Twenty Sixth Income Report – May 2015 ($654.09)

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

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May 2015 was a routine month.

I spent a lot of time preparing the launch of the next book.

Slicing the Hype was published at the beginning of June, so May was full of the usual pre-launch hustle: researching keywords, picking the title, choosing the cover, approving editing and proofreading, creating a book description and so on.

Other than that I did the normal stuff: pitching and writing guest posts, giving interviews etc.

My Fancy Hands experiment was on its highest. I organized a few promos and also tried to promote my permafree book The Fitness Expert Next Door. As I indicated in the last report, it was a wasted effort. My ROI (return on investment ) wasn’t even close to my initial investment, neither in time nor money.

Changes in the KDP Select program

About that time Amazon introduced changes in their borrowing program. Authors were no longer paid each time a book was loaned, but for the number of pages read by the borrowers.

Thanks to this change I realized the painful truth: people don’t read nonfiction. Dividing the number of pages read by the number of pages in my books, I discovered that most of the loans made in the past were “empty”. Maybe 20% of loans resulted in actual readings of my books.

I loved the new data provided by Amazon. In self-publishing you so often act blindly. And every piece of reliable data can help you to improve your business.

I didn’t like the conclusion though.

Decision

After getting the data about the number of pages read, I decided to leave the KDP Select program. One by one, my books finished their exclusivity periods and I started to publish them outside of Amazon as well.

I used Draft2Digital, because their process is so smooth. In most part, I copied the data from Amazon to their system. Manuscripts needed some changes, but the most troublesome requirement was removing all the links that led to Amazon.

At the end of the month I had a few books on iTunes, Barnes&Noble, Kobo and other main book retailers.

 

It was a wise move. I didn’t earn much in 2015 from other vendors, perhaps a little above $100, but it was a little more than I would have earned if I’d kept my books in KDP Select. And I reached an audience of people I couldn’t previously reach. My revenues from D2D got even better after my success on Quora, but that is a future story.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:
Amazon royalties: €681.82 ($750)
German translation royalties for Master Your Time: €35.53 ($39.08)
Total: $789.08

Costs:
$5.5, Bknights promo on Fiverr
$10.5, proofreading services Fiverr
$10, Awesome Gang promo
$29.99, Fancy Hands fees
$40, eReaderGirl promo
$10, social media promo service from jameshmayfield.com
$29, Aweber fee

Total: $134.99

Net Result: $654.09

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Previous Income Report: April 2015