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

We started July 2021 on Samos, a Greek island. The next day we were going back to Poland. But I got a nasty surprise; my airline cancelled our return tickets. I spent the whole afternoon on the phone and, in the end, I had to buy new tickets.

I’m officially anointing the Polish Airlines (LOT) the worst airline in the world, customer service-wise.
They cancelled our tickets, didn’t inform us, and lied in the correspondence that they tried to contact us multiple times. And the plane we traveled the next day back to Poland was half-empty! Why cancelling the tickets in the first place?

So if you ask me, you’d be better to go by foot or a row boat than fly with Polish Airlines.

Speaking of the Worst Customer Service

I got a new client, a guy from my mastermind tribe. He published his first book, and he was completely clueless on what was going on. I got into his KDP account and did everything by myself – from uploading the files to the book description. And I needed help from Anthony because Adam, the client, didn’t provide the right cover files.

We published his book in the middle of July, but Amazon refused to advertise it. It was a spiritual book; Adam is a pastor. Amazon said they cannot advertise it because the book contains medical claims – all of this because the subtitle of Adam’s book was Healing the Wounded Man.

*facepalm*

Luckily, Adam paid me for this particular project an hourly fee.

Inbox Zero

On the 19th of July, I processed all the emails in my Resurrecting Books inbox.

Every. Single. One. I jumped with joy and shared it on Facebook.  😀

Before going to Samos, I had a coaching session with one of the PwC’s coaching training alumni. I picked my email management as a subject of the session. The gal that coached me did an amazing job in a mere 20 minutes. I had well over 120 emails in my email inboxes back then.

On the day of the coaching session, I processed about 20 emails and started building momentum. Afterward, I kept consistently tackling about a dozen emails at a time.

Since the 19th of July, I kept my inbox clean. I’m writing those words on the 18th of October 2021, and I have 14 emails in my inboxes, and I haven’t looked into my email over the weekend.

Who Not How

Anthony delivered the final version of my podcast pitch sheet after a few iterations. He did the same with the Polish version of the sheet.

Having those materials, I shared them with a few podcast hosts who interviewed me in the past. Then, I pitched my guest appearance to a few hosts.

I also shared the sheet in my mastermind, and one of my buddies recommended to me a podcasting platform where hosts and guests connected. I created an account there.

Daily Accountability Partner

It was my accountability partner, Soren, who forced me to start sending those pitch sheets out. He was working with me for several months, and he could wonderfully sense when I was procrastinating over some tasks.

It was also he who pushed me to discuss with my wife my work schedule and work-life boundaries. I felt extremely frustrated with her constant interruptions, and Soren had enough of listening to my complaints.

Family Stuff

In July, we visited my mother-in-law twice. She finally was released from a hospital after her accident. It was almost two hours of driving in one direction and I was alone with my wife, and we had no interruptions (TV etc.) She couldn’t escape or evade, like she liked to do.

So, I finally told her how much it got on my nerves when she bumped into the home office with the latest FB meme or an online shopping “I had to” pay for right now. We agreed I’ll work till 6 pm and will be available for my family after that hour.

Of course, we both miserably failed with sticking to those boundaries, but at least we had a standard to aspire to.

During one visit of my mother-in-law, we also visited our friend from high school and her mom. We saw each other about eight years ago or even longer!

In July, we had my mom at home for almost the whole month. We spent some time together.

My wife took for a 1-week vacation first with my mother, then my daughter. And I could work without interruptions.

Cars

My Mazda didn’t pass the yearly technical check-up. I could fix it for about $700, but that car was 23 years old. It made little sense to invest into it. And my wife was sick of the rusty spots all over the car.

Thus, I had another distraction. I organized scrapping the Mazda and reached out to the car mechanic from whom we bought my wife’s car. According to the Who Not How model, I gave him some characteristics of a new car and let him find a relevant machine.

Well, that’s the theory. In practice, I couldn’t restrain myself from browsing through the car-selling portals and researching different brands and models. If I could, I would’ve saved at least 10 hours in July.

We used my wife’s car for the second trip to her mom. Something broke, made some racket and when we arrived at home, we’d seen smoke coming out of one of the wheels. My wife went for a vacation and I got a task of fixing the car.

The defect was tiny. It took a mechanic about 10 minutes to fix it. The problem was to actually get hold of a mechanic. Everybody was on vacation! I managed to fix the car a day before my wife returned.

Two days before the end of the month, my mechanic called me. He found a car for me. I finalized the deal on the 1st of August, but it was just a formality.

I got a white 13-year-old Toyota Auris with the LPG tank. I bought it for my company and put a part of the price into business costs.
 
Which means I can also deduct the part of the fuel and maintenance costs.

One day I took my mother to Warsaw and she got the 1-shot vaccine, mostly to make travelling around Europe easier. She lives in Ireland and has kids in Poland, Germany and Portugal.
We also watched quite a few volleyball matches at the Olympics.
I biked a lot. There was no COVID at the horizon.

Business

The book sales tanked. I couldn’t see the bottom of the fall. I sold only 528 copies in July.

I fired my VA. She consumed too much of my already-strained mental bandwidth. Her work was always hit & miss, so I had to always double-check her tasks. I had no energy for that. It was a good decision. I immediately felt relieved.

My output suffered a bit, but it had suffered anyway. Double-checking on my VA and training her a few times about the same issue had been consuming my time and energy, so doing things my way with my own hands wasn’t any harder. At the end of the month, I was able to go back to my proofreader with some new articles.

The July 2021 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1,651.06 ($1,964.7614)
Coach.me fees: $188.39
Audiobooks royalties: $62.57
D2D royalties: $65.23
PWIW personal coaching: $20.58
AMS service remuneration: $3,162.27

Total: $5,948.61

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$870.74 Amazon ads
$1,190.6, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$91.55, royalties split with co-author
$102.55, Advanced Amazon ads
$22, Greek SIM card
$135, book promotions
$100, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $2,905.24

Net Result: $3,043.37

Previous Income Report: June 2021

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

If May 2021 was fully packed, then June 2021 was over-packed. For most of the month, I felt totally overwhelmed. Both business and family life were truly hectic. I planned a vacation with my wife at the end of the month and it didn’t go well, making the closure of the month bittersweet. I worked non-stop, and I was constantly exhausted.

1-time Projects

I tackled a few mini-projects in June; things I don’t normally do, but since I got the opportunities, I continued them.

Philip Morris Webinar

We scheduled the webinar on the 29th of June. My parents’ schedule shifted a bit, so we were forced to move the date of our vacation too. Thus, I needed to conduct a webinar from my hotel room in Greece.

I spent a few hours preparing the PowerPoint presentation, coordinating the technical details with my contact in Philip Morris and invoicing details with my accountant. I also had to pack my microphone to a suitcase. Luckily, our luggage didn’t get lost, and I could do the webinar with my normal audio-video setup.

More about the webinar itself further down, in the ‘failures’ section.  :/

Scribd Audio Program

I spent on this project a few hours too. Actually, I spent about the same time on registering myself as their contractor and figuring out the invoicing process, and working on the content of the program.

Scribd was up to their word; I had very little to do. They compiled several of my Medium articles and Quora answers and arranged them into a program. All I needed to do was to review the outline and provide my comments.

Podcast Pitch Sheet

I got the idea that this time I could do more for my book than just a soft book launch. I decided to try a podcast tour with The Remarkable Power of Consistency.

First, I created the Impact Filter from the Who Not How book, and posted it in my mastermind’s FB group. Crickets. So, I consulted a couple of podcasting books I read and created the podcast pitch sheet. Or rather, the content for it. It needed some graphical elements, and I’m hopeless with that. My friend, Anthony Smits, helped me with that.

Ironically, the only podcast interview I got through my business, without using the pitch sheet. One of my new customers has a podcast and he was interested in my way of doing Amazon ads. We discussed this, but also my book.

Book Launch

I published The Remarkable Power of Consistency at the very end of May. The first few days of June were busy with the publishing process too. There were some troubles with the paperback version, then Anthony helped me to create the hardcopy version.

Next in the queue were keywords and categories, which I researched and updated.

After the mid-month, when the book gathered 10 ratings, I scheduled a few promotions. I extended the launch period (and the Kindle discount to 99 cents) till the end of June. I switched to the full price already in July.

I did all the above when juggling my business and life. The Remarkable Power of Consistency sold exactly 361 copies during the launch, 24 of those non-Kindle; 247 copies in the US.

On the family front, there were plenty of 1-time events too.

A Tent

My wife bought a tent and, of course :/, she made me set it up the very same day.

