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

September 2020 was a very productive month for me. As 2020 months went by, anyway.

The marketing/ prospecting effort in August resulted in some work in September too. Plus, I gave a webinar for Joe Bunting about Amazon ads on the 25th of September. Hence, I got a few 1-time customers. We made about $700 on those gigs in September, which was about 20% of Resurrecting Books’ revenue in that month.

Wedding Anniversary

On the 8th of September, I took my wife to an inn to celebrate our 20th anniversary. I was prepared, had a few small gifts for her, and made a PowerPoint presentation using our family photos. We spent the night at the inn and the next morning we were sightseeing a nearby 18th-century park aptly named “The Romantic Park”. The great food in the inn was a nice bonus. The icing on the cake was a bouquet of 20 roses I ordered a few days ago and gave my wife on our way back home.

My wife thoroughly enjoyed all the attractions. She didn’t expect such a feat. her idea for the celebration was baking a cake when I was supposed to be at work.

We had a nice time and I felt a pang of hope for our marriage I haven’t felt in years.

This pang translated into a spur of productivity. Subconsciously, I decided my effort is worth something, so I hustled. I woke up early in the morning and worked for 6-8 hours a day. This additional energy lasted for about a week.

Failed Experiment

One of my customers has an Advantage account in the US and after weeks of begging, he allowed me to use his account to advertise my mentor’s traditionally published book. I’ve already tried it with my Advantage accounts in Canada and UK without much success. The idea was that since my mentor is an American, it will translate into more sales in the US.
It didn’t. Amazon liked the book and ladled out quite a few impressions. But people weren’t buying. Only about 1 in 62 readers decided to buy. My mentor said this was too expansive to justify continuing the ads.

Podfest Masterclass

At the beginning of September, I got an email from Podfest about their new virtual event. I volunteered to lead a session about using free books on Amazon to drive traffic. And they accepted. Which resulted in even more work for me. I attended a call for speakers, I created a presentation, I recorded and uploaded my session in case of technical glitches. And I gave my presentation live at 11 pm on the last day of September, which created additional challenges.

Amazon Ads Webinar

Also, I gave a webinar to Joe Bunting’s class about Amazon ads. I repurposed my first Podfest presentation, so I didn’t spend much time on preparations. The delivery was much better too. I dealt with the presentation in under 30 minutes and had a lot of time to answer all the questions.
Unfortunately, I got only a single prospect and she wasn’t the right fit.

Life

I should’ve worked on my 2023 goals – an assignment from my mastermind. However, I used my business as an excuse. Yes, I made some progress, but not much progress.
Apart from all the activities I’ve already mentioned, there were others, like dedicating one morning to shopping for a bike for my daughter’s birthday.
Speaking of bikes, I had an accident and I broke my employer’s iPhone. Getting a replacement, and then switching back to my phone after the repair consumed some hours too.

Book Sales & Canada

My sales plummeted; they were 137 copies lower than in August. I lost 33% of sales in Canada.
I also lost a couple of clients in Canada, who decided to run their ads, one in the middle of the month, and another at the end of September.
I also asked a few older customers to open their Canadian accounts. We switched to their accounts which allowed us to avoid paying the Polish VAT tax. The only bright side of all this commotion was that pressure on my cash flow eased quite a bit.

Covid

Schools in Poland have been reopened. And the number of Covid cases started to skyrocket immediately. At the end of the month, my 18-year-old son went back from school sick. He recovered in three days, but he infected all of us. I got hit on Sunday, two days before my Podfest presentation.
We all went through the flu pretty mildly. Nobody even had a fever. But the fatigue was overwhelming. My temperature barely increased by a fraction of a degree, but I felt like crap. My energy levels dropped to ‘almost dead’. My wife had it even worse and she spent a few days in bed.

The September 2020 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1,447.26 ($1,693.29)
Coach.me fees: $119.97
Audiobooks royalties: $21.59
D2D royalties: $0
PWIW personal coaching: $335.45
AMS service remuneration: $4,272.89

Total: $6,443.19

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,948.52 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$1,521.2, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$78.53, royalties split with co-author
$82.47, editor’s share
$210.53, Advanced Amazon ads
$32, book promo
$4.95, Scribando
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $4,113.31

Net Result: $2,329.88

Previous Income Report: August 2020

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

In August 2020 I was very busy with growing my book advertising business, Resurrecting Books. Frankly, I was not able to ever work so hard on it.

Which doesn’t mean I worked some crazy Elon Musk’s hours. I put up my time-tracking sheets from August and checked that I worked for about 5 hours a day, 30 hours a week. And it includes ALL the work I did: writing, posting, email broadcasts, attending my mastermind calls, and so on. I worked on Resurrecting Books maybe 15 hours a week.

The goal was to get a dozen new customers that month. Umm, I cannot confirm or deny we reached that goal. We certainly got a whole bunch of new prospects and accepted a dozen (or more?), but I don’t think we were able to start the ads for the whole twelve.

Of course, some of them were profit-split customers, so we couldn’t earn a dime before summarizing the first month.

Anyway, as far as my goal-setting goes, I call that experience a success. The idea was to get significantly more customers and we did. I owe it mostly to my new onboarding specialist Nicole.

In most cases, all I needed to do was to guide her to do the application since she handled everything. From reviewing prospects’ book pages to extracting a PayPal email address from them, Nicole onboarded new customers and handed them to us when they were ready for starting ads. Wonderful!

My team was tested in battle when it comes to creating thousands of new ads in a timely fashion, which came in very handy when new markets opened at the end of the month.

Canada and Australia

Those two markets opened to Amazon ads for authors in the last week of August. The immediate effect of this was… a small catastrophe. Recently, about half of Resurrecting Books revenue came from the Canadian market.

I was lucky enough to create an Advantage account in Canada when it was available for everybody, about a year before ads could be generated from those accounts.

When finally, at the beginning of 2019, I could create Sponsored Product ads in Canada, almost no one else had an advertising account there. I had the whole market for myself and my customers. It was like discovering El Dorado. There were times when my book royalties’ Canadian market almost matched those from the US market.

So, the small catastrophe was caused by the immediate influx of competition. The average cost per click jumped overnight. Sales declined overnight. Oh, the profit margins were still positive, but the profit shrunk. And it meant a lot of work for my team.

Luckily, it happened in the last week of August, the end of the month is always less busy for me. I notified my customers and asked them to open their own Canadian (and Australian) advertising accounts. We created ads for them and we did it in an ordered fashion. Because of the limit of the number of ads under one account, we usually put all of each customers’ book into one campaign. We had little idea what was working and whatnot. I didn’t care much anyway because the ads were still extremely profitable (about 400% ROI).

