Fifty Sixth Income Report – November 2017 ($587.58)

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

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November 2017 was insignificant. I could take a “boring” month after everything else that already had happened in 2017.

My Amazon ads got stale in October. My book revenue dropped to about $1,700, so I took a closer look at all the ads I ran. I had several hundred of them at that time. I turned off at least a couple hundred of the oldest, because they were close to dead. In exchange, I created new campaigns with the best keywords found in the old campaigns.

I also created many more ads using keywords extracted directly from my manuscripts.

My workmate wrote a tiny program for me that parses TXT files and extracts from them the list of unique words. This was by far the best keyword research tool after KDP Rocket I’ve ever used. I processed all of my manuscripts through the tool and created 10 new keyword templates. So far, I earned on them over $800.

All of this processing resulted in five new keyword templates that I used for my clients. My son created well over 250 ad campaigns in November 2017.

Starving Artist Challenge

Around the middle of November, I joined Jeff Goins’ 30-day publishing challenge. Every day, I was supposed to publish something new.

Using a few tricks, I pulled this off. Sometimes, I reused my content from one platform to publish it on another (e.g. took a Quora answer and published on Medium), but it was always involved with some work.

I had been spending about an hour a day formatting content and looking for relevant images to add to my articles. However, the results were quite extraordinary and immediate. As soon as I started cranking out content every day, my statistics skyrocketed. I got more views, reads and followers on Quora, Medium and my blog.

AMS service

I had plenty of interactions with authors inquiring about my advertising services, and I reviewed many book pages on Amazon. But I got only two new clients in November 2017, including my old friend who was scared shitless of providing Amazon her husband’s credit card data. We advertised her fiction book.

My other customer was a nonfiction author with several titles. I got him on board in the last week of November and created first ads for him on 25th of November.

Case Studies

The fiction book of my friend initially did very well and sold about a dozen copies in the first few days. Then it tanked, like most fiction books tend to with keyword ads. Her daily spendings dived below a dollar a day.

But I still consider her book resurrected. It had sold zero in the previous few months. Since getting the help of my ads, her book sells now 10-20 copies a month and the ads are actually profitable.

In the end of October, I got a nonfiction book. It had an excellent track record and the bestselling rank around #11,000. This book did even better than the fiction book of my friend at the beginning. It sold over a dozen copies in a few days.

And then, exactly like with my friend’s book, everything tanked and remained that way. The book was still selling well organically, but my ads provided very little traction.

Wins

I used the same pricing trick I used a year ago for the Christmas period. I priced my paperbacks high and let Amazon discount them for my readers.

However, this year the effect was weaker. Fewer of my books got discounted, and Amazon was faster in bringing them up to the full inflated price. Nonetheless, I earned an additional few hundred bucks, thanks to this trick.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Like every year since 2015, I made a huge promo of my books for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Unlike in previous years, I had no promotion strategy nor any additional email blast for a Cyber Monday, so the number of sales at that day was not impressive at all. Black Friday made up for it. I sold over 130 copies of my books in one day. In the whole promo weekend, I sold well over 200 copies.

I did it three times already, enough to conclude that it works every time. Especially, if you collected over 1,000 email addresses in one year, so new readers may be interested in your old titles.

Black Friday/Cyber Monday promo gives you a boost of sales just before the Christmas season. Amazon algorithms don’t miss such spikes. It’s worth it to “lose” some revenue at $0.99 to compensate for it during the Christmas season.

Losses

I continued running ad campaigns for my permafree books. I wanted to determine if more free copies in hands of readers translated into more sales afterwards. All I could determine was that the correlation is impossible to determine.

Well, I also concluded that it cost me about 8 cents to generate a single download.

 

I attended an all-hands call in my ISI mastermind with Jeff Goins. At the end, he told us how we can reach him and he would gladly help. I took him for his word and sent him an email about what I have to offer for other authors. Jeff replied, asking what exactly I expect from him, and I asked him to connect me with his audience via a guest post or podcast episode, whatever he deemed more relevant.

At that point, the conversation went deadly silent. So, I approached him from a different angle. I discovered that his first book was self-published and sent him detailed instructions how he can improve his book page (and sales). The only thing he applied was changing price from $1.99 to $2.99 (with quite good results).

I followed Jeff once again and at the end of January, he replied that he would be up for a guest post about my recommendations on his blog.

Once again, I found out that it’s hard to cooperate with celebrities, even if you are introduced to them and don’t use ‘cold call’ approach.

 

I wrote less in November 2017, only 22,900 words. The only good thing about my writing that month was that I immediately published almost everything I wrote.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:
Amazon royalties: €1019.44 ($1182.55)
CreateSpace royalties: €628.05 ($728.54)
Coach.me fees: $600.13
Draft2Digital royalties: $10.33
Audiobooks royalties: $119.25
PWIW personal coaching: $310.92
AMS service remuneration: $453.59
Affiliate commissions: $46.31

Total: $3451.62

Costs:
$49, Aweber fee
$20, InstaFreebie fee
$1752.75, Iron Sharpens Iron mastermind
$114.13, royalties split with co-author
$35.18, my editor’s share in profits
$674.98, Amazon ads
$118, RAs’ (RAs = Real Assistants; my sons 😉 ) remuneration
$100, ClockWork

Total: $2864.04

Net Result: $587.58

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Previous Income Report: October 2017