Cinema

We got out of the lockdown at last, and we could use some entertainment. I went with my daughter and wife for Cruella – a very deep movie for a kids’ fairytale. I also went with my son and daughter for the latest Tom & Jerry movie; we had a lot of fun.

Braces

My daughter got her teeth braces. I wasn’t involved at all – other than being a calming element for my wife, who approached it like an open heart surgery. There were some complications; Olga had one tooth removed, and it all required attention and time of my wife. Meaning, I was the one who had to listen to all her concerns and hug her through anxiety attacks.

School Exams

My eldest son finished high school and had the final exams. My daughter finished primary school and had hers. My other son had a couple of vocational qualifying exams in his technical high school.

And it was the same story – it was a source of anxiety for my wife, that’s all. I was involved only into preparations of my daughter for her math exam. But the exam was on the 6th of June, if I recall correctly. So, maybe I did a single mockup test with her, that’s all.

My Parents’ Visit

My parents escaped from Ireland under the excuse of essential travel for health consultation. The lockdown was hard enough for us in Poland; it was nuts in Ireland.

They arrived at 19th of June, and they were a part of our vacation scheme. My mother stayed with our kids when we traveled to Greece.

Of course, I spent some time with them, which took time away from the mountain of tasks in my business.

The Mountain of Tasks

It grew and grew for the whole month, along with the accompanying pile of unprocessed emails. A week before vacation, I had over 100 emails in my inbox!

I felt totally overwhelmed for the most of June (and I WAS overwhelmed). Thinking of how much there is to do and doing just a fraction of it sapped my energy like nothing else. It was exhausting.

In the last week before vacation, I underslept. From Wednesday to Thursday, I slept less than four, five hours the next day and again, less than four. I’m too old for this shit.

I managed to deal with half of the emails and finish or move forward all the projects I mentioned above. Still, my mind was with all those unfinished tasks, and not focused on the finished ones.

Medium

One of my 12 Week Year goals for Q2 was publishing 100 articles on Medium. Among all the craziness, I kept steadily publishing new articles. I even exceeded the number of articles I planned.

On the 11th of June, I published an ultra-short piece, barely 100-words long. So, I added a few sentences about The Remarkable Power of Consistency, and the info that the Kindle was discounted for the launch.

I didn’t think much of the article. Why should I? It was a short, not especially useful for readers, shameless plug. On the 20th of June, the article started gaining momentum. It got a few thousand views till the end of the month. Medium’s algorithms recalibrated their perception of my writing, and my further posts got more views as well. Thirty days prior, I managed to get over the 50 reads threshold only on a couple of days. On the 21st of June, reads of my articles exceeded 100 a day, and kept climbing. 200, 300… On the last day of June, I reached over 400 reads for the first time.

Business Coach

In the middle of the month, we had a small get-together of my department. I talked to my supervisor and out of the blue, she decided to bestow on me a $5,500 coaching certification from the department’s training fund.

I asked my wife for her opinion and she said, “Take it!” So, before my vacation, we processed the paperwork and I signed up for the training cycle that starts in October. It would consume every second weekend for the whole quarter.

I took the offer mostly because there was another offer in the background. My supervisor would work the system so I could become a part of a PwC coaching team after the certification process. That’s better than IT stuff, which simply bores me out of my mind.

My Great (Nightmare) Greek Vacation

We had to travel a day before to an airport which was about 250 miles away from our home – we had the flight at 6:05 am. On a train to that other city, my wife got a message that her mom had a car accident. A truck ran her over while biking. We had no contact with her mom till about 8 pm. She was admitted to a hospital, had a broken arm and a ruptured leg. And no visits were allowed due to COVID regulations. She was going to stay in the hospital for about two weeks.

We booked a cheap motel near the airport. We woke up at 3:30 am to be early enough for onboarding. The queue to the check-in desk was long and slow.

And they didn’t let us get to the plane. We didn’t have a Greek Passenger Locator Form. It was the first time my airline informed me about this requirement. It wasn’t a mystery for them; they clearly knew we needed it, why they didn’t tell us?

‘Cos the whole airline (LOT Polish Airlines) is one big mess.

My wife was devastated. She cried like a baby. Well, the frickin’ lady at the check-in desk told us we could get the form, go to Samos, our destination, and come back with our already-booked flight. We went to a train station. I researched the flights for the next day. My wife kept being devastated.

We bought one-way plane tickets for the next day. They cost us 150% of the price of the original tickets. We had two layovers. I spent the whole day, literally, studying all the COVID travel regulations I could find. BTW, we booked new flights with a couple of different airlines, and they both informed us in big, bold letters we need to get our Passenger Locator Form. Which only highlights the incompetence of the Polish Airlines.

We traveled to Samos the next days with no problems. But we ended up with enormous headaches – dehydration and all the pressure changes took their toll.

The Webinar

The Wi-Fi connection in the hotel wasn’t very fast or reliable. I bought the SIM card to have a backup. That was a 1-hour trip to a town and 20 Euros.

A day before a webinar, I gave a mockup run to Anthony, and he gave me some feedback.

The webinar itself went exactly as I planned. No technical glitches. No network connections problems. About 20 people showed up, and I gave the presentation.

I called my friend who works in Philip Morris, and he told me it was a disaster from the audience point of view.

The PowerPoint presentation itself was awful, and I overwhelmed my audience with information. Ugh. I swallowed the tough feedback. My takeaway from this webinar was to:

1. a) show my presentation before I gave it (I did that, but Anthony was too polite to tell me it sucked.)
2. b) prepare with the audience in mind (I didn’t do a proper research in advance.)
3. c) prepare more in general

Emotionally, the webinar hurt me. I coordinated and prepared the whole thing, spent about 5 hours on all the paperwork and preparations. And the results were meager.

Logically, they got what they paid for (not much). My effort was proportional to my fee; in fact, my effort even exceeded the fee twice. And I got some painful lessons for the future. Painful lessons are the best. They better stick to memory.

Vacation

Our stay on Samos was great. The weather was awesome, especially by Polish standards. 😉 Our hostess was very hospitable. We had a room with the sea view. Thanks to idiotic Greek regulations, there were very few tourists and my wife often had the whole beach just for herself.

The vacation itself was cheap. We paid €240 for the hotel, and we spent about the same amount (or less) on food and souvenirs. Anthony’s wife, Paula, got along very well with my wife.

Vacation Work

Anthony has been helping me with my book business for years, but it was our first face-to-face meeting. It was so great to be able to finally hug him!

Apart from the webinar preparations, we moved forward a couple of other projects – my podcast pitch sheet and graphics for BookBub ads. I helped him to get control over his Kindle device and cleaned up both of their computers.

The June 2021 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1,884.72 ($2,299.35)
Coach.me fees: $188.39
Audiobooks royalties: $29.08
D2D royalties: $44.74
PWIW personal coaching: $573.2
AMS service remuneration: $2,064.41
Others: $475.2

Total: $5,674.38

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,196.24 Amazon ads
$672.54, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$500, ISI mastermind
$49.53, royalties split with co-author
$302.5, editor’s share, formatting and design
$102.55, Advanced Amazon ads
$99.99, Coach.me yearly fee
$5, book promotions
$100, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $3,068.81

Net Result: $2,605.57

Previous Income Report: May 2021

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

May 2021 was a very long and eventful month on all fronts, from business to family. The month was jam-packed, so I don’t even know where to start.

The book sales weren’t stellar, but ROI on my ads improved significantly. So, despite selling a relatively small amount, I actually earned more royalties than in April and significantly more than in March.

I continued to train my VA. It was a struggle. I remember spending two full hours at the beginning of the month to rewrite a procedure she prepared. That was so frustrating; she was supposed to save me time, not consume it.

But with her help, I managed to publish 25+ articles on Medium. I earned $21 on Medium. Which was more than I made from books outside Amazon. On the other hand, my workload on Medium was much bigger, so those two income streams aren’t very comparable.

Family

My eldest sister visited us and spent almost three weeks with us. That was unnerving for my wife, who likes 1-day guests the most.  😉

My eldest son had high school exams at the beginning of the month. My daughter had primary school exams in the middle of the month. I kept preparing her for the math exam, and she even scored 83% on a mock test once! Quite a progress from the 16% she received in March at school. Two months of consistent practice made miracles.

She checked the answers after the real exam and claimed she will get above 50%. The official results will be available at the beginning of July.

COVID Vaccination

On the 20th of May, I and my wife drove 100 miles and stayed at the hotel for the night. The next morning, we had the vaccination with Johnson & Johnson vaccine scheduled. I worked very little on the day we went there. It was like a 1-day vacation for me. In the evening, we went for a long walk along the banks of a majestic river, Narew.  [photo]

The next day, right after getting the vaccine we drove back home, and we arrived around 11 am. I felt quite normal till the evening. Then, I got a fever. I gulped a couple of pills, sweated like crazy during the night, and I was almost back to normal on Saturday morning. I felt a bit shaky the whole day, but I already was OK on Sunday.