Opening the Canadian market was a blessing in disguise. There is always a seed of good in events turning bad.

You see while running their ads under my Advantage account, I needed to pay for their clicks. I spent a few thousand dollars each month out of my pocket and then needed to calculate those per client, so they could reimburse the cost. What is more, I paid 23% more for clicks because of the Polish VAT tax. So, transferring ads to my customers’ accounts not only improved my cash flow but also decreased their cost. Well, because the competition bumped the average cost per click, it was about neutral for my customers.

Podfest Global Summit

In the middle of August, I spoke at the self-publishing micro-conference on the Podfest Global Summit. The idea was to increase Resurrecting Books brand awareness by talking about Amazon ads.

Thanks to the organizer’s help I created a solid presentation. It consumed a few hours from my schedule.

The gig itself went pretty well, although I just couldn’t shut up and talked for too long. I filled my time and had no chance to answer any questions from the audience.

25 minutes is not enough to teach about Amazon ads, not mentioning the whole book preparation and book launch processes. I counted on some interactions after the conference, but nothing happened. So, it was more an educational experience for me, than a business-building event.

Resurrecting Books

We continued having called on Mondays. Usually, I had Nicole, my onboarding specialist, on the call, my sister Joanna, who does a lot of assistance and management tasks, my eldest son, who does an amazing variety of all kinds of tasks for me. Sometimes, we had my dad, who mainly cranks out the ads.

Thanks to them the whole business started to feel more like a business. Everybody could see that others were depending on their work and just get a feel of how robust and complicated the whole service got. We became more of a network than me being the main hub and a point of contact for everyone.

I got a couple of high-profile customers: a guy referred by Dave Chesson himself and a lady who trains a lot of nonfiction authors. I wanted to do a great job for them and provide compelling results… but I couldn’t. My method is nothing extraordinary and it works, when Amazon’s whims allow. The guy didn’t see many results. The lady sold a dozen copies of her book, minimally better than without the ads.

Big Potential

My friend Alex, who runs a similar service, offered to employ his automatic processes to optimize the campaigns of a few customers of mine. I happily agreed. Around the 20th of August, he created the first campaigns. I also got about 29,000 new keywords to test which he mined from my customers’ existing ads.

I continued #connectingThursdays: every Thursday I encouraged guys in my mastermind’s FB group to network. Nothing concrete came out of it, but I had about a dozen calls with my mastermind buddies. I haven’t been in contact with most of them since the retreat in October 2019.

I had a couple of accountability calls with Marc Reklau. It was great to be around this guy for a couple of hours. Marc is so inspiring but in the-matter-of-fact fashion. Apart from our tasks and goals, we spoke about self-publishing, translations, ad performance, goal-setting, writing things down, and dozen other topics. Those calls quickly became highlights of my month.

Pausing on My Day Job

I took three out of four Wednesdays off and worked only for six hours a week. I didn’t take the last Wednesday off only because I had an on-call duty. Seriously, this one week felt much harder than the three. Freeing those 4 hours a week in one day couldn’t make a difference, but it did.

My day job became more of a distraction than a source of income. Being able to forget about it and focus on my business three days a week is good for my focus.

I have plenty of days off available, so I’ll probably continue this practice till the end of this year.

The August 2020 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €2,430.65 ($1,728.87)
Coach.me fees: $122.33
Audiobooks royalties: $45.51
D2D royalties: $0
PWIW personal coaching: $335.45
AMS service remuneration: $4,761.67

Total: $6,993.38

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,470.28 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$848.2, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$85.56, royalties split with co-author
$202.56, Advanced Amazon ads service
$4.95, Scribando
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $2,996.57

Net Result: $3,996.81

Previous Income Report: July 2020

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

The highlight of July was a couple of vacations… which my wife went to. After being imprisoned for a few months we all needed some separation for our mental health. So, she traveled to my sister in Germany, spent a few days at home, and went with my daughter to get some rest at the Baltic Sea.

And I had two weeks, which I could dedicate to work. Well, it didn’t go exactly as I planned, I was prone to waste my time on social media and TV, but some work had been done.

Resurrecting Books

I maintained our weekly team call schedule. It was good for everyone involved, but especially for me. I could feel like a proper CEO 😉

We got a few new customers in July, just a standard trickle of new prospects. Having an onboarding specialist, I finally reached out to a few people in my network, letting them know that I accept more customers. Not much came out of that, although I secured a webinar in September.

I had a couple of calls with Alex, who runs a very similar service. We exchanged our experiences. Encouraged by Alex, I tested the phrase keyword-matching feature and discovered, to my surprise that this worked even for my own books in the US. I quickly tested it in Canada (the results were half of it).

At the end of the month, Alex got an idea to help me out with optimizing the ads for the best books of my customers. I jumped at this opportunity.

When I summarized July revenue after the end of the month, I was pleasantly surprised: it was another record month. The revenue was 48% bigger than the average from the last 12 months and 4% better than the previous record.

Networking

I subscribed to the RadioListGuests service and applied for a few podcasts interviews. Almost every time, my application was accepted, mostly because I was very mindful to hit only the right shows.

As a result of one of my mastermind calls, I decided to proactively facilitate more calls between mastermind members. I started posting every week a call to network more. I had several calls with guys from other groups. It was nice to catch up with them. I think I got zero business out of those calls, but it wasn’t the point. It got me out of isolation a bit and was good for my mental health.

Podfest Summit

I got invited to speak at the Podfest Online Summit about Amazon ads. Of course, I agreed. I spent an hour or two on the organizing call and exchanging messages about the agenda with the self-publishing micro-con organizer.

Book Sales

My book sales shrunk in July. I just wasn’t able to get them to the pre-Covid levels. I mostly ignored this. Well, I created the phrase-matching ads and was happy to see a spike in my campaigns. But it remained neutral for the overall sales. I was able to limit my ad spendings, but not to increase the sales.

Limping Accountability

I posted my July goals in the accountability group on the 14th of July, two weeks after I should’ve done that! That was an indicator of how badly I neglected accountability. Every few days, I had been catching up with my habits tracking. I should’ve done this multiple times a day.

Fitness

The weather was great most of the time, so I biked and walked a lot. I made over 300k steps in July and well over 500 kilometers on a bike.

During one of my biking ventures, I fell hard turning on a crumbly road. I scratched my arm quite vividly and hit the road with my head. It was nothing, really. I had a mild headache for a few hours and I slept like a rock that night.

