Are you curious about a 3-month delay? I explained it in my first income report.
August 2018 was an extremely busy month. Apart from my considerable daily workload, I published a monster anniversary The Slight Edge report and worked on my new book. I also spent more time with my family because my kids had vacations.
The Daily Grind
Every day, I wrote my 600-word quota, published an answer on Quora, checked on my coaching clients and of course did my morning ritual and 10-minute habits.
I had also my hands full with growing my book marketing service. I had a lot of inquiries and corresponded with prospects almost every single day.
I also played a lot of catch-ups. One day I spent some time updating my online progress journal because I neglected it for 11 days. Another day, I spent a couple of hours managing our finances. Because of a few big purchases in July and borrowing from different accounts, I created a big mess that I needed to straighten out.
I promised my subscribers a consistent publishing schedule and I wasn’t used to it. About each time I had something to publish, I did it at the last possible moment.
The Slight Edge Report
For the first five days of August 2018, I was busy with finishing the anniversary report. A day before the deadline, I spent a couple of hours on spellchecking and formatting it. The next day, I spent another couple of hours on correcting the report returned by my proofreader and formatting the post on my blog.
But I managed to publish the report on time.
Family Activities
When I went through my August entries in my journal I was surprised by how much of my time was occupied by family activities.
I went to the cinema a few times with my wife and with my kids.
The back porch was finally finished, so my wife started displaying it to her friends. I remember one afternoon spent on the porch with our former babysitter and her husband.
One Saturday we had our friend’s son’s wedding. We were back home at 5 am and went to the afters on the next afternoon.
At the end of August, my mom visited us. My cousin had a wedding at the beginning of September, she arrived early to spend some time with us. Again, the porch was in use 😉
We had also more time for ourselves. My wife went to a spa with her cousin for four days. I was in the sauna a few times for a few hours.
The Growth of Resurrecting Books
I got four new customers for my book advertising service in August 2018. That meant a lot of correspondence: first, I gave my feedback and recommendation on their books, supervised them in implementing my tips, explained how my profit-split model works, and then instructed them on how to create an editor’s account for me.
That wasn’t all. Once I got the editor’s account, I created template ads for their books and orders for more ads for my team. The last step was supervising the ad creation and initial results.
I also had a call with one of my new customers from July and we opened the AMS UK account for her.
And there was the usual maintenance stuff, like reloading ads in the UK, calculating profits and invoicing. I received 87,000 new keywords from a fellow author and my team created well over 2,000 ads in August 2018.
My Team
“My team” was me, my wife and my son. My son had vacations, so he did most of the ads. Everything took longer than I anticipated. I needed more people on board.
I asked a couple of people from my church community and they were interested, but my wife was firmly against it. She took it as a blow to her honor. She thought that I thought she was incapable of tackling more ads.
Well, she wasn’t. She really has had her hands full running our household. It’s a full-time job in itself.
She was stubborn and firmly refused to hire anyone else.
To add insult to injury, Amazon changed the interface in the US around 10th of August. They “improved” the process of ad creation, so now it took about 5 times longer.
And I got a bug – I couldn’t create new ads in the US under my account. I still could create them for my customers. I contacted KDP Support immediately, but their incompetence is beyond legendary. I’m writing this report two months later and they are no closer to finding the solution.
Well, at least deactivation of my US account lessened the workload for my team. We slowly inched through the month and at the end of August we about did everything I planned in the first 10 days of it.
I needed more people, no matter what my wife said.
My eldest son started a day job on 16th of August. And he started slacking with updating the tracking Google sheets for my customers. He already wasn’t consistent in doing them, but since he started the job he became terrible.
I needed someone to replace him with this task too. *sigh*
A Surprising Twist
I spent two days babysitting my son – my wife was horrified that her 17-old year “baby” is commuting alone. Sheesh! I wasn’t used to spending 8 hours at the office anymore, so after two days I rebelled.
The things in my day job slowed down considerably. In this busy month, this was a blessing.
Anyway, one day at the end of August I had a conversation with my wife. I told her how overwhelmed I felt, especially when she didn’t allow me to hire any help. I enumerated all the money-making projects I had in the air.
And she agreed to downsize my day job to quarter-time! 10 hours a week in the office! I was elated.
My wife’s condition was, of course, that my superiors would agree to that scheme. The very next day I had a talk with my supervisor. She was exasperated with me:
“Really? Quarter-time? Why not quit altogether?”
I should, but my wife clings to that old notion of day-job’s “security.” However, my supervisor, bless her tender heart, didn’t think twice. She agreed. We decided that I’ll start effective October 1st.
My Team vol. 2
My wife did her fair share of ads, but she just had no time. She was busy with preparations for the start of the school year and for a couple of weddings we were going to attend. Deep at a gut level, she realized I was right and she was stubborn. But she wasn’t going to admit it 😉
My mother was going to spend a week at our home. During a phone call I complained to her about how overwhelmed I felt without expanding my team. Mom got a brilliant idea. My father and sisters could help me.
This time when I hinted the idea of expanding my team my wife didn’t withstand. Somehow, hiring my family was different in her mind than hiring folks from my church community.
Don’t ask. It’s a women’s logic. I cannot follow it a bit.
We determined that when my family would visit us while coming for my cousin’s wedding I’ll teach them how to help me out.
The Self-talk Book
On top of everything else, I worked on my self-talk book. I spent several days reverse-outlining what I wrote and fixing errors and typos I found on my own.
Once I finished that, I sent the manuscript to my proofreader. In fact, to quicken the process, I had been sending her a few chapters at the time. I was still reverse-outlining the last chapters when the first came back from her.
We got stuck at the end. Erica had a crazy time at her day job and didn’t tackle last chapters for a week. I didn’t follow up with her because I was swamped with all the other work. When I discovered what was going on, I asked my friend to proofread the last three chapters.
Then I had to go over their corrections and add them into the manuscript. I had a fire under my butt because I already organized a beta-readers list.
In one of my email broadcasts I asked for volunteers for beta-reading and got 24 of them. Before sending the broadcast, I created the special email list for them, a new sign-up form and a page on my blog with the first 400 words of the book and the form.
Once I corrected the manuscript with my proofreaders’ remarks I formatted the book to make the reading experience less painful. This took a couple of hours.
I dug out beta-reading instructions for my old book, personalized them for self-help book and created the email broadcast for beta readers.
At last, on the 31st of August 2018, I sent the manuscript to my beta readers.
And it all happened next to my family activities, day job and growing Resurrecting Books. I hope you got the picture. This is why I like writing books, but I dread the publishing process.
The Income Report Breakdown
Income:
Amazon royalties: €837.12 ($979.43)
CreateSpace royalties: €823.35 ($963.32)
Coach.me fees: $330.93
Draft2Digital royalties: $20.39
Audiobooks royalties: $137.96
PWIW personal coaching: $369.04
AMS service remuneration: $944.96
Affiliate marketing: $0
Total: $3746.03
Costs:
$29, Aweber fee
$49.59, royalties split with co-author
$1402.06, Amazon ads
$26.21, Book Bub ads
$145, RAs’ (RAs = Real Assistants); my sons’ remuneration
$82.58, The Marketing Coach
Total: $1734.44
Net Result: $2011.59
Previous Income Report: June 2018
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