We purposefully took the 1-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine so we could travel abroad in a few weeks. My parents were coming to Poland from Ireland, and we arranged that my mom would stay with the kids and we would go somewhere on the Mediterranean Sea.

The Remarkable Power of Consistency

In the middle of the month, I decided to publish the new book at my 8th anniversary as an author – on the 26th of May, 2021. I didn’t really feel like pulling my weight with this project, but we managed to meet the deadline. I say “we” because Anthony Smits did most of the work formatting the book. And I couldn’t make it without my cover designer, Łukasz Szczubidło.

And “managed” is a generous term. I hit the “publish” button after midnight, but technically, it was still 26th of May in the States.  😛

Then, we discovered one huge problem with images in the Kindle version and a problem with the cover for the paperback version. I remember sitting in front of the TV on Saturday, 29th of May and frantically messaging both Anthony and Łukasz. But I had the final version ready on Monday (the last day of May), and that’s when I notified my subscribers about the new release.

The whole project wasn’t the model of doing things in a timely fashion not only because I was half-lazy about it. I had other things to attend (more about it in a minute). The huge problem was that Anthony got his COVID vaccine three weeks earlier and he got the chronic fatigue in the process. In his words: “I did nothing but sleep for the two weeks!”

The Abundance Shock

On the 13th of May, I got a call from the HR department of Philip Morris Poland. They wanted me to do a webinar for their employees in June. We exchanged a couple of emails, I wrote an offer for them, and then we set the date – it all took some of my time.

On 20th of May, I got an email from Scribd. They wanted to do an audio course based on my online articles about habits. I jumped on the call with their representative, and I saw no reason to decline the offer. But I had to pay my dues in time – to review a contract, to sign and send it, issue an invoice, and so on.

My customer contacted me and inquired about ads for his wife’s book. I got the access to her KDP account, looked around, created the AMS account and editor access for me, and finally replied to my customer with my recommendations. One of them was to rewrite the book’s description.

Why “The Abundance Shock?” I didn’t chase any of those opportunities. They didn’t materialize from the thin air – my friend working in Philip Morris sent the info about me to the HR department at the beginning of a pandemic, a year ago! I had a relationship with my customer. I have been consistently posting stuff online for years. Then, all the three opportunities emerged in the span of two weeks.

I figured out writing a book description will take me about two hours. I said to my customer that if he wants ME to write it, it’s $200. He just said “OK.” And I wanted to deter him from this idea because I don’t like writing book descriptions. I guess, I need to quote $400 the next time.

This is the magic of consistency and author-ity (being an author). I left a lot of footprints in the last eight years, thus I was offered $1,000 without even trying to get those deals. People came to me and politely asked if I can shut up and take their money!

The 8th Author Anniversary

On the 26th of May 2013, I published my first book – “A Personal Mission Statement: Your Road Map to Happiness.” Me being me, I couldn’t resist to crunch some numbers. I published 16 books of mine (including “The Remarkable…”, one bundle which included my whole first series (How to Change Your Life in 10 Minutes a Day), two stories books with co-written with Jeannie Ingraham (she did most of the work), and a public domain work – the quotes from The Science of Getting Rich.

I sold over 80,000 copies of my books. My books were translated into German, Spanish, and Chinese. I sold the rights to Trickle Down Mindset to a Korean publisher, and I don’t even know if it was published there. I turned five of my books into audiobooks.

In that eight years, I wrote over 2.5 million words, published 275 blog posts, 1,600+ answers on Quora, 230 answers on Quora in Polish, 400+ articles on Medium and all over the Internet. Those 2.5 million words include also my 300,000-word novel which I have been writing on Sundays just for fun and to keep my writing streak alive.

Since 23rd of September, 2013 I missed only two days of writing – one on the trip to Prague with my wife, the other during my mastermind retreat in Nashville.

Auto Ads Experiment

My friend gave me $500 to experiment with my ads. I dedicated half of this fund to a couple of automatic ads for The Art of Persistence. I turned off all the other ads for this book. I lost about $9 on the whole deal. I sold more copies with several ads, than with my full set of 134 ads running.

The results surprised me. When the fund ran out in the middle of May, I decided to create auto ads for my all books. And I turned off all the long tail ads I had. I used slightly less bold bidding than during the experiment. I didn’t want to just break even, but to generate some profit.

Twenty days later, I could tell it wasn’t the best idea. The Art of Persistence may, or may not, sell as many copies in a month as before the experiment. My overall sales dropped and ROI tanked.

Lesson: If you don’t know how to target the keywords well, or if you do know, but don’t have time for it, the long tail keyword method [link to RB] is still superior to normal book advertising on Amazon. It’s so much easier to generate profit with common words, even if you confuse the Amazon’s algorithm and sell fewer copies.

Free Books Experiment

I continued to advertise six permafree of my customer. In May, we generated over 2,600 downloads with the $760 budget. I got him on the call at the end of the month, and we examined the results case by case. We decided to change the approach and to promote only the three books which performed best.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t really pinpoint the impact of all those free downloads (over 8,000 since we started) on his business. So, I gave him homework to compare subscription rates and traffic to his websites before and after turning his books into permafree.

Resurrecting Books

I got a few new customers in May, but none of them was a big hit. In fact, I don’t even think I broke even with them.

I think May was the first month we managed to examine all the search terms of our customers and turned them into new campaigns.

The crazy volume of workload and the number of projects I juggled in May caused me to drop the ball I’m least inclined to tackle – customer service. Prospects and customers had been waiting for weeks for a reply to their emails, and this situation got only worse in June.

The May 2021 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1,501.54 ($1,816.86)
Coach.me fees: $192.96
Audiobooks royalties: $25.1
D2D royalties: $47.44
PWIW personal coaching: $575
AMS service remuneration: $2,451.13
Others: $54.98

Total: $5163.47

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,252.331 Amazon ads
$1009.2, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$49.55, royalties split with co-author
$500, ISI mastermind
$250.77, Bluehost hosting
$73.2, book promotions
$100, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $3,159.16

Net Result: $2,004.31

Previous Income Report: April 2021

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

April was a good month. I was productive. Cash was flowing in. COVID numbers in Poland rapidly declined, and I was looking forward to some normalcy.

12WY Goals

My accountability partner started his 12WY goals in Q2 of 2021. I decided it was a good idea for me to go back on the goals bandwagon. So I set three goals for Q2:

1. To publish 100 articles on Medium before the end of June.
2. To work on publishing my own books; including the new book about my The Slight Edge journey, audiobook for the Art of Persistence and a bundle for the Six Simple steps to Success.
3. To create procedures and systems for my business.

Execution on the 12WY Goals

As you can see, I wasn’t super specific, only the first goal was truly measurable. And I made the most progress with it. At the end of April, I had 28 articles published on Medium and I earned $14. I published the first article on the 8th of April, so publishing 28 pieces took me only 22 days.

I made quite a lot of progress with The Remarkable Power of Consistency. I finished the editing phase. My proofreader went over the old reports and I corrected them too. I wrote the back cover text, so my cover designer could create a cover. I worked on the marketing message, which resulted in writing the book description. I created the Advance Reading Copy and sent it to my launch team.

While working with my VA on the import of my Quora answers into Medium, we created a procedure for doing that and a checklist, so she could double-check her work before submitting the draft. Once more, it was more work for me. I spent quite a lot of time reviewing and rewriting those documents. We weren’t ready around the end of the month.

Soft Skills Trainings

I continued trainings for PwC juniors in my day job. Actually, I gave the training totally on my own for the first time. And second.  😉

I enjoyed those meetings thoroughly. We made them hybrid – a few people participated online, and a few were with me in the conference room. The first session was about emotional intelligence, and the second about motivation.

I got quite favorable feedback from my coworkers, and those sessions made the whole day job experience more enjoyable.

Lockdown

The number of the COVID cases in Poland was in a steep decline. Doomsayers predicted that we would have a disaster right after Easter, which plenty of people spent in the family gatherings – a Polish tradition. Then, the same doomsayers predicted the ‘end of the world’ every day. None of that realized.

The health care system was hammered in March. Some days, we were the world leader in the number of deceased per million citizens. But in April, everything turned around. In fact, it turned around at the end of March and I was exasperated with the lockdown. We had just a 2-week break in extreme anti-COVID measures. I was so hungry of going out that I even enjoyed my commute to work.

The weather wasn’t adding much to my mood. It was warm enough for biking only twice in April, including one time when I biked in a jacket and scarf in 14 degrees Celsius [57 Fahrenheit].