Only a day or so after the accident, a reflection came to me: “Well, that was close. If I would’ve hit the road harder…”
Life is a fragile thing. That’s why we should live it to the fullest.

Accountability Partner

In the last week of July I reached out to Marc Reklau. I wanted to update him on my recent discoveries regarding the ads. During the conversation he confessed he has no accountability partner.

Well, accountability is one of my few superpowers. That is, keeping someone accountable, not myself 😉 I offered him to become his accountability partner and he accepted without a moment of hesitation. We decided to have bi-weekly calls, and set the date for the next call.

Amazon Ads Takeaways

BTW, here are the things I shared with Marc.

-phrase keyword targeting in the USA works pretty well next to the broad targeting; I got 20% more impressions using the same keywords and the overall ROI was better

-the above wasn’t true for my Canadian ads; the volume increased only about 5% and I saw no difference in the ROI

-up and down bidding works great in the USA and quite well in the UK; using this kind of bidding, I was able to obtain the lower average cost per click

-in Canada, it actually works the other way; down-only bidding gives lower average cost per click than up and down bidding

The July 2020 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €2,430.65 ($2,483.86)
Coach.me fees: $121.92
Audiobooks royalties: $45.82
D2D royalties: $24.33
PWIW personal coaching: $335.45
AMS service remuneration: $3,429.69

Total: $6,801.07

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,123.45 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$754, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$112.42, royalties split with co-author
$120.52, editor’s share
$17.58, MichalZone domain
$96, Calendly yearly fee
$25, book promo
$4.95, Scribando
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $2,871.64

Net Result: $3,929.43

Previous Income Report: June 2020

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

I set a couple of goals for June 2020: to work on my Resurrecting Books business and to grow my presence at the Polish market. None of them went very well, but I neglected business development more than being active in Poland.

Book Sales

That was a bummer. I sold eight copies shy of 700 in June. That was the worst month since February 2019. I was partly responsible because I did nothing in months to promote my own books. I even stopped most of my Amazon ads since during the lockdown everything was so unpredictable.

At least my customers’ sales didn’t decrease so much.

Polish Market

I was diligently formatting and scheduling posts for my Polish blog. At the end of June, I had posts queued for publishing almost till the end of September.

I publish a blog post twice a week on that blog. It’s much easier than publishing three times a month on my English blog. First, because I basically reused 100% of my Polish Quora content, but skipping the external editing was a huge factor too. In Polish, I can honestly say if what I’ve written was good or not. Also, I can find and correct any typos and mistakes on the fly.

I also reached to a few podcast hosts but I got only crickets as an answer. Apart from cranking out posts, I also created the page for media on my Polish website.

At least, I was doing something consistently with this goal. Resurrecting Books was a different story.

Resurrecting Books

I did very little to move the needle forward. Yes, of course I dealt with my customers and onboard new prospects, but I was supposed to work on the business. In that regard I only drafted a customer service process and shared it with my onboarding specialist.

Well, I also did something in the marketing area: I gave a podcast interview focused on the ads and my business and asked for an introduction to an author with 10 books.

Still, I was very disappointed with myself.

First Resurrecting Books Team Meeting

In the last week of June, there was a Business on Purpose virtual summit and I got four of my team members online: my son, dad, sister and Nicole from States. After the summit, we spent 30 minutes together. My family introduced themselves to Nicole and vice versa. I shared Resurrecting Books values with everybody for the first time ever. That was a great time.

Experiment in Canada

One of fellow Canadian authors recently published a new book. I accidentally saw it on FB. I got the idea to try to advertise his old book in Canadian store. The book was great and it had got ratings. I thought it will be a smashing success.

Well, it wasn’t. I was able to sell only a couple of copies despite getting well over 300 clicks. This experiment only confirmed what I found repeatedly working with books: the most important element of the advertising process is a book description.

My friend’s book’s was quite terrible. The cover and title captured attention of readers on Amazon, but the experience on his actual book page repelled them.

If you want to advertise your book, you’d better make sure your book description is great!

Tiny Habits

I did one more thing with my Polish blog: I translated the Tiny Habits training into Polish and led several of my subscribers through one-week training, twice.

I picked three new habits for myself each time. I don’t know about my subscribers, but I learned a lot 😀

I wrote the whole monster blog post about this experience.

I adopted one habit very handy in reviving our family life and I managed to master a habit with which I had been struggling for months. I appreciate the Tiny Habits framework even more.

End of the Lockdown

We finally came out of the house. I was twice with my wife at a cinema. One time, we had the whole cinema for ourselves! That was a surreal experience, but very positive as well. I made fun that I rented the cinema for a date for mere $5.

I also went to a swimming pool with my daughter, first time in months.

The weather in June was quite wet, but also hot. On a few days when it was raining, I sat on my butt at home. But whenever the sky was clear, I biked or walked. I made over 300 miles. I explored the countryside.

Business Was Good

I didn’t work very hard in June, yet it was my best ever month for Resurrecting Books. I beat the previous best month by $176.

I changed a bit the pricing and cooperation model. I made quite a chunk of revenue with no risk 1-time deals. And I was able to delegate onboarding new customers to Nicole, my new team member. It was such a relief!

The June 2020 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1,785.28 ($1,963.8)
Coach.me fees: $139.16
Audiobooks royalties: $31.96
D2D royalties: $18.17
PWIW personal coaching: $382
AMS service remuneration: $4,576.58

Total: $7,111.67

Costs:
$49, Aweber fee
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,186.07 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$807.22, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$108.38, royalties split with co-author
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $2,823.74

Net Result: $4,287.93

Previous Income Report: May 2020

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

May 2020 was the most productive month since January. I put myself together a bit with the help of my friends and mastermind. My church community reactivated and I had the pillar of consistency back in my life. And alleviation of the lockdown didn’t hurt one bit too.

Poland

I took care of my Polish blog. Finally, finally!, I created a sidebar to it and started lining up the content. First, I shamelessly filled the holes in the past schedule. Then, I formatted the posts drafts copied by my sister from Quora, made sure they look OK, and scheduled them for the future. At the end of May, I had posts scheduled till the beginning of July.

I secured a podcast interview on another big Polish podcast. This encouraged me and inspired me to reach out to a few more podcast hosts. To no avail, but at least I took action.

Tiny Habits

After the podcast interview, I got more than a dozen subscribers to my Polish email list. I pondered what to do with them and decided that getting them through the Tiny Habits course would be the best thing I could do to facilitate a transformative experience for them.

