a big hit. I was one of Amazon’s top 3000 authors. Wow! And my book broke into the top 1000 titles for the first time in my career (#520 to be exact). We sold 300 copies the first day. My publisher set the price at $2.99. It was a small 9,000 word booklet, but it was selling! We sold more than 10 copies a day through the end of August.

That was a good result, especially as the rest of my books sold the fewest copies (in a month), since the launch of Master Your Time In 10 Minutes a Day. More than half of my August sales came from the republished speed reading book.

Renovating the house

I had no time to think about the significance of any of this. I was working hard on renovating our house. My wife was working even harder. Achieving a new home was a dream come true for her, and as we had no funds left for renovations, we had to do a lot of it ourselves.

We worked frantically to move in before September, the beginning of a new school year in the new school. It was a bit surreal. The house was only just habitable, so we spent a lot of time in the backyard by the barbecue.

By the end of August, my wife and I were sleeping in the house, working on it in every possible minute. A few times we worked past midnight, slept a few hours, and started again. As mentioned already, my hard-working wife did much of the labor singlehandedly. I took care of the miscellaneous: I enrolled the kids in their new school, transferred our business paperwork to a new county office, organized the moving company, and all the other ‘things’ I’m sure you know about if you’ve ever moved house.

We managed to move in on the 30th of August; it was the Saturday before the beginning of the school year. And of course ‘moving in’ didn’t mean the upheaval was finished. There was still a lot of work to be done fitting ourselves and our stuff into a new property and a new routine.

All of this was very draining. I was exhausted. I was blessed to have a publisher that kept things going. I did very little with my business, but it did all right nonetheless.

August was another month in which I didn’t spend much money. I had a few posts proofread. I paid a couple of sites for book promotion and that was it.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income: €264.97 (about $349.76)

Cost:

$15, Lift coaching
$3, Gifts of my books
$30, Ghostwriting gigs, Fiverr
$10, Promotion of Learn to Read with Great Speed on freediscountedbooks.com
$15, Proofreading services, Fiverr

Total: $73

Net result: $276.76

Previous Income Report: July 2014 || Next Income Report: September 2014