Resurrecting Books Projects

In April, I finally made my book, Slicing the Hype, permanently free. It got immediately picked up by some promo site and got a few hundred downloads. Notifying my email list also helped. I shared this on Facebook, and my customer with several business books noticed the post. He inquired about my results and decided to turn six of his books into permafrees. We had not had much success with his book up to that point in time. We were able to generate a dozen or two sales around the break-even point.

Jim is a doer, so he managed to turn three of his books into freebies before the end of the month. And he got quite a number of downloads – 5,442.

We also finished the work on Don’t Buy a Duck, a book of my friend from my ISI mastermind tribe. I remember publishing it at the end of April (Derek gave me the access to his KDP account). It was good to take it off my plate.

Consulting Project

The last 1-time project was consulting for David Jenyns, the author of SYSTEMology. He inquired about my services, but I advised him against using my system. His book had too good bestseller rank; it would rather hurt his sales than help him. But he agreed to pay for my time, so I would help his team work smarter on his ads.

I logged into his AMS account for the first time and I thought: “Hmm, it seems there will not be much work for me.” The campaigns had excellent conversion rates. My client was losing a bit of money, but not that much.

Then, I looked into his campaigns and it appeared I’d have a lot of work. All the campaigns were basically only targeting his book. Which is the exact opposite of what you should do with the AMS ads! Whenever I create ads which can be duplicated, I actually put the author name and the book title in the list of negative targeting. I don’t want people who look for a particular book to see the ad. Amazon will provide them the book in the search results anyway and I will not pay for clicks.

In the first three months of 2021, David paid about $400 for nothing; for showing his ads to people who were already looking for it on Amazon by title and his name.

Later, Soren told me that this was the Google SEO approach to target your own product in the ad. David’s employee copied the way he operated with Google ads into the Amazon ads – with terrible results. The AMS campaigns didn’t show him what are the other books he could target, and he was lullabied into the belief that his ads were doing well because the results were there, on paper. Or rather, in the AMS dashboard.

I quickly recorded a video explaining why this wasn’t a good idea and what to do instead. I also had a coaching call with two people from David’s team, when I taught them how to properly leverage targeting on Amazon.

In a few weeks, SYSTEMology had a totally different set of ads, and David started paying for the actual advertising – showing his book to people who hadn’t heard of him before. In April, his ads sold 44 copies instead of 31 in March (among which about 25 were from people who would have bought his book anyway).

Coaching Revenue

One of my subscribers, who had been on an extended Internet hiatus, saw my offer for accountability coaching at the end of March. She paid me $300 so I would help her be accountable about growing her book business.

My coaching client with whom I started weekly calls in March paid me more than usual. Together with the consultancy fee for David, I made over $1,000 for coaching in April. I think that was my first ever month when I made four figures from non-book and non-business stuff.

I also got one coaching client on Coach.me. He read a couple of my books, tried to sign up, but I turned my coaching off on that platform. So he reached out to me via email. I invited him on the intro call. Faik lives in Azerbaijan and is an awesome dude. He represented his country at the Olympics, and he is doing 6-figure projects. He reached out to me because he was stuck. He knew he should start a new project, but at the same time he had enough money to live comfortably for the next few years. He wasn’t able to force himself to start.

Our conversation lasted about an hour. I remember thinking: “Oh, that was an interesting conversation, but it doesn’t seem anything will come out of that.” It took Faik a couple of days before he signed up. Then, he crushed it. He had a very ambitious goal for someone who was complacent and stuck – to work three hours a day on his project.

Once he started, he didn’t miss a beat.

Overall Profits

I hit my record profit in April 2021. I made about $50 more net than my previous record month, but still, it was more! It felt especially good after several weaker months. I could pay my mastermind fee in May without problems!

I remember sharing this news in my mastermind with a dispassionate voice. For me, it wasn’t a big deal at all. It’s just money! My buddies made fun of me that this is how excitement looks in Poland.

Mother-In-Law

My mother-in-law visited us in April and stayed for 10 days or so. My wife takes always her obligations as a host very seriously, and it showed very strong during that visit. It strained my wife’s sanity. Sometimes I felt at home like on the minefield. I was glad I could ‘escape’ to my day job from time to time.

One day, I “stepped on the mine.” My wife asked about the COVID vaccines the very first day we were allowed to sign up for one. I said something dismissive and she erupted.

Needless to say, the very next day I was signed up for vaccination. She cooled off next day, and we signed her up too. Then, we decided to game the system a bit. The sole reason I wanted to get a vaccine was to be able to travel. Two-dose vaccines could’ve taken us the next three months before we would be allowed to travel. So, I called the info line and inquired about the dates for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. We got one for both of us on the 21st of May.

That meant, we could start traveling in mid-June!

$500 of a Confidence Fund

My mastermind buddy, the same who agreed to invest into my audiobooks, stopped me at the end of one of our weekly calls and told me:

“I’ll give you $500, so you can invest it in your ads. My only condition is that you will document the process. Why? Because I believe in you!”

Gosh! It’s so great to have such guys in my life!

I took the offer and decided to experiment with targeting ads for The Art of Persistence. I turned off all the keyword ads (over 130 of them), and started from a couple of auto-targeting ads.

I used crazy-high bids, about 70 cents or so. I quickly scaled those down, and repeated it a couple of times. The ads were spending money like water and didn’t bring much in return. Well, they sold some copies, but the whole experiment was in red. Finally, I stabilized the bids at 40 cents.

In the next week, I added several ads with my own ideas for targeting. However, auto ads were doing much better than them, especially the ad of the paperback version. One discovery I did in April, thanks to those ads, was that paperback advertising was more effective and cheaper than advertising Kindles.

Amazon Ads Mastermind

In April, I had a first call with Alex Strathdee from Advanced Amazon Ads and Denis Caron from WeekendPublisher.com. After the call we decided to utilize our discussions online.

It was a blast! They were not only like-minded; they both had similar businesses. You have no idea how awesome it felt to chat for an hour with a couple of guys who intimately understood the advertising language I operated with.

April 2020 was exhausting. Training my VA was taxing. I also took a new goal – publishing on Medium – and continued the work of my new book. I was tired. The extended lockdown didn’t help. But the growing revenue certainly made it easier for me to keep going.

The April 2021 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €2,584.38 ($3049.57)
Coach.me fees: $127.55
Audiobooks royalties: $19.99
D2D royalties: $45.15
PWIW personal coaching: $857.7
AMS service remuneration: $2,325.65

Total: $6,471.43

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,362.82 Amazon ads
$839.05, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$500, ISI mastermind
$49.53, royalties split with co-author
$102.55, Advanced Amazon ads
$68.77, web domains
$100, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $3,099.4

Net Result: $3,372.03

Previous Income Report: March 2021

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

If there was a turnaround month in 2021 for me, it was March. I still struggled a lot. Revenue was nowhere near where I wanted it, and I put too much stress and too many obligations on me.

Yet, I also did some things right, and new opportunities appeared on the horizon. Like with most of my opportunities, I didn’t see them coming in advance nor plan for them.

A Coaching Client

My coaching client who has worked with me for over four years admitted he had big resistance to push forward. In fact, he was sliding back for quite a long time and didn’t tell me.

I offered him to double down on accountability. Online coaching clearly wasn’t for him. He needed to feel that I see him, in the literal sense. He was apprehensive, but he agreed. After four years, we basically started from scratch. However, I still liked this arrangement. I hate the feeling when I don’t see my clients progressing. In March, we started weekly accountability calls.

A Prospect

I got a few prospects in March, including Jim, who had about a dozen business books on Amazon and they were doing nada for him. In a good month, he had been selling five copies.

I charged him just for the ads creation and did plenty of work for him: first, I provided a review of his book pages, then formatted them in HTML and updated on Amazon. I also updated his keyword lists in the KDP dashboard. We managed to do three of his books in March.

LinkedIn

Believe it or not, but I didn’t have a LinkedIn account. At the beginning of March, I was researching for the contact to a Polish publisher I met a few years ago. I found him on LinkedIn, but saw almost nothing since I didn’t have the account. So, I created one.

Once I had it, I decided to make it at least half-decent. I added profile information, links to my books, and so on. I also connected there with men from my mastermind tribe.

Among them, I reconnected with Daniel Bauer who published his book a few years ago. He recalled me talking about Amazon ads, inquired, and at the end of the month we started ads for him.

The Remarkable Power of Consistency

The work on a new book reached the editing phase, which I simply hate. Fortunately, my editor, Erica Ellis is beyond fantastic. I think we made at least two passes through the book in March.