I reached out to those new subscribers and asked them for permission. I got more than a dozen yesses. So, I started to prepare for that. My son helped me to translate the Tiny Habits materials from English to Polish. His translation was so funny! It reminded the Google Translate output. I dedicated about a couple of hours to make this material sound like proper Polish.

Then, I translated the Tiny Habits email sequence and started organizing the sequence in my new email management system.

Bird Send

I also finally took action on migrating my email list from Aweber to BirdSend. Even though Bird Send did the migration for me, it took me several hours of work because I needed to make an inventory of my all sign-up forms and pages. During the last 7 years, I created the whole maze of them and never had a need to put them all in one sheet.

In the middle of May, I had all my subscribers in the Bird Send system, but I still used Aweber to notify my list about the book giveaway I participated in. I only managed to start using the system at the end of the month. And it was not without adventures…

Email Blooper

At the end of May, I wanted to send that notification about the Tiny Habits course to my new Polish subscribers. I struggled with the Bird Send interface which was new to me. I had to confirm my sender email address in the middle of the process, since it was the first email sent from that address.

And I didn’t notice that the filtering I did at the beginning of the process was gone. I sent an email in Polish to everyone:
-my Polish subscribers,
-my English subscribers,
-my past prospects for Resurrecting Books service,
-my current Resurrecting Books customers…

Everyone!

Gosh!!

I kind of managed to send another broadcast with an English explanation of my mistake. About half of my list got it before my email account was locked. Too many people marked my Polish message as spam. *facepalm*

However, there is always a grain of good in bad. I got a few dozen emails back from my subscribers, mostly asking WTF. Some of them even painstakingly translated my message and asked to be put into the Tiny Habits training 😀 Those, I referred to the original BJ Fogg’s course.

I also got several inquiries from my bilingual subscribers who were interested in Polish training. So, in the end, I got more interactions and more participants of the Polish Tiny Habits course.

A New Hire

I got two great candidates for the onboarding specialist position for Resurrecting books. In the first week of May, I did interviews with them and picked one person.

Nicole was a romance writer who advertised her own books, so she knew ins and outs of the AMS system. I remember bouncing my ideas off my mastermind buddies when I had been creating the onboarding process. They were all so confused, ranging from “Why do you even need such a person?” to “I look at this and have very little idea what this is all about.”

But when Nicole went through all the materials she said that everything was clear for her. No questions. No confusion.

So, in the second half of May, I was busy sharing training materials and documentation with my new team member. We had the first call with a prospect, where she was an observer. Before the end of the month, I was able to delegate a few tasks to Nicole. I liberated another chunk of my time!

The idea was to dedicate this free time to get new customers.

Resurrecting Books

May was a good month for my business. We got a few new customers, including one “unicorn”- a book that practically sold itself with almost no tweaking on our part. Since day one the number of impressions was incredible and the conversion rates were simply shocking.

The rest of the new customers were far from being such a hit.

I also got a few 1-time customers who wanted advertising diagnosis of their books. I advised them how to optimize their book pages, had run my ads for 30 days for them, and then analyzed their results giving them actionable conclusions.

At the beginning of the month, I created the first such a report and I immediately recognized I need to raise the price for that service. It took me almost two hours to crunch the numbers and put them in writing.

We also did a few 1-time, flat fee deals which came down to creating the ads. All those non-permanent deals provided about 15% of revenue in May.

Day Job & Life

I work remotely for the whole month. I took a few Wednesdays off just to minimize the distraction on that front. Not much was happening on my projects. I just resented the distraction of turning on the laptop in the morning and following emails and messages for a few hours.

The lockdown was loosened some in May. Walking and biking stopped to be an issue. And the weather was really nice most of the time. I managed to shed off three pounds.

Book Sales

Book sales rebounded in May, especially paperback sales. Amazon started shipping them again. Yet, all of my books were shipped with a lead time, so people were less likely to buy them.

I sold 970 copies in May 2020 on Amazon. With my audiobooks and other stores, I crossed the magic number of 1,000 copies. That was nice progress comparing to April’s 875 copies and 845 copies in March.

The May 2020 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €2,474.77 ($2,695.32)
Coach.me fees: $125.26
Audiobooks royalties: $39.58
D2D royalties: $15.27
PWIW personal coaching: $335.45
AMS service remuneration: $3,965.66

Total: $7,176.54

Costs:
$49, Aweber fee
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,577.72 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$573.97, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$99.26, royalties split with co-author
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $2,975.86

Net Result: $4,200.68

Previous Income Report: April 2020

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

The beginning of April 2020 was exactly the same mess as the end of March. To be exact, I was a mess.

Hijacked Schedule

I let my wife hijack my schedule. She never really wrapped her head around the concept that I’m really working when I’m closed in my home office. In truth, I let her hijack my schedule. I didn’t feel like working anyway. I spent quite a lot of my time following the news, analyzing coronavirus statistics, and engaging in Twitter political wars.

My wife’s favorite pastime is watching movies with me. So, we watched a movie practically every evening. Sometimes, a couple of movies or more (on Sundays). It was still better than stupid Twitter wars, which seriously clouded my judgment.

Hijacked Mind

Garbage in, garbage out. Also, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, even if those people are Twitter trolls. My productivity and peace of mind went down the sinkhole because I allowed random people to invade my mind.

I was able to convert some of it into positives. This is how I started recording the corona videos – one day I wrote a whole article-rant about how to do read the statistics using your brainpower, not opinions on the Internet. I also wrote several answers about the coronavirus situation on Quora, both in Polish and English.

Yet, it wasn’t enough.

Day Job

I worked from home and I didn’t work many hours. Still, three days in the week I worked were hampering the little momentum I got. My day job was a distraction. My mental energy was so low that whenever I had to dedicate some brainpower to my day job I had very little energy left for my own endeavors.

However, it was a conversation with my supervisor which started the process of recuperation. We admitted to each other that we have trouble putting ourselves together. We jumped on the phone and discussed it in length.

My supervisor had much less trouble with productivity, she was crushing it in the job. Yet, she was a complete mess outside of work hours. You already know my mental state from this and the previous report.

But the most enlightening was the reflection after our conversation. We concluded that our old survival mechanisms kicked in in the new situation. We fell back to our default coping mechanisms.

Our survival wasn’t threatened, but we felt like it was. You surely remember the first weeks of the lockdown; nobody was sure of anything. We both knew better, but we couldn’t help ourselves.

