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


64th Income Report - July 2018Vacations got me without really me noticing it. July was the first full month of vacations for my kids. My wife was working from home, so I was the only one who was leaving home to go to work.

Luckily for me, everybody in my household sleeps late. I had my mornings for me. But I didn’t manage to do much. I was going to bed late, so I was waking up late, about 7 am. Usually, I only had time for my morning ritual, writing, posting on Quora, and checking my sales from the previous day.

Everything else – creating ads and orders for them, exchanging messages with customers and prospects, and so on – I did on the trains to work or in the evenings. That was not a good productivity formula. I remember when, in the middle of the month, I sat down and wrote all the names of people I needed to contact. I owed a reply to some for more than a couple of weeks!

Family Time

On the other hand, I spent more time with my kids and wife. We went to a cinema almost every week. We had a barbecue a few times and it was my responsibility to grill the stuff.

And we watched practically every game of the soccer World Cup.

My wife and I visited my cousin, who has a genetically ill son. As heartbroken as it was to see the baby in his pitiful state, it was great to meet my cousin and give some support to him and his wife in person.

One Friday, the godfather of my eldest son visited us. I spent the whole afternoon sitting on our porch and chatting.

Household Issues

In July, we finally connected our home to the county’s sewage system. It involved some of my time, not much, but the interruptions in my morning time were annoying.

My wife’s 21-year old Nissan Micra finally decided to retire. The nearest repair shop staff tried to bring new life to it to no avail. I was acting as a bridge between my wife and car mechanic all this time. And I was her driver too, whenever she needed to go to town.

Then, I spent four or five days on buying a new car for her – searching through the offers, examining cars, making an actual purchase, and doing the paperwork.

As I said, it didn’t help my business performance, but it was nice to have this kind of flexibility and actually be able to do all those additional things and still have time for business as usual.

Selling a Kid into Slavery

One more family activity I did was bringing my kids, one at a time, to my day job. My director helped me circumnavigate some ridiculous corpo rules and smuggle my kids into the office.

When my eldest son visited the office, my crazy supervisor asked if he would be interested in working here. He really wasn’t, but my wife talked him into it. He went for an interview and my supervisor was impressed by his performance at logical tests. He got hired. He is 17 years old and got a job in the IT department of one of the four biggest consulting corporations in the world. Wow.

Day Job

Speaking about my day job, it left its marks too. I remember one Saturday when my actions caused troubles in the client’s production database. There was a rookie on standby, and I felt obligated to help him out. I spent half of that Saturday fixing the problem.

This month was also moderately busy in my day job, so it took its toll on me.

Resurrecting Books

Remember the backlog of people I should’ve contacted? Most of them were prospects for my book advertising service. Luckily, I implemented a tactic invented by my marketing coach and had a new website and new funnel in place. I didn’t need to contact every single of my prospects. It significantly decreased my workload.

However, I got at least several leads from referrals and I had to answer to those people. BTW, lately, a significant number of my customers came from referrals. My satisfied customers and friends recommend my service to their friends whenever they hear a complaint about low book sales.

Show Up Principle

It all comes from showing up. I’m not a newbie in the self-publishing industry. Authors hear about me often.

In July I got two new customers straight from my April income report. A couple of authors who read the report inquired about my service. One of them was on the fence for more than six months!

I earned over $300 with the two of them in July and will probably earn thousands in the future. Writing those income reports was fun, but also a LOT of work. Now, after four long years, I’m reaping the fruits of my hard work.

Writing

I wrote some book reviews and some Quora answers in July. But most importantly, I wrote…

New Book!

I finished the first draft of my book about self-talk, code name: Self-talk 😉

I finally had some brainpower to write a book, and some time, because my new process automated plenty of interactions with prospects.

Yupii! It was the first book I finished since December 2015.

I immediately started to work on the draft and self-editing it. I finished this job before the end of the month.

The Slight Edge report

The period between August 2017 and August 2018 was absolutely crazy in my life. It took me over 5,000 words to summarize everything that happened in the last year. I spent a few last days of July writing the report.

Publishing

For the whole month of July, I was publishing one Quora answer a day. Well, I missed a single Sunday, I didn’t prepare the post for that day in advance and I avoid working on Sunday like the plague.

I used only a few new original answers. Most of the stuff I published was re-used from my books, blog posts, and other Quora answers.

It worked. A few answers were broadcasted to Quora readers and I got over 10,000 views on some days.

I published nothing on Medium, but the traffic remained steady on that platform, about 100 views a day, more than my own blog gets. That’s the power of leverage. Medium is a platform where readers already hang around.

Speaking of my blog, I made a commitment to my subscribers that I’ll regularly publish three pieces a month- an income report, a personal development post, and a book review.

Coaching

I got one new client by accident. I opened my coaching for new clients because I offered it to my mastermind buddy. He wasn’t interested, but in this narrow 2-day window a guy found me on Coach.me and signed up.

I was fresh after finishing the book, so I thought why not offer my coaching to my subscribers. I love to coach and I had some spare mental bandwidth. I got one more client.

My past Pay What It’s Worth client who quit the coaching a couple of months ago came back to me. Without accountability his results went straight downhill.

Significant Tidbts

My wife gave her blessing for the next trip to the USA. The next day I bought the plane tickets. They cost me about $1,000. I went to Nashville on the 27th of September.

Authors Mastermind

On the last day of July, I was invited to my friend’s self-publishing mastermind. I was impressed by the guys in there. We spoke mostly about AMS ads.

They didn’t find me the right fit for their group. Publishing books is about 25% of my business, it’s about 80% of their businesses. But we exchanged keyword databases. I got 87,000 new keywords for testing.

Advertising Paperbacks

While creating ads for a new customer in the USA, I noticed that he can advertise paperbacks. I dug into it and finally discovered how. His paperbacks were published via KDP, not Create Space. I moved one book from CreateSpace to KDP to test that hypothesis. Sure enough, I could advertise it via AMS.

Amazon removed practically all the obstacles from the migration process. They also added all of CreateSpace’s features to KDP process and interface. The only disadvantage of KDP over CS is that I switched from a1-month to a2-month delay in payments. However, the opportunity to advertise my paperbacks with AMS heavily outweighed this disadvantage.

Before the end of July, I moved three books to KDP and started running ads for them.


The Income Report Breakdown

Income:
Amazon royalties: €1161.45 ($1119.38)
CreateSpace royalties: €1189.26 ($1025.42)
Coach.me fees: $271.37
Draft2Digital royalties: $33.36
Audiobooks royalties: $144.97
PWIW personal coaching: $291.11
AMS service remuneration: $1249.29
Affiliate marketing: $268.24

Total: $4403.14

Costs:
$29, Aweber fee
$100.52, royalties split with co-author
$65.52, my editor’s share in profits
$882.14, Amazon ads
$200, RAs’ (RAs = Real Assistants); my sons’ remuneration
$500, ISI mastermind

Total: $1777.18

Net Result: $2625.96


Previous Income Report: June 2018

Sixty Fourth Income Report – July 2018 ($2625.96)

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