I also contacted my old proofreader. Actually, she replied to my email with a thank you note from 2020. My funds were depleted, so I gave Erica just the new parts of the book, the ones which were never proofread by anyone. The main part of the book are my The Slight Edge annual progress reports, which I published on my blog. All of them, but last, were proofread before publication.

Now, I gave this part for my proofreader to double-check.

At the beginning of March, I surveyed my subscribers and decided for the title: The Remarkable Power of Consistency.

Dan Is Dead

On the 8th of March, I got an email from Archangel Ink that my audiobook narrator died of COVID. Dan managed to record the whole Art of Persistence before his death. He made just three minor mistakes in the recording. I sent those audio files as they were to my audiobook publisher.

You can read my ruminations after Dan’s death here:

Family

My daughter will finish her primary school this year. She had a mockup math test and she did terrible – just 16%. My wife was devastated and she ordered me to “fix this.” So, I started teaching my daughter math almost daily. In two weeks, she made a lot of progress. When I did a mockup test with her, her result was over 50% – more than three times better.

And we reached out the ceiling of her rapid progress. Yet, just a bit of consistency produced amazing results. When I write this report, we are less than two weeks before the real exam, but I’m confident she will get at least 40%.

Lockdown

As quickly as the government started opening us up, they started closing everything again. The number of COVID cases surged rapidly and crippled the Polish feeble health care system.

So, another lockdown was announced from the middle of March. As a COVID convalescent, I didn’t care much (read: none) about the danger. I remember that on the last day before the lockdown I went to a swimming pool and sauna, and for the movie with my sons. It was the same movie I watched in February with my wife, and it was even better the second time. BTW, do you recall the pin-drop moment I mentioned? We were in a different cinema and different audience. The effect was exactly the same. Everybody were mesmerized.

Hardcovers

Being done with the hardcover for Change Your Life in 10 Minutes a Day, I decided to also produce hardcovers for two other books – Trickle Down Mindset and The Art of Persistence. The first one is 117 pages long, and the other – 134 pages.

All my other books are even thinner, so I decided not to play with them. Anthony Smits modified the paperback covers. This time I had more troubles with Amazon than with covers. They inquired about copyrights, both times. Like they couldn’t have seen I already have the Kindle and paperback formats in their store. Sheesh!

A Driven Life

Speaking of Amazon’s pitfalls – I helped Anthony with his book, A Driven Life. I worked with his co-author on improving the book description and Amazon page. Then, I started ads for the book in the UK, since it was the primary market for this book.

The pitfall? For about 10 days after publishing, the paperback version wasn’t available in the UK, and Amazon gave the information that it was “out of stock.” But the book was in their print-on-demand system! Sheesh!

Anyway, it cost me some time and energy, and in the end the results just weren’t there. Ant and Ray sold maybe a few dozen copies. 🙁

Virtual Assistant

Working with my new Philippine VA wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. It was a lot of hard work and time. I had to train her for every single task and she didn’t do recurring tasks according to my standards.

Ha! I discovered, I didn’t communicate my standards clearly enough. Communication was a big issue. As well as the time difference. My always-crowded schedule didn’t help either. It was a struggle. It cost me definitely more energy than I was prepared for. And it cost me money I could’ve dedicated to so many other things.

But I persisted and trained her in a few new tasks. Thanks to the help of my accountability partner with the Google sheets, we were able to upload all our customers’ data and finally start the ads optimizing process. It was a couple of months behind the schedule, but it happened.

I trained my VA in importing my Quora content to Medium, so I decided to try my luck with Medium once again.

Book Sales

My sales were slightly better than in February. I mean, about 3% better, if you take the difference of the number of days into account.

In the middle of March, I participated in the cross-promotion with a dozen other authors. I’m always game for them. Art of Persistence sold over 250 copies in a few days, 220 in the two days of the promo. It “cost” me only a couple emails to my list, and I made about $80 in royalties.

My ads got more traction, especially outside the US. I noticed in February that my UK ads are giving the positive ROI, so I doubled down on them. Canada and EU markets did well too.

The March 2021 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1,870.56 ($2,263.38)
Coach.me fees: $128.32
Audiobooks royalties: $23.4
D2D royalties: $49.44
PWIW personal coaching: $478.1
AMS service remuneration: $2,124.2

Total: $5,066.84

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,484.55 Amazon ads
$699.74, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$500, ISI mastermind
$49.53, royalties split with co-author
$102.55, Advanced Amazon ads
$100, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $3.081.82

Net Result: $1,985,02

Previous Income Report: February 2021

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

I hired a VA from Philippines. I knew from the outset she was not a perfect fit, but I decided to hire her anyway. Partly, out of laziness. I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t bother to look for another candidate. Also, I had no money. I got just a couple of referrals, and only one person followed through. My only alternative was some paid platform.

So, I didn’t really get who I wished for, but someone who I needed. My new VA had been completely clueless about my business, and I needed to train her from scratch. Hence, I created several training videos and some documentation. And we had a call every week going over new stuff and correcting the past mistakes.

Also, it opened my eyes to the challenges of the remote work, especially with someone who never had worked with me before.
In the past, I had plenty of contractors, but each of them was a master of their craft. I didn’t need to tell them how to do their job, it was enough to articulate what I needed. Now, my VA had to use the tools I was using and in the way I used them.

Beware Vanity Publishers!!!

In January, I got a one-time client. I organized a flash sale for an author who has a vanity publisher. What’s that? A publisher who charges you for publishing your book. This client of mine got the worst deal ever- not only he paid for producing and publishing his book, but his publisher holds the rights to his book.

So, David had no control over his book- description, and so on. Luckily, Amazon gives authors some tools they can use. You can use AuthorCentral to modify your book description and Editorial Reviews.

We did just that. It was a long arduous process because David wasn’t tech-savvy at all.

Then, I organized the promotion for him. I submitted his book to about a dozen different promo sites. I spent hours doing that. His publisher had only one responsibility – to drop the price.

They dropped the ball.

They had no clue that if the Kindle is image-heavy, Amazon won’t drop the price to 99 cents. My self-esteem jumped- I knew that for years, so I was wiser than a publisher.

I scrambled to salvage anything from the promo. I contacted the promo sites and notified them about the higher price. Most of them accommodated the change without any problems. In one case (xxx) I had to pay them additionally for the price increase. In another case, we got a refund because that website promotes only 99-cent books (Buck Books).

It was a bloody mess, and I spent more hours on that; hours, for which David was paying. God, protect the authors from such “publishers!”

And bloody Amazon, who initially refused to drop the price at 99 cents, matched it with other stores after a week! Heck! Only one promo site got on that price. And a few of my subscribers. In the end, I doubt David sold more than 30 copies, and he spent several hundred dollars on the promo sites and my fee.

The most off-putting was the arrogance of the publisher. I was on the phone with their representative. We discussed David’s situation. I also alluded that they might have been interested in doing Amazon ads. Her response:

“I don’t think so. We are so successful doing our thing that we are not interested in dedicating our resources to new venues.”

Heck! Of course they are successful! I would been successful. Give me a few grand to publish your book and I will deliver top quality and pocket one or two grand for myself. And who knows? Maybe the book will become a bestseller, so I’ll earn even more?

But their authors aren’t successful!!!

#@$@##%^^@!@$(*#&

Rant over.

Resurrecting Books

I finished another one-time project in February. I helped to publish a book of a Polish author translated into English.

It was good to have this off my plate, since the Resurrecting Books business picked up a bit. I had new prospects to tackle. And I was desperately trying to figure out an idea for optimization of my model and sell more books for my customers.

Book sales weren’t terrible, but they were far from great. I sold 637 copies. However, I got the royalties payment from December at the end of the month, and it was the best I got since July 2020. Also, I knew the January payment was going to be handsome – the highest royalties since April 2020.

Financially, I was still struggling. Actually, despite the better royalty payment, I earned about $120 less than in January, and January was poor enough. If not for the help of my mentor who stopped charging me for the mastermind for three months, starting in February, it would be terrible. Thanks to that help, I felt like things were going better.

Amazon Developments

I was invited to the Amazon hardcopy beta program. I immediately accepted, jumped into my KDP account and created the hardcopy for Change Your Life in 10 Minutes a Day bundle. Surprise, surprise, the paperback cover didn’t fit and needed to be adjusted. I asked Anthony Smits for help once again, and in a few days he figured out how to modify the paperback cover. On 22nd of February, my first ever hardcopy was published. A couple of my mastermind buddies purchased it immediately.

Amazon opened its store in Poland. I was crazy excited. This could bring the self-publishing revolution to Poland! Previously, the publishing landscape in Poland was weird. It was cost-prohibitive to publish on your own. It was hard enough to get accepted by a traditional publisher. There was a plethora of small publishing houses, but the distribution was monopolized by two-three huge entities.