To make it even more fun, both of us weren’t really afraid of anything: getting the virus, death, or poverty. We had it figured out. Yet, we lived in a state of constant anxiety and our brains went back to our past and obsolete survival mechanisms.

So, I had this conversation on the 6th of April. The same week, I discussed this mental fog state with my mastermind and one of my accountability partners.
I discovered that everybody was affected by this syndrome to some degree. It wasn’t something wrong with me. It was universal. It was like a magical poisonous cloud of anxiety covering the whole world.

This realization alone helped me to put myself together. I also named the source of the problem in my case – Twitter wars – and promised my accountability partner to stay out of that.

It helped like waving a magic wand. I keep track of my work hours. I worked barely over 3 hours a day in the second week of April and almost twice as many hours in the 3rd week.

A Ridiculous Corpo Story

After the conversation with my supervisor, I offered to GIVE our team SOME time. Since we knew everybody deals with anxiety, I offered my help to go through this struggle. My crazy supervisor encouraged me and she even forwarded my email to the whole company.

And here comes the story straight from Dilbert: The head of the HR department researched me, find out I have no coaching credentials from established entities and did what every venerable head of corporation HR department would have done: she named me a fraud and banned any help from me to the team.

Till that moment, I had stayed in my day job because my wife insisted on it. So, I tried to find a new place for me in the organization, the one that would utilize my talents better. I hoped to provide some training and coaching within the organization.

The HR lady cured me of those illusions. That event convinced me that I will quit this job at the very moment my wife allows me. Which is just a matter of time and money.

It was very liberating. I dealt with the corpo world’s idiocy for all too long. At that moment I separated my future from working for someone else. Forever.

Well, it separated me from my day job solely in my head. But it was liberating enough 😉

Upside

The upside of my distraction was that I took care of some household upkeep. I took my wife’s bike to a mechanic, made a checkup of my lawnmower, tanked our cars full, and did some other small things around the house.

Delegation and Progress

One of my sisters living in Ireland got laid off and she was bored out of her mind. She offered to help me out and I taught her how to keep track of my customers’ results and register them in the Google sheet.

My eldest sister was also laid off and she had more time to help me out. I taught her how to import my Polish Quora answers into my Polish blog and prepare drafts. That was a great idea. At the beginning of April, I had maybe a couple of posts on the blog. At the end of the month, I had two published every week and a few scheduled for the next month.

Having the drafts prepared by my sister, it takes me about 10 minutes to format the post, ad categories, tags, images and schedule the post. When writing this report, I have the whole month of content for my Polish blog scheduled ahead.

Hiring

I had been dabbling with the hiring process for a few months. On the 22nd of April, I finally published a job ad in an authors Facebook group. I gave candidates the time to the beginning of May to apply. Four persons applied within 48 hours and three of them were quite a good fit. And that was all. The feeble nature of FB feed took the ad out of sight of other authors, or no one else in that group was interested.

So, that wasn’t the best hiring process in the history of humankind, but it worked just fine for me. I would have got overwhelmed if I got 50 applications to review. I had enough in my lap, thank you!

5 Circle Fit

Brian Buffini organized an online challenge to help his followers get out of the lockdown at full speed. I joined the challenge. The recommended activities were much below my usual level of difficulty (e.g. 1-mile walk and I had been doing about 3 miles a day). Yet, 5 Circle Fit helped me because it gave me some structure to follow.

Book Sales

The book sales were slow. Amazon was as surprised by the Coronavirus, as the whole world. Paperback printing and shipping took a huge hit. At the end of the month, I noticed some uptick in sales, but it was more in my perception than in reality. I sold more than 30 copies in five out of the last ten days of April 2020. However, I sold only 30 copies more overall, than in March.

The biggest struggle in April was trying to stay sane and productive. The moment I stopped engaging in political wars on Twitter I immediately noticed that my productivity (and sanity) surged. That was my win of the month.

The March 2020 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €2,836.8 ($3,148.84)
Coach.me fees: $124.86
Audiobooks royalties: $36.36
D2D royalties: 24.33
PWIW personal coaching: $335.45
AMS service remuneration: $3,214.85
Affiliate commission: $294.06

Total: $6884.69

Costs:
$49, Aweber fee
$2,348.55 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$77, Business on Purpose monthly fee
$499.44, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$184.27, royalties split with co-author
$155.29 profit split with my editor
$14.28, domain
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $4,022.89

Net Result: $2,861.8

Previous Income Report: March 2020

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

My productivity went out of the window. My wife had not only me in the house 24/7, but also three teenagers. She didn’t take it well.
Plus, a week after the school shutdown a dermatologist diagnosed me with scabies! Heck. I probably got it at the mountain hostel at the retreat. It gave my wife more reasons to go mad.

My day job suffered the most from my productivity slump. Luckily, there wasn’t much to do. Not only the nature of my job requires most of the time just waiting for something to fix (I work in IT maintenance), but also the only project I was involved in was for an airline and their business activity dropped like a stone.

So, I usually did something for my business. It was still a big distraction three days a week. I needed to have my work computer up and running and have an eye for upcoming notifications. It didn’t help one bit that my wife was her usual distractive self and jumped into my office every time she found a funny meme on Facebook.

Consistency

But those were just external distractions. I was internally distracted and it was the real reason behind my lack of productivity. It even affected my consistency. I broke several habit streaks. At one time or another, I neglected each and every of my tracking activities, from tracking my business finances to tracking my habits.

When I look back at this mess now, I can connect the dots between putting my church community on hold and my total dissolve of routines. Yes, I only attend the meetings twice a week, but I’ve been doing that for over two decades of my life. This was the most fixed thing in my life. It lasted longer than any of my jobs, including my author career. It lasted even longer than my marriage!

And I lost this foothold.

Coronavirus Analysis

In the middle of the month, I sent a broadcast to my email list and hinted that I track the coronavirus global statistics quite diligently. I offered to record some videos sharing what I see in the numbers. The demand was huge, so I decided to follow through. I recorded the first video three days later and discovered that YouTube lost my old account?! It was bizarre. One day, I logged to YouTube and there were no videos.

With my crippled productivity, it took me another week before I uploaded videos under the new(?) account and shared them with my subscribers.

Continuing Various Projects

I tried to launch my Polish blog, the video coronavirus updates, I worked on my job ad for ResurrectingBooks, dealt with prospects, I delegated some tidbits of my workload to my son and sister… and nothing was really moving forward.

My new habit – writing thank you notes – has been disintegrated. I wrote eight notes in the whole March and only three of them after introducing the lockdown.

