The First 4-Figure Month: Fourteenth Income Report — May 2014
(The naked truth about self-publishing; episode 14)
Are you curious about the time delay? I explained it in my first income report.
May 2014 was quite uneventful.
Well, there were some fireworks. On 9th of May my post about a rock star from UK was noticed on Twitter by one of his fans and then retweeted. I got several retweets by people with followings that numbered in thousands. I got the surge of visits on my blog… and then my website provider encountered some technical problems. The site went down.
But it’s not the end of the story. The next day I found this in my Twitter feed:
That made my day too.
James had over 2 millions followers on Twitter at that time. Within 2 hours I had a surge of visitors on my site; which was more than during the whole previous month. Quite a bunch of people praised my article.
James’ tweet got 162 retweets and 310 favs.
But it didn’t do much more for me than feeling better about myself. The surge disappeared two days later and everything was back to normal.
Lesson:
I helped this random chance. My friend Naomi from Start Biz Quit Job taught me how to retweet my old blog posts using Buffer. It was a bit of a hassle to set the things up, but it did pay off big.
Don’t let your old content just sit there and do nothing. You never know what will happen if you put yourself out there.
Free promo
The adventure with Twitter was nice, but in my business it was business as usual.
I organized a free promo of “Release Your Kid’s Dormant Genius.” This book was selling pretty badly. It has never reached the level of one sale per day. I invested $20 in marketing services. I wanted to make a bigger impact, but most of all I wanted to check the websites which I paid.
I got almost 1,900 downloads. Not bad at all. The sales afterwards unfortunately didn’t reflect that. I sold 24 copies in May and 28 in the following month. I should sell about 180 to get my investment back. It seems that this book is just not marketable.
Lesson:
I don’t regret writing this book. Writing makes you internalize what you know. Maybe I didn’t help many parents with their struggles, but I definitely helped my son. I transformed him from a layabout into a decent student. He finished two school years in the row with honors.
When we moved this year, he changed the school. This one is more demanding, but he is managing just fine. My supervision is now minimal; it’s not even 10 minutes a day but a couple. How much would I pay for that? Easily a thousand bucks. Sometimes you just need to write for yourself.
Countdown Deal
I also did my first Countdown Deal on “Master Your Time. “ In promoting this deal I invested $40. I paid one company to submit the info about the promo to 30 sites. The efficiency of their effort was mediocre at best. Only 5 or 6 sites published the blurb. But I broke even with this promo.
Beta Readers
I was working on my 6th book, “From Shy to Hi.” I managed to finish editing in May, create the Advance Reading Copy and share it with my subscribers. Four of them volunteered to read the book and provide their feedback.
It was first time I did it and I recommend this course of action to every author out there, especially a one who is new to the publishing world and who has little time and resources.
I mean, the most important thing is a quality of your book. The feedback from actual readers is priceless for improving this quality. I don’t have time to go back to my past book and craft them into something 1% better. I’m busy writing new books.
Sharing your book with readers in advance is a shortcut to the normal process of releasing a product and waiting for the market feedback. It allows you to publish a better book upfront.
Writing, Sales and Results
I started writing another book, “Trickle Down Mindset.” I wrote over 16k words of it. Apart from this book I was writing blog posts and how-to articles for Kindle beginners.
I got the idea of publishing my income reports. I didn’t want to start from the point I was in, I received 700 euros in May. I wanted to demonstrate that hard work and consistency pays off. So I decided to publish those reports with one year delay.
As an experiment I outsourced book content writing on Elance. I finished hiring a young gal from the Philippines.
The sales were still dwindling. I sold 543 copies. I hoped that the release of “From Shy to Hi” would compensate for that.
I gave away for free over 3,500 copies that month.
The Income Report Breakdown
Income: €952.82 (about $1238.66; February royalties, plus €80 of backlog from various markets, plus €20 from March royalties from 3 smaller markets which were registered at the end of May)
Cost: $19, Aweber services.
$20, freebie sites paid submissions.
$40, Countdown Deal promotion of “Master Your Time”.
Net result: $1159,66
GREEN! My first 4-figure month ever!!
Previous Income Report: Burning Money: Thirteenth Income Report — April 2014
Originally published at www.expandbeyondyourself.com.