Also, readership in Poland is terrible, and books are relatively expensive. From all of the above reasons, I never even tried to publish anything in Polish. Amazon could change that.

But they didn’t.

Excited about the prospects, I checked out my father’s translation of Master Your Time he did a few years ago. It was horrible. 😀 He literally translated English idioms which made the final effect comical.

I asked Dad to go over the translation once again, this time thinking in Polish.

Soon, I discovered that eBooks weren’t available in Poland. Amazon redirected users to Amazon.com to buy a Kindle book, and you couldn’t browse them in the Polish store. I couldn’t price my paperbacks separately for the Polish market.

So, there will be no self-publishing revolution.

I stopped my father before he finished this iteration of translation. There was no sense in continuing that. I won’t publish anything in Polish till I can properly sell it in my country. It doesn’t seem it will be anytime soon. Amazon opened in Sweden in November 2020, and Kindle books are still not available there.

Life

Lockdown was slowly alleviated in February. I was able to go to the cinema or swimming pool for the first time in over two months. The choice of movies wasn’t abundant, so we went for a niche Danish movie, “Riders of Justice.” Wow! We didn’t expect to be amazed. This is a psychological drama packaged as an action movie, an unlikely combination, but a very successful one. There was a key scene, which lasted for about two-three minutes; no music, no special effects, no plot twists. Just a couple of guys talking. You could’ve heard a pin drop in the cinema. Everybody was mesmerized.

Lent started in February, but before that was a Fat Thursday. It’s a Polish tradition to eat donuts and other sweet stuff in mass at the last Thursday before the Lent starts. My wife baked some traditional Polish sweets.

I ate a donut or two and two plates of those. I woke up in the middle of the night with an uneasy stomach. My wife noticed, asked what the fuss is about and gave me some medicine.

Did you notice I have a crazy sweet tooth? It’s been my kryptonite.

With the start of Lent, my church community started a morning breviary prayer. I drove a couple of times to a town at 6 am. It forced me to start my days earlier, which is always good for me.

Frustration

February was full of hustle. I hired a VA with a thought of handing her over the new process of harvesting data from Amazon. We had search terms reports for our customers available, but then we needed to download and process them.

It didn’t pan out that way at all. At the end of the month we were nowhere near collecting the data, not to mention processing them. And processing them was only half-way to creating new campaigns based on those results.

My VA didn’t understand the process. She kept making the same mistakes. And new ones. And sometimes her mistakes were just a result of her tools and environment. I remember spending once over an hour on the video call before I discovered that her protection mechanism in Windows prevents her from saving the files on her hard drive.

I expressed my frustration during my daily accountability calls. On the last Saturday of February, Soren offered his help. We spent two hours on the call. I explained the process and he asked me more probing questions. A few hours later, he prepared a Google sheet template that would automatically aggregate the data from the search reports. It solved my VA’s troubles with processing the data and significantly shortened the time to do this. We were battling with this for about two weeks with little success, and we managed to deal with it within two days with those templates.

The February 2021 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1,565.88 ($1,894.71)
Coach.me fees: $180.87
Audiobooks royalties: $30.08
D2D royalties: $49.44
PWIW personal coaching: $383
AMS service remuneration: $2,464.76

Total: $4,988.37

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,215.91 Amazon ads
$197.2, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$91.55, royalties split with co-author
$102.55, Advanced Amazon ads
$250.77, Bluehost hosting
$73.2, book promotions
$100, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $2,299.03

Net Result: $2,689.34

Previous Income Report: January 2021

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

In January, things were slowly starting to open up after the lockdown. I went back to working at the office. Commuting was a welcomed experience after almost three months of sitting at home all the time. My old routines were back in no time – meditation on a train platform, reading on the subway, and so on.

My day job wasn’t one ounce better than usual, but any change was desirable.

I was only surprised how commuting robbed me of my stamina.

I often napped on trains, especially on a way back home. We had a wave of cold in Poland. One day, I noted in my journal -15 Celsius. Luckily, this lasted only a week or so.

I remember seeing on Facebook a traffic jam photo in San Diego by Brian Buffini. He said it’s nice to see things going back to normal. I had a similar experience with my commute. Polish railroads are awful when it comes to being on time. One day, I arrived at the platform, waited 15 minutes to hear an announcement that a train will be delayed by almost an hour. So, I just picked a birthday gift from a delivery automat for my wife and headed back home. I worked remotely that day.

Walking

I still walked a lot, despite freezing temperatures. Well, I also learned to maximize walking opportunities around the house. I walked while taking my daily accountability call, speed reading exercises and reading a book written by a saint.

There were days – especially when we had freezing temperatures – when I made my whole 10k steps inside the house.

Resurrecting Books

I discovered that search terms on Amazon could be generated on a recurring basis. Since it was one of the steps of the new process I had in mind for processing keywords, I was stoked. It was enough to create the reports once and regularly collect the data. Of course, like everything with Amazon, it wasn’t so easy, but easy enough. Together with my sister, we made some experiments and finally figured out how to create those bloody reports, so they contained the data we wanted.

I also started a process of hiring a VA. The timing wasn’t all that perfect, I was in the middle of the deepest financial dip since we bought our home, but my wife gave her consent. With her reluctance and lack of understanding business, it was like a sign from God for me.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t very diligent about the recruitment process. I got just a couple of referrals and only one of the gals applied. I decided to hire her if she didn’t drop the ball during the process.

The Financial Dip

To give you an idea how deep was the financial dip – at the end of the month the VA candidate was close to finishing her recruitment tasks, and I scrambled to pay her $20 I promised for this job. I had to invoice a customer to get the $20 I needed.

The previous quarter was horrible when it comes to revenue. I consistently used up my savings to pay bills, birthday gifts, mortgage, business expenses, and Christmas gifts. I had funds for all of those things, but their levels first decreased and then I needed to do some creative accounting to pay for my mastermind. For example, I ‘stole’ money from a fund for my kids’ school trips since there were no trips to be held in the foreseeable future. I had just about $100 left in my fund for monthly bills in January. Normally, there should be about $700.

The whole situation stung mostly my ego; we still had a peace-of-mind fund (called rainy days fund by most) that could easily sustain us for another half a year. But it was under my wife’s control, so there was no chance I would ‘steal’ from it.

I reached out to my mentor who hosts the mastermind group I’ve been a member of, and told him that January may be my last month in the group, since I no longer could afford it.

Audiobook

Also, the situation humbled me enough to ask my friend, a real estate millionaire from Texas, to invest into creation of a couple of audiobooks. He agreed without much consideration (or any at all). He told me later he did it to prove to me that he believed in me.

I quickly exchanged a few messages with Archangel Ink; we established the costs for two books, and Jerad sent a payment on the 23rd of January. Before we reached that phase, I needed to go over the manuscript of The Art of Persistence and prepared it for the audio version – removed or renamed the links, and the like).

Change Your Life in 10 Minutes a Day

In the first half of January, I also continued to work on the launch of the bundle of Change Your Life in 10 Minutes a Day series. The paperback was out at the very end of December, so we finally started ads. I purposefully used quite high bids, as uncomfortable as spending more on ads than making on them makes me.

I begged out a few more reviews and scheduled a few promotions with promo sites. But the best results, as usual, I got from asking for help from other authors. One of them sent an email broadcast at the end of the discount period and generated approximately 230 sales in two days; which made over 25% of the whole launch period sales.

I felt like at the beginning of my self-publishing career with this launch. I produced the book practically for free – no editing or proofreading involved since I repurposed the old content; my friend made the cover for free; the same friend formatted the book for me; I already had all the know-how needed, so I didn’t need to pay for it. The only thing I spent the money on was promotion and over 80% of it was my ad budget (I spent $410 in the US alone). Amazon charges for clicks at the beginning of the new month or when your spendings reach a certain number (it’s $500 for me), so part of this cost was delayed in time. Considering my poor financial situation it was VERY desirable.

And I spent just $36.09 on ads in December.

The results justified the effort. I sold 254 copies in December (all but 1 were discounted Kindle copies) and made about $80. In January, I sold 527 copies till the end of the launch period and another 58 copies after the launch.

I was encouraged by the results. The whole idea with this bundle was to create another revenue stream from something I already had. Definitely, this bundle proved the concept successful.

So, I already started to work on the bundle for the Six Simple Steps to Success series.

If I can make money by repackaging what I already had, why not?