Any work felt like pulling my teeth with bare hands. I only created one blog post in Polish and the blog’s main page.

Lead Generation Deal

I reviewed the ads of one of my customers. We had a call and we went through my recommendations. At the end of the call, she came up with the idea of creating ads for her permafree book which serves as a lead generator for her funnel. She will pay me a commission whenever a lead from that funnel will convert into a customer.

In a few days, we created a few hundred ads for her book. We managed to get the cost of a single download from $2.4 to $1.6 in a few days and we tripled the number of downloads. Now, it’s just a question of time before something converts 😉

Overall, March 2020 was pretty awful. The whole world locked down and my mind went along. I just couldn’t force myself to operate at an even decent level of productivity.

The March 2020 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €3,118.17 ($3429.99)
Coach.me fees: $115.08
Audiobooks royalties: $62.69
PWIW personal coaching: $333.45
AMS service remuneration: $3,402.63
Affiliate commission: $294.06
Total: $7669.66

Costs:
$49, Aweber fee
$1,596.51 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$77, Business on Purpose monthly fee
$593.84, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$261.44, royalties split with co-author
$162.47 profit split with my editor
$51, WP theme for my Polish blog
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $3,457.35

Net Result: $4,212.31

Previous Income Report: February 2020

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

If I could describe February 202 with one word it would be: “overwhelming.” Whatever momentum I gained in January, I lost it in February.

Part of it was the fact that I drove myself too hard in January and my subconscious reacted with resistance.

I definitely paid too much attention to negative events. One good client fired me in the middle of the month. We had had a call just two weeks before and she said she trusts me. Then, bam! I didn’t see that coming at all.

Book sales were dropping across the board, for me and for my customers. It’s normal at that time of the year, yet it added to my foul mood.

I’ve got the tax documents from my employer. For the first time, my accountant did my business tax. The initial verdict was hopeful: I should get a small refund. Then, it appeared that having a business I cannot do taxes together with my wife and use some write-offs. Heck. The difference was $2k.

More Things to Do

I was in the capital almost every single day. If not for my day job, then for my rehab sessions. It appeared I’m too old for the daily commute. It added to my stress levels and robbed me of some productive time.

Email Marketing

I had a call with the owner of a new email marketing company. I decided to switch to their service. Not only it was cheaper than my current provider, but the new company also did so many things better than the old one. I was proved right when I sent a broadcast to my inactive subscribers. Aweber said they didn’t open my emails in the last half a year, but quite a few of them replied that they actually read my emails quite often.

One immediate benefit of this action was that I got below 5k subscribers after cleaning my list and saved $20 on the email bill.

Polish Blog

Basing on the feedback from my podcast interview and on Polish Quora, I decided to start a blog in Polish. The traffic on Quora in Polish tripled for me, then slowed down to the double the previous level.

My wife promised me some support and my mastermind buddies weren’t against it. I bought hosting, installed WordPress, bought a theme, created the first page, and lost all the steam.

Thank You Notes

I wanted to develop a new habit of writing the thank you notes every day. I succeeded maybe half the time. And this 50% success ratio was only due to accountability from my mastermind buddies. If not them, it could be even worse.

Coronavirus

We had a trip to Athens planned for the end of March with my wife. In February, we were hearing the rumors about the coronavirus, but we didn’t treat is serious at all. I even wasn’t concerned about whether we will go to Greece or not. It was just another annoying thing on the long list of things that weren’t going exactly as I wished for.

I was overwhelmed.

Day Job

I had a consultation with a presentation skills expert after my podcast interview and webinar for Bellevue University. He gave me some feedback. I immediately implemented one bit and moved the desk in my home office so my background would be less distracting.

It worked very well. My mastermind buddies noticed that. Some of them even thought I’m in a new place.

I also have a performance review. It was very informal, both I and my supervisor knew that my day job is not high on my priority list. She gave me an unofficial blessing to take care of my stuff when there were quiet moments on the project. This actually improved my mood. It helped me to not be bitter about losing my time (and money!) by working there. You know, the difference between my hourly wage in my day job and my business is about $20.

Book Promos

I put Directed by Purpose and Making Business Connections into a couple of different book promotions. The first book sold about 120 additional copies, while the other about 20.

It’s hard to say that the effect lasted for longer than a few days. Which is why I don’t organize book promotions anymore. I only participate in the ones organized by others.

Resurrecting Books

Contrary to what you might think after reading the above list of complaints, the business was doing well. Dave Chesson added some content to his free AMS ads course and notified his massive list about it. At the end of the course he recommends my services, so I got a throng of new prospects. Some of them were actually a good fit. Most of them weren’t.

Anyway, despite all the hurdles it was a very good month for my advertising business. I made over $3,500 which still was 24% more than the best result in 2019.

Canada

I invited a couple of old customers into the Canadian market. The ROI there has been very impressive. In fact, it was Canada that kept the whole business afloat. The margins in the USA went down to low 2-digits.

Cash Flow Problems

Since I advertise my customers’ books in Canada under my Advantage account, I pay for those ads from my own pocket. It caused some cash flow problems. I was charged four times in February, including three times with a full $500 payment. I agreed with my five biggest customers they will pay me the cost estimation in advance, before the end of the month. And they did. Yet, my all ads came to a scratching halt when there weren’t enough funds on my debit card. Twice.

Experiments

With new European markets available and new kinds of ads and bidding options, I experimented some. I tried the category ads and tested up & down bidding against down-only option.

None of those experiments were especially successful. I only determined that in Canada it’s still better to use down only bids. Ads with those bids were getting marginally more impressions and they were a bit cheaper than the ads with up & down bidding.

On other, more competitive markets down only bidding almost morphed into “this is the default bid.” So, if I bid 10 cents, the average cost per click was 9 or 10 cents.

New Model

The influx of new prospects made me reconsider my business model. I couldn’t keep the old one – trying all promising prospects and work with those whose ads will be significantly profitable. I lost too much time on this and my team created too many ads that were a waste of their time. Thus, I was dedicating my resources to activities that were very risky in terms of the return.

To add insult to the injury, it was harder and harder to determine if my ads were giving a positive net result. When my ads’ ROI was 100%, it was easy for my customers to see the difference. When it came down to 20-50% it was much harder, especially with the wonky AMS sales reporting.

So, I came up with a new model. Customers would pay for my service in advance. I would include the book page review, creating and managing the ads for a month, and the final report explaining their numbers in the price. And I could continue the cooperation with authors with books that did exceptionally well.

