Sixty Ninth Income Report – December 2018 ($2846.38)

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


Sixty Ninth Income Report – December 2018December 2018 was a month of distractions.

The beginning of the month was exactly in the middle of the book launch. I got no rest on the second weekend of the launch. My wife and I went to Saint Andrew’s Day party. We danced the whole night and were back home on Sunday morning at 4 am. Another week of catching up and marketing the book was ahead of me.

But I’m glad for that party anyway. We had a great time together.

 

In the first week, I was busy with calculating the profits of my customers and occasional updates on Facebook about “Power up Your Self-Talk’s” launch. This was the best book launch I’ve ever had. The first week, with over 200 sales, was just a warm-up. On Wednesday, the 12th of December I sold 54 copies. That day I had two promos scheduled and my friend, with a list size similar to mine, promoted the book to his readers.

But it paled next to the kick the book got when Steve Scott sent a broadcast to his list.

I sold over 150 copies in the USA store in one day. The book almost reached the top #1,000 in the whole store.
Income Report December 2018

Income Report December 2018

Resurrecting Books

It was a good thing that the launch went almost on autopilot. I had my hands full with my Resurrecting Books service. I fired one customer. He had only one book, a memoir. While memoirs still do better with my system than pure fiction books, they usually are nowhere close to personal development books. We were about breaking even for the last few months.

The workload with one book is almost the same as with two or more books. In each case, I go over the same onboarding process. Initially, there is a bit more work because I need to point out the flaws of every particular book page.

However, often authors repeat the same mistakes, so I can copy-paste the tips from one book to another. It goes without saying that creating the ads for each book (and we create about 100 ads per book) consume the same amount of work, but my team takes care of this. I only need to create the first template ad and an order for more ads.

The maintenance of the ads is almost the same, no matter how many books an author has. The tasks are the same – the team has to download the ads’ data and put them in a tracking sheet; I use those data to make sure the ads bring in profits.

I estimate the workload to be 5% greater when I take a customer with two books over a customer with one book. And the potential for profits is 100% more. Now, when I onboard an author with one book, it’s more for the sake of experience than the hope of a profitable deal.

Shoulder Rehabilitation

I injured my shoulder when continuing my pull-ups routine even though I had pain. I went to a doctor in September or October. I needed rehabilitation.

Luckily, my employer provided nice medical insurance. I didn’t need to worry about the cost, but the timeframe was a problem. If I would’ve waited for a regular schedule, I could start my rehabilitation program somewhere around February. Instead, I called the rehab center a few times a month and booked appointments whenever other patients canceled them.

Which meant I got my appointments, but I had to be in the capitol almost every single day. It killed my productivity. I had almost no longer blocks of time when I could focus on one thing, zoom in and work.

Well, in the last several years I got really good at juggling a shocking number of tasks and fitting them between other tasks. I used this skill in December 2019 to the fullest.

Christmas

Another productivity challenge was Christmas. We spent them