Accountability

I write this report with some delay, at the beginning of May. It struck me when I saw in my journal in the middle of January first mentions about my daily accountability calls. Soren, one of my mastermind buddies, proposed that we call each other every morning and go over our priorities for the day. He did that after I complained I cannot find anyone who could keep me accountable as good as I do it for myself.

It was a game changer, and not just for me. Like me, Soren is reasonably productive. But thanks to our calls, I was able to recover from my mad scramble after the COVID brain fog, and he became more consistent. In one of the first calls, we decided to go after “the one thing” in our calls. If you are familiar with the book The One Thing, you know that ultimate question:

What’s the one thing I can do today that will make all other things easier or unnecessary?

We don’t approach this question ad verbum, we don’t ponder if today’s priority will make everything easier or unnecessary. However, thanks to having this question asked every day, I was able to focus more on the long range. I always have multiple tasks to perform. As an authorpreneur and solopreneur, I always have the never-ending to-do list. I need to do them anyway. If I don’t reply to prospects or don’t invoice customers, I will eventually starve. So, whenever Soren asks me for the “one thing,” I pick one of my longer projects (publishing a book, creating a business process, and so on) and move the needle forward.

The January 2021 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1,237.63 ($1,497.53)
Coach.me fees: $155.26
Audiobooks royalties: $26.89
D2D royalties: $40.95
PWIW personal coaching: $383
AMS service remuneration: $2,923.58
Publisher Rocket affiliation: $91.62

Total: $5,118.83

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,631.23 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$300.92, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$96.55, royalties split with co-author
$102.55, Advanced Amazon ads
$57.84, proofreading
$77.28, book promotions
$100, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $2,823.07

Net Result: $2,295.76

Previous Income Report: December 2020

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

December 2020 was a month of pushing through. Physically, I already recovered from COVID. Mentally, I was knee-deep in brain fog.

I had to force myself to follow my routines. So, I did. I was sticking to my habits and tracking.

Going over my journal entries from December, I noticed how often I was walking. My shoulders were aching again; the weather was too cold for biking, so walking was my main exercise. I did 357,862 steps. Oftentimes, I phoned my relatives and friends while walking. Among others, I reached out to my good friend who lost her husband to COVID.

Oh, walking was my only exercise because we were locked down in Poland. Grocery shopping and walking were my only excursions from home. I didn’t even go to work, which in hindsight was a wise decision. When I got back to the office in January, I was shocked how the daily commute weakened me.

So, I had been semi-imprisoned at my home since the middle of October, and it didn’t help my mood one bit. Even my church community suspended its meetings.

Books

On the 8th of December, I noted down in my journal: “I finished the new book.” I wrote the last words of the outro.

In the first half of the month, scratch that, for the whole month I was busy with my bundle’s book launch. I bundled all five books from my How to Change Your Life in 10 Minutes a Day series and published it in one volume. On the 4th of December, I released the Kindle version. I notified my author friends and sent an email to my list. In a few short days I had a couple of reviews, so I started the ads.

I took almost three weeks off in my day job. I didn’t have much work there, but showing up for a few hours three days a week was distracting. In my shaky mental state, I preferred to forget about my day job altogether.

In the following days, I lined up a few more broadcasts to my friends’ followers and a few promotions on promo sites.

My friend, Anthony Smits, who edited a few of my books in the past, this time helped me with formatting and made a cover for me. Due to my low energy levels, I had been working in small chunks in the previous month or two, so we published the book in phases. The paperback version was out on the 30th of December 2020.

Finances

I didn’t know in the midst of it, but December 2020 was my worst financial month since… ever?

Alright, I checked – since April 2014. I forgot how crappy you feel when you don’t know where the next payment can come from. It affected my mood despite all the affirmations and intellectual awareness. I knew very well that my life or my worth doesn’t depend on how much I made this month. But my guts were telling a different story of starvation, disasters and desperation. 😉

In fact, I made less in December than I had been making in my day job 10 years ago (well, on good months, at least). It gave me a sour taste.

Book sales were a bit better, but that was no wonder. They were at their lowest point in November! And they weren’t much better. If not for the launch of my 10-Minute bundle, I might have sold even less than in November.

The Turnaround Point

In fact, as soon as I took the time off in my day job, things started to get in line. I got a few prospects. The launch for How to Change Your Life in 10 Minutes a Day went very well, especially considering how little attention and preparation I gave to this project.

Also, the whole situation forced me to rethink my business. Clearly, my system didn’t work so well as in the past. I desperately needed some changes. Hmm, this system needed some changes since 2018, but as long as it worked so-so, I was fine with the so-so results. The financial situation pushed me over this laziness. I dabbled with some improvements for months, but it was December financial misery that activated me for good.

Together with my sister, we started to collect search terms reports from our customers’ campaigns. I also showed her how to do a keyword research with Publisher Rocket. Ha! I had no money to spare, so she purchased the software out of her pocket.

Millionaire Friends

On 28th of December, I had a call with one millionaire from my mastermind tribe. He wanted help with publishing a second edition of his book on Amazon. He agreed for a fee of $50 per hour. And he quickly paid in advance for 5 hours.

A couple weeks earlier, I reached out to another millionaire friend, Dave Chesson. I was desperate to get any business at all and I asked him for advice.

He replied within minutes and asked if I want to have a call right now. I immediately said “yes.” We spent almost half an hour on the call, and Dave gave me a few insider secrets about Amazon ads. He also showered me with advice about my business.

I didn’t implement much of what he said, but you have no idea how his response elevated my mood. He made himself available for me, and he told me that 99.99% of people on the planet would have waited for weeks for his 30 minutes.

This short call repaired my damaged self-worth. For me, it was more of a self-worth therapy than a business consultation. *facepalm*

Strangely enough, all the side projects I had were put on hold in December. It was another reason for poor financial results, and it added to the desperation levels of mine.

The best thing that happened in December was my book launch. Being in a low mood, I did a very half-assed job with the launch. I wasn’t overly excited about it – they were just my old books repackaged. I went through the motions and published the bugger.

But I knew the motions to go through. I already had contacts in place. I reached out to some folks I hadn’t been in touch with for a year and, to my surprise, they responded very favorably. I created the ads on the 30^th of December, and they generated 18 sales in two days.

I launched the book in the middle of the month, felt like I didn’t do much, and the bundle sold 253 copies till the end of December.

The launch was a real cure for my foul mood.

The December 2020 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1,237.63 ($1,446.79)
Coach.me fees: $117.6
Audiobooks royalties: $25
D2D royalties: $20.87
PWIW personal coaching: $335.45
AMS service remuneration: $2,009.15

Total: $4,202.54

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,675.47 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$287.28, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$66.6, royalties split with co-author
$202.6, Advanced Amazon ads
$57.84, proofreading
$47, book promotions
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $3,077.25

Net Result: $1,125.29

Previous Income Report: November 2020

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

In November, especially at the beginning of the month, I was affected by Covid. Physically, I felt OK. Emotionally and mentally, I was a mess. This was the famous Covid brain-fog. I tell you; it was a real thing.
In the hindsight, reading my journal entries from November, I see I was overly tough on myself. I did a lot that month. But in the midst of it, I felt like moving in slow motion. I was frustrated, moody, and apathetic. All the time.
I remember a call with Marc Reklau in the middle of the month when he did some coaching on me. I needed that badly. As I wrote in the previous report, my social connections took me through this recovery experience. My accountability partners, my mastermind, my brothers and sister from the church community – all of them helped me to keep going while I was ready to give up.

I started the month strong, not that I had any choice. I needed money, so I had to calculate the results of my customers quickly and invoice them. Next week, I crashed. I could work only about 5 hours a day for the next two weeks. I was self-beating myself and lashing out, mainly on myself.
I needed time and I didn’t give myself the time to properly recover. In my mind, it was ridiculous. I went out of bed on the 24th of October and almost a month later I still couldn’t put myself together. I still had days when after just 90-minute work, I needed to crawl back into a bed and take a nap!
Oh, and observing my terrible book sales gave me no peace of mind. In fact, it made everything worse.

First Polish Customer

In early November, I got my first Polish customer. I’m not sure how he found me- through my blog, Quora, or one of the couple podcast interviews I gave. He subscribed to my list and after some time asked if I would like to help him publish his wife’s books on Amazon.
I said my hourly price (and I gave him the price for “things I don’t want to do”). He accepted. We had the first call and I forwarded the first manuscript to my formatter.

Quora in Polish

Speaking of Poland, the Quora community manager contacted me and invited me to the beta program of Quora circles in Poland.

I accepted and I created a personal development circle with the intent to own this space on Quora in Polish. It went well. For the first month, my circle was the biggest one in Poland (which doesn’t mean it was big, a few months later I have below 400 subscribers; other circles simply did even worse). It was easy-peasy for me. I already had had well over 100 posts on Polish Quora. I was familiar with the interface. Managing the circle took me no more than 10 minutes a day, usually much less. I could queue the content for 3-4 days within 10 minutes.