I came up with this idea mostly for 1-book authors because about 70% of my prospects were such authors and my way of doing ads worked only for a few of them.

A Fiction Experiment

I took one author with several books in the series. A few of them were stand-alones. His books were in the Kindle Unlimited program, which made the results triple hard to track. After running the ads for a few weeks we still had no idea if the ads were in green or in red. His audiobook sales jumped a bit. His pages read (KENPs) stayed on about the same level, sales too. Which was a good sign because up to that moment they were on a downward trend.

Probably, my ads helped a lot to maintain his level of royalties, but we had no way to tell.

I created ads in Canada for him and the results were fast and furious. He had been barely selling a few copies a month before. He sold a few dozen copies in February and his pages read increased significantly as well. The ROI was 172%, even with $20 spent on his non-stand-alone books which appeared to be an advertising failure. We got this ROI only with the things we could pinpoint; he probably made also some audiobook sales too.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €2,416.82 ($2,658.5)
Coach.me fees: $204.77
Audiobooks royalties: $46.82
PWIW personal coaching: $333.45
AMS service remuneration: $3,539.43
Total: $6810.37

Costs:
$69, Aweber fee
$1,637.66 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$77, Business on Purpose monthly fee
$299.89, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$155.45, profit split with my editor
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$70, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $2934.09

Net Result: $3,876.28

Previous Income Report: January 2020

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

January 2020 was the month of overwhelming hustle for me. In the first week of the month, I had three holy days and I had only one day of work prior to January to catch up after the Christmas break.

I was playing catch-up for the whole month. Seriously, I remember working on the 30th of January and dedicating the whole day to creating ads orders for my team and replying to emails.

So many things happened that I have a tough time picking one to begin this report.

Stack promo

In the second week of January, I promoted to my subscribers a bundle of productivity resources. Frankly, I did that to make some money. However, the bundle was ridiculously discounted, so I had no remorse in promoting it. In the end, several people bought the stack. I made in commissions enough money to pay for three months of my Aweber fees.

It was also an opportunity to get rid of plenty of subscribers who were freebie seekers or had been on my list only because they participated in some book giveaway. I “lost” about 200 such subscribers.

Webinar for Bellevue University

I had quite a lot of work preparing my presentation for the webinar conducted at the end of the month. Considering the time spent on a couple of calls before the webinar and on slides preparation, the fee I received for the webinar wasn’t as exorbitant as I felt when signing up for the deal. I got about $50 per hour of work.

I could employ my freshly learned presentation skills from training in my day job. Cooperation with Bellevue was flawless. I got the feedback that 800 leads (a combo of book downloads and webinar participants) we generated was a huge success for such a campaign. The pinch of feedback I got from the webinar participants was very encouraging too.

5-day ads challenge

I also joined Bryan Cohen’s 5-day challenge. I hoped to eventually learn something, but my real ulterior motive was to engage with people in his group and shine with my expertise.

Well, it didn’t pan out very well. I didn’t learn much. My thoughts about most authors’ ineptness with ads were fully confirmed. That was my main takeaway from the challenge. In a way, it’s been encouraging, I’ll never run out of prospects.

But other than that, the challenge was a waste of my time. In the midst of January’s craziness, I didn’t have time to properly connect and contribute to Bryan’s group. I exchanged my time for nothing. It is called a learning experience. Well, normal people call it a failure 😉

Another Fail

I managed to publish only an income report on my blog for the whole of January. I had no time and energy to prod my proofreader. Besides, I delivered my texts quite late to her, so I had no right to expect them to be delivered promptly.

Then, when she provided the docs I was buried below the mountain of work and never found a time to publish those posts.

Influx of Prospects

Dave Chesson from Kindlepreneur updated his free AMS ads course to include all the new shiny improvements Amazon implemented in the last year. He notified his subscribers (100k+ ?) and I got a lot of prospects in the result. How come? At the end of the course, Dave names a guy who can run the AMS ads for you. Me.

Not only I got more prospects, but I also picked more of them to cooperate with. When time is as crazy as in January, I can barely onboard two new prospects. I accepted five or six applications. It wasn’t the smartest decision in my life.

On the plus side, I could be very picky (and I was). So, the applications I accepter were either a perfect fit or just a fun thing to do (like a book-tribute for a 15-year old sister who died from cancer).

I also got a few old customers into the Canadian market, since my Canadian account was working again.

Onboarding Process

I did very little in that regard in January, despite the fact it was supposedly one of my January 12WY projects. But I managed to record a few training videos, document some bits of the process. I got a couple of cool side effects of those activities. Realizing that I have gaping holes in my process, I taught my friend to check on my customers’ accounts every few days to notice whose ads were getting unprofitable. I also trained my dad to review recently created campaigns and make sure no one was using the default Amazon bids which are way too high for my method.

Day Job

The first weeks of January were very quiet in my day job. I started slacking there again. This time, I fiddled with my stuff during office hours instead of mindlessly browsing on the Internet. That served my sanity much better.

It also made the prospect of going to the office more bearable. Even the most trivial stuff in my business is so much more exciting than my day job.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €2,987.8 ($2,427)
Coach.me fees: $122.23
Audiobooks royalties: $43.32
PWIW personal coaching: $402.49
AMS service remuneration: $4,410.85
Total: $7,405.89

Costs:
$69, Aweber fee
$54.51, royalties split with co-author
$2,839.68 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$77, Business on Purpose monthly fee
$803.68, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$49.95, InfoStack promo
$250.77, Bluehost yearly hosting
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$70, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $4,925.48

Net Result: $2,480.41

Previous Income Report: December 2019

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

I shudder when I recall December 2019. My life was a total madhouse.
The first week of December was a normal frenzy of calculating customers’ profits and issuing invoices. Plus, of course, all the accompanying activities – gathering and sending invoices to my accountant, calculating remuneration for my team and paying all the team members, and so on.
Plus, my best customer got this brilliant idea to send some authors my way since I was doing such a good job for him. So, I got three new additional prospects in the middle of all that.
The second week was the most peaceful. Meaning that I finished all the above, had some processing power to tackle new prospects, and order some new ads for my customers and I even worked a bit on creating the onboarding process for new customers.

However, the end of this week was the start of a book launch frenzy. The third week of December was as crazy as I could get. I had a book launch and I needed to prepare the manuscript for it. A day before the launch, I had a call with a prospect and we agreed to start with three books… before Christmas! On the 20th of December, I discovered that my Canadian account has been fixed. I could finally create new ads. So I did. And I requested more ads from my team.
All of this happened in the midst of Christmas preparation, collecting gifts, coordinating the get-together with my siblings and parents, and packing for a trip.

