Eightieth Income Report – November 2019 ($2,805.44)

Are you curious about a 3-month delay? I explained it in my first income report.

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In October, I closed some open loops, so I started the new month with a renewed vigor. At the first mastermind call in November, our mentor asked us about our business goals for 2020. I said I want to 10x my business. The first step toward that direction would be systematizing and documenting my customer onboard process. This is the last thing I’m really involved on a daily basis in Resurrecting Books. Anything else I could delegate.

So, hammering out this process was my first 12 Week Year goal. The other was the work on my book.

The New Ad Interface

However, on the 8th of November, I discovered that Amazon did something good with their ad interface. Loading the list of keywords moved from excruciatingly long to a mere few seconds. My team could work so much faster. Over the weekend I ordered over 1,500 ads. My team knocked them out in no time. I was busy trying to keep pace with them.

The new interface brought also a few problems. The campaign creation process changed in the Canadian and UK markets. I needed to train my team in the new process. I needed to teach it myself first.

Luckily, my elder son is very bright. He mastered the new process in no time. He even recorded the ad creation on video, so I had a training material for other team members.

The new interface, even with a couple of additional steps, was much faster than the old one. We created over 6,000 new ads in November.

A Mild Cold

And on the 11th of Nov, I got a cold. It wasn’t anything serious at all. I had a sore throat and subfebrile temperature.

For a week, I simply tried to push through. I only gave myself slightly more time to sleep. I was so used to being healthy that any curation seemed for me like wasting time.

Well, it didn’t work out at all. I had been under the weather for the whole week. Next Tuesday, I finally decided I need to give myself some grace. I drastically slowed down. I did only the necessary things and gave myself a lot of time for day-time naps. On Friday, I had the whole day training in my day job.

Saturday, the 21st of November was the first day when my productivity was up to my normal levels.

Last Week

I not exactly wasted two weeks in the middle of November, but they left a sour taste in my mouth. I could do so much more, if I’d have taken proper care of myself before I got a cold or if I’d have rested properly the moment I noticed a decline in my health.

Beating myself didn’t help much with catching up. I had prospects to attend to. I had more orders of ads to send to my team. I had a backlog of emails to deal with.

And it was Thanksgiving week. I had a Black Friday deal coordinated with 14 other authors. Needless to say, my progress was much slower than I wished for.

Also, I had more meetings than usual in my church community. This added just a few more hours a week into my schedule, but with the whole craziness, it made me feel even more overwhelmed.

The Onboarding Process

Luckily, God had my back. My childhood friend is a process engineer in a factory and he found himself recently with a lot of time in his lap. He volunteered to help me out.

I sent him my chaotic notes and he overnight put them into a simple well-organized chart. He provided some insights, so I realized where I need to add more details. I had little time to do more busy with catching up with the everyday stuff, but at least this project inched forward.

The New Book

We made good progress in November. We finally polished the content, so I could create an advance reading copy. I shared it with 60+ readers from my email list. I also surveyed my subscribers and came up with a subtitle for the book. I discussed with Jeannie, my co-author, further details, did some preliminary keyword research and modified the cover concept with my designer.

At the end of the month, I started a reach-out campaign to my author friends asking them for help with my book launch.

Fizzling Happiness

About a week after introducing the new interface, I discovered that I could create new ads again under my old corrupted accounts!

I immediately ordered ads in the USA and Canada. I also contacted a prospect who had been waiting for the Canadian market for a few months.

My happiness was short-lived indeed. One by one, the accounts got corrupted again. It was enough to create a hundred ads or so to break them.

The nice thing about this was that I got a new customer for the Canadian market.

Prospects

In November I got three prospects. Two of them were very promising, with 2-3 nonfiction books. Usually, nonfiction works much better than fiction with my ads. We created ads for them and it appeared their campaigns barely broke even!

The third prospect wanted to advertise just a single fiction book. I accepted her because she had also a couple of nonfiction books and I thought we will advertise them. We created just the test batch of ads for her book.

In a week I couldn’t believe my eyes. This book was performing extraordinarily. In fact, this was the #3 book out of 200+ I advertised. We quickly created the full stack of our standard campaigns. Then, we created also long-tail keyword ads. It was a no-brainer. This book was converting like crazy.

Lesson:

You never know what will happen with AMS ads till you start. Two prospects fit my ideal customer profile and very little came out of that. The third was a longshot, but it paid off handsomely.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €2,987.8 ($3,406.42)
Coach.me fees: $138.05
Draft2Digital royalties: $22.86
PublisDrive royalties: $6.58
Audiobooks royalties: $49.06
PWIW personal coaching: $337.12
AMS service remuneration: $2,762.12
Total: $6,722.21

Costs:
$69, Aweber fee
$81.51, royalties split with co-author
$2,155.82 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$10.93; retreat-related costs
$77, Business on Purpose monthly fee
$827.42, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$70, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $3,916.77

Net Result: $2,805.44

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Previous Income Report: October 2019