Twenty Eighth Income Report – July 2015 ($1042.56)

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

I took it easy in July 2015. I was still affected by the disaster of Slicing the Hype launch. I had enough of publishing.

Fortunately for me, at the beginning of this month my partner finished writing our joint-venture book. I wouldn’t have published anything on my own, but for my friend’s sake I took care of the publishing process. I ordered proofreading from Archangel Ink and a cover, informed my subscribers about a new project, prepared a pre-order page and so on.

At the beginning of the month I had a follow up of a job interview. The next day they decided to hire me and I had a serious chat with my supervisor. To my surprise they agreed to let me go in the middle of August, much earlier than I anticipated. It put some additional workload on me, I had to create the documentation and finish a few projects.
In the middle of the month I took a week of vacation and flew to Ireland with my kids. The vacation were quite productive, I woke up early every day to write. After a week I left my kids with their grandparents and went back home.

After learning from Kimanzi Constable I started to follow a few editors on Huffington Post and Entrepreneur to get on their radar. I read a lot of articles and shared them on Twitter. It was just groundwork. I also published my first article on GoodMenProject and submitted another one. On my trip to Ireland I did a lot of brainstorming and outlining future articles. The first article didn’t make a big splash. I got less than 30 social media shares.

I also tried Facebook ads for the first time. The initial results were encouraging, but in the end I invested $25 to earn $12. I couldn’t afford to bleed more money, so I gave up. One of the big disadvantages of FB advertising is that it is image-based and I’m aesthetically blind. To efficiently market on FB, you’d better be juggling images effortlessly. I had to ask my friend to create an image for the ad. I think my aesthetic blindness was one of the reasons my campaign failed.

I wrote only a few chapters of “Making Business Connections That Count” at the end of the month. The rest of the time I was writing guest posts, blog posts, articles and their outlines. I wasn’t in the right mood to write the next book.

July was also the month when my editing habit fizzled out. I ran out of momentum and allowed it to slip away. When I started a new job the following month I was not in a position to commit to it again. I returned to work in editing spurts, which is a recipe for disaster. Well, at least for struggle. Anyway, since that time, I’ve been editing my stuff only when I got a backlog of a raw material or some deadlines were rapidly approaching.
As you can imagine, it didn’t help in alleviating the level of stress in my life.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:
Amazon royalties: €1014.32 ($1115.75)
German translation royalties: €25.82 ($28.4)
Total: $1144.15

Costs:
$1.6, FB ads of Trickle Down Mindset
$11, proofreading services Fiverr
$29.99, Fancy Hands fees
$29, Aweber fee
$30, View From the Top Community fee

Total: $101.59

Net Result: $1042.56

Previous Income Report: June 2015