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


Know Yourself Like Your Success Depends on ItI started preparing the next book launch unusually early; I spent the first two weeks preparing the next book for publication. The results of Know Yourself Like Your Success Depends on It were encouraging, so I felt the surge of hope.

My copy editor, Anthony, reviewed my manuscript. I sent it to my beta readers, quickly incorporated their feedback and sent the manuscript to Archangel Ink for production.

The price they quoted made me shudder with shock. (It was $509 for a 20,000 word book.) This price was the main reason I changed my future publishing schedule. I was about to publish the book about habits in the Six Simple Steps to Success series, but it was 30,000 words. The book about networking online was several thousand words shorter, so I decided to go with that one instead.

Anyway, on the 12th of November I sent the manuscript and while waiting for corrections I was free to do other stuff.

Beta-readers

The ‘Fitness’ market is really crowded and I’m not an authority in that field. I attribute a lot of the sales of Bulletproof Health and Fitness to my beta reader feedback, such as this:

The part which inspired the most was definitely the few paragraphs you put in the excerpt. It somehow gives hope that if he can, so can I. Plus, those feats of pushups and pull ups were impressive enough by themselves.
I think it would’ve been nice if the introductory chapter started with something exciting like that…to me it seemed a bit uninteresting till I reached the above mentioned passage.

That was pure gold!

For me, my performance is nothing special, but clearly this is not so for others. After getting this feedback, I moved the fragment to the introduction. I believe it hooked many readers who read the free 10% of the book.

A day job

The pace in my office got crazy. We won two new projects I was involved in. I worked quite a lot of overtime hours. To add insult to the injury, there were a few emergencies in another project. These added to my already strained workload.

I was constantly exhausted and sleep deprived. I often worked till late and woke up later than usual. I had only time for doing my morning ritual before going to work and I often caught a nap on trains. Thus, I didn’t have a reliably available time block for my writing and business.
However, I wrote and did all many associated things (proofreading, blogging, formatting, email broadcasts etc.) “in the meantime”. When I reviewed my journal entries from November, my juggling effort impressed even myself.

The one positive output from all this day job busyness was that I appeared to be a valuable asset for the company and I was able to easily morph my probationary contract into a permanent one.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:
Amazon royalties: €571.53 ($611.54)
CreateSpace royalties: €27.63 ($29.56)
German translation royalties: €8.12 ($8.69)

Total: $649.79
CreateSpace at last allowed European authors to get EFT payments and November was the first time I received royalties for my paperbacks directly into my bank account.

Costs:
$390, editing for Bulletproof Health and Fitness
$16, proofreading services Fiverr
$30, View From the Top Community fee
$29, Aweber fee
$450.68, royalties split with co-author
Total: $915.68

Net Result: -$265.89

The negative net result was caused by the payment to my co-author for two or three months in bulk. We have finally worked out how can I send her money without losing a huge piece to conversion rates and bank fees.


Previous Income Report: October 2015

Thirty Second Income Report – November 2015 (-$265.89)

Leave a Reply

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