The fourth week was a holiday week matched with the book launch. We spent six days in Plock at the family get together. I was one of the sober drivers, so I was making 3-4 trips a day between a rented house where we slept and my grandfather’s home where we had the get-together. I managed not to break my writing streak during the whole time, which was a small miracle in itself. I checked on my coaching clients a few times.
A day before Christmas Eve, after exchanging greetings and hugs with everybody, we just hang together for several hours. During that time I processed over 100 emails in my inbox. I just moved to relevant folders plenty of them, but I also took action on some and replied to a few of them.
And then just two days of December were left and I spent a few hours of my most productive time fixing the broken toilet at our home. According to my wife, it was the priority number #1 😉

Life

December was also a busy family month. I was in a cinema with my wife twice (Irishman and Knives Out) and once with my kids (Frozen 2). I supervised changing tires in our cars from summer to winter ones and my wife’s car technical checkup. It didn’t pass it for the first time, so I needed to organize a repair as well.
We attended our daughter’s singing recitals a couple of times and I already mentioned the broken toilet.
My hands were full.

AMS in Europe

The week before Christmas, Amazon opened three new markets in Europe: FR, IT, and ES. I created the template ads for my books the very same day it was announced. Basing on the preliminary data from one campaign, the next day I asked my son to create the whole set of ads in IT first, then in other markets.
My son created the Italian ads and forgot about FR and ES, and I was sure I had the same set of ads on all the markets. Italy was doing very well and the two other markets sold just a few copies each. I discovered my mistake only several days into January. So, I mistakenly advised a few customers to go just to Italy with ads.
The European markets are selling books in English surprisingly well. My sales without ads amounted to a few copies a month, maybe as many as 10 copies for the whole European non-UK market. With the ads, I sold almost 200 copies and only 15% of that was the sales of a new book.
The conversion rate isn’t terrific, but this was to be expected since those are non-English markets and I do basically zero targeting with my ads.
The great thing about European markets, from my perspective, is that I can put as many books into a single ad as I want. It significantly decreases the workload for my team.

Process Building

At the end of November, our mastermind leader challenged me to work on my business processes. Luckily for me, it quickly slipped from the minds of my masterminds buddies. Luckily, because I did very little about it. In November, I had a few brainstorming sessions and shared their result with my childhood friend who is a process engineer in a factory.
If not his help, I would’ve done totally nothing about this during my crazy December. He helped me to translate my notes into something more coherent and drafted the algorithm of the customer onboarding process. I spent maybe one hour in December working on that process.

Lack of Reflection

Usually, I use the Christmas break to ponder over my yearly goals, both reflecting how they went in the previous year and what do I plan for the next one. This year, I did very little of that. I utilized a few journaling sessions to go over my 2019 goals and decide on what to do in 2020. I simply had no time to do more.

Day Job

I already mentioned I took almost two weeks off. I also used a couple of working days for training applicable in my new career: communication skills and presentation skills. Especially the second training was very enlightening. It will help me to give a much better webinar for Bellevue University at the end of January 2020.

The Book Launch

During the second week of December, I finally had a closer look at the manuscript of 99 Habit Success Stories. I tweaked a few places fixing the timeline of my story and a few other stories. I found a few typos too. I had to change the font size in the paperback version, it was too small. It screwed all the numbers in the table of content and caused many stories to spill over a second page. I spent a few hours fixing that.
My eldest son helped me with creating the index at the end of the book. We needed to do it separately for the Kindle and paperback version.
When I finally uploaded the files at Amazon, it appeared that the paperback on Amazon doesn’t follow the format of the uploaded PDF. I had to play a few times with the margin size and space between lines to make the Amazon version identical with my PDF, so the page numbers in the TOC and the index at the end of the book would fit.

My poor cover designer had to prepare five different versions of the paperback cover till the size was exactly as Amazon wished for.

I submitted the Kindle version late in the evening on the 17th of December. I fought with the paperback manuscript almost till midnight, to no avail.
The next morning I found the Kindle on Amazon… but the whole description was “ble ble ble” – the text I inserted when creating a draft in the KDP dashboard.

I had the final version of the description ready, so I quickly uploaded it on Amazon. I notified a few advance readers who already delivered their reviews via email that the book is out there and they can publish their review.
It was Wednesday, always the busiest day of my week. That day, I managed only to work a bit more on the paperback manuscript and to notify a few more people.

The rest of the launch was as hectic as the first day. The next day, I wrote an email broadcast to my list and notified a few author friends about the launch. The broadcast sold about 60 copies! That was a nice start.
I had some time on Friday and Saturday to finish the paperback and notify more people about the launch. That was it before the holiday week.
I remember creating a list of contributors to notify in the middle of the family get-together on Monday. During the holiday week, I didn’t manage to do much about the launch. I sent several emails contacting contributors and my friends. I collected some screenshots from Amazon. I reminded Steve Scott about his promise to help with my launch.
And he did help, oh boy! Scott sent an email to his list on Monday, the 30th of December. I sold 160 copies of the book in the USA on that day. I guesstimate the overall impact of his help to 350+ copies sold, which made more than a third of total sales during the launch.

However, Scott wasn’t the only one who helped me. Som Bathla, Mimi Emmanuel, Scott Allan, Marc Reklau, Jordan Ring, IC Robledo (and probably a few others slipped my mind) all supported me in their own ways. I paid zero for marketing and sold well over 850 copies during the launch.
Well, I paid some for Amazon ads. They sold 6% of the total. A nice boost, especially considering that the ads almost broke even. I sold enough paperbacks to almost cover the fees for generated clicks.
Back at home, on the 30th of December, I finally went through the list of book contributors and notified them about the launch. It was about the last thing I did for the launch in December.
The only downside of the whole launch was the number of reviews. The usual story, not enough of them. I had 60+ advance readers who promised to review the book and I got just a few reviews from that. The rest was the usual ironclad crowd of my fans and fellow authors.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €2,987.8 ($3,286.58)
Coach.me fees: $117.6
Draft2Digital royalties: $22.75
Audiobooks royalties: $56.94
PWIW personal coaching: $337.38
AMS service remuneration: $2,423.76
Total: $6,245.01

Costs:
$69, Aweber fee
$71.45, royalties split with co-author
$2,208.74 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$77, Business on Purpose monthly fee
$542.26, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$70, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $3,930.51

Net Result: $2,314.5

Previous Income Report: November 2019