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


July 2021 Income ReportWe 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

Hundredth Income Report – July 2021 ($3,043.37)

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