Projects I Tackled in November

Remember I said I underestimated myself? I did a LOT in November.

Book Giveaway

I participated in a book giveaway organized by Jonathan Green. I got about 960 new subscribers. This number ebbed down to about 360 in the next months. I’m contented with that number. I made sure that only the people interested in my content stayed on the list. The giveaway didn’t require much of me- just sending the files over to Jonathan and sending a couple of emails to my list.

Conflict Management Training

I participated in conflict management training via my day job. It took 1.5 days of my schedule but was well worth it. In the end, conflict management is at least 80% emotion management and emotional intelligence is one of the things I wrote down in my 2023 vision to work on. Speaking of which…

2023 Vision

I crystalized and wrote down my 2023 vision. I edited it and shared it with my mastermind and accountability partners. I consider it the most important work I did in November.
I felt terrible and this project lifted my spirit. I had something to look forward to. I also had something to do right here, right now, both in terms of crafting the vision and narrowing it down to daily disciplines which should make the vision a reality in three years.

Amazon Categories

I researched the current categories for all of my books and the potential categories for them on Amazon. I requested from KDP Support to change categories for several of my books.
I won’t bet my life on this, but I think it helped my sales down the road. For a couple of books, I saw small sales spikes immediately; for others, it wasn’t so obvious at all.

Slicing the Hype

I finally updated the manuscript for Draft2Digital, and the book had been accepted by Apple in their store. It’s available for free outside of Amazon.
Unfortunately, Amazon didn’t match the price in their store. I didn’t have enough energy to ping them about this. It is still on my to-do list.

Polish Blog

I did a whole bunch of housekeeping tasks for this blog: I upgraded the WordPress theme, updated plugins, removed spam comments, added a search bar to the main page, and scheduled posts for the future.
The next time I needed to log in there was in a month.

Income Reports

I was hopelessly behind my publishing schedule for Expand Beyond Yourself. In November, I managed to add two-income reports to that blog.

Mum’s Visit

My mother-in-law visited us and stayed with us for the first 10 days of November. She wasn’t a burden, but I needed to be more social than my usual nerdy self. We spent some time together, especially on the weekends.

Back to the Routine

There were some things in November I went back to after about a 2-month hiatus caused by Covid.
I visited a church in the afternoons for the Holy Sacrament adoration.
My church community started to meet again on Wednesday evenings.
I attended a Business on Purpose bi-weekly call.
The weather was still relatively warm, so I got back on a bike a few times at the end of the month.
It felt good to be back in the saddle even if those activities crowded my schedule. I missed those meetings, interactions, and activities a lot. I felt like I got a part of myself back.

Covid’s Real Impact

Brain fog was one thing, but there were some measurable aftereffects of the sickness. I suffered from unexplainable hunger pangs. I gained several pounds in November despite keeping my workout routine. It was frustrating to no end. I managed to shave off six pounds from January to September and I got almost all of them back.
Also, brain fog made me susceptible to stupid time management decisions. Or rather to turn off my conscious brain. I found in my journal at least two instances of binge-watching Netflix for several hours in a row.

Resurrecting Books

Only two Canada-only customers hang on with me, but I had no illusions they will remain my customers in the long term.
And in the middle of the month, my onboarding specialist quit. There wasn’t anybody to onboard. Covid killed even my feeble marketing attempts. So, she moved forward. I couldn’t blame her; I didn’t deliver even half of the workload I promised her.

Despite the swirl of activity, November felt bleak. Covid-induced brain fog kept me in its merciless clutch.
My book sales sucked a big time. Well, they actually increase by over 120 copies month to month, but they were still well below 1,000 copies a month. And profitability of those sales sucked. I made about $200 net in royalties. The last time I earned so little from my books was in August 2016!

The November 2020 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1,215.79 ($1,446.79)
Coach.me fees: $122.33
Audiobooks royalties: $39.2
D2D royalties: $20.87
PWIW personal coaching: $335.45
AMS service remuneration: $1,931.45

Total: $3,896.09

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$781.24 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$493.15, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$76.52, royalties split with co-author
$202.51, Advanced Amazon ads
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $1,977.9

Net Result: $1,918.19

Previous Income Report: October 2020

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

I started October sick and finished it worse than sick. This was the month I got COVID.
For the first week of the month, I functioned so-so. I was cautious not to move too much around since I had strong suspicions that my weakness at the end of September was the COVID. I worked from home and went to the office just once because I had to pick up a new phone.
On the 8th of October, I went to my church community yearly meeting. I spent four days there. It was awesome to meet everybody first time since March even wearing the masks. BTW, the pandemic situation in Poland was OK. The numbers were climbing quickly, but they were climbing from such a low level that we generally weren’t concerned, nor alarmed.
Another three days were quite productive, I finally closed September in my books.

COVID

I woke up on the 15th of October sick like a dog. I had COVID. The next week was rough. The sickness wasn’t much worse than a cold – coughing, a sore throat, and a fever. I suffered most from the fever since I am very sensitive to that and it jumped 2 degrees of Celsius (3.6 degrees of Fahrenheit).
I was weak as a puppy most of the time. I had little trouble with my fitness. I remember doing over 50 burpees one morning that week. But I felt constantly tired. After each physical effort (including these burpees), I needed to go to bed and catch a nap. On the last day of sickness, I napped FIVE times!
Needless to say, I didn’t do much that week.

I didn’t take a sick leave in my day job. I could work for 10 hours a week from my bed with the laptop in my lap (pun intended). When I got better, I didn’t commute to the office anymore. I switched to the fully remote work.

Family Drama

On Monday, right after I got back from the retreat, a huge family disruption blew away. I won’t get into the details; I will only say that it was a super-tense situation between my wife and my daughter and my wife accused me of taking the kid’s side. It was ugly. The emotional turmoil was off the chart. I remember that I spent the whole Tuesday mastermind call talking about this.

Financial Crisis

My Canada-only customers left me, all but two of them, and I was making the most money with them. Also, the results of the rest of my customers in Canada went down.
My book sales were awful. I sold 582 copies, comparing to 575 sold in September. Considering the additional day in October, it was actually a decline. The US data showed it without any day-counting – I sold 44 fewer copies in October.

Mental Meltdown

COVID, a sad family situation, and a poor financial situation all at once. I had it. I also had a COVID brain fog. Fatigue was something I could explain at the physical level. But this brain fog? It is impossible to describe. Saying it was a mix of depression, procrastination, and overall indifference simply doesn’t give it justice.
It became even more apparent in November when I fully recovered physically but was still mentally and emotionally impaired. I saw no reason for being so lethargic, I had plenty to do, but I just couldn’t force myself to work.
Oh, and at the end of October, another semi-lockdown was introduced in Poland. Our kids stopped going to school and we were all imprisoned in the four walls of our home.

Support

As you can tell from the above description, I wasn’t functioning well in October. In hindsight, it could’ve been so much worse. I had a couple of support pillars that got me through.
First of all, my habits. I do most of them on autopilot and I don’t appreciate them enough. Journaling, gratitude journaling, prayers, exercises, writing- all those activities gave a structure to my days. Even half-alive I did most of them. Even with a fogged brain, I did them.
I suffered physically, mentally, and emotionally, but not as much as I would have without this habit structure in my life. In fact, if not my habits, then what could stop my downfall on the slippery slope?
Secondly, I had other people. My friends. Mastermind. Accountability partners. Readers. Despite what my instinct said, I couldn’t isolate myself. It’s not that I was showered with great advice or resources. Most of the time, others could only sympathize with me, that’s all. Nobody could cure me of Covid. Nobody could fix my feeble family dynamics. Nobody could boost my book sales.
But I had ears to speak into. I knew I had to show up for others. I couldn’t escape into self-pity, depression, idleness. I kept going because of and for other people.

One Thing I Did Right

There were many setbacks and some downright catastrophes in October, but I managed to progress with my vision for 2023. My church community retreat gave me enough time and mental space to hammer out the vision in writing. For the rest of the month, I chiseled what I wrote and the vision statement was at least half-baked at the end of the month.

The October 2020 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1,497.71 ($1,729.15)
Coach.me fees: $117.6
Audiobooks royalties: $17.52
D2D royalties: $43.14
PWIW personal coaching: $810.65
AMS service remuneration: $2,376.77

Total: $5,094.83

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,165.17 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$1039,64 RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$84.47, royalties split with co-author
$202.47, Advanced Amazon ads
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $2,916.27

Net Result: $2,178.56

Previous Income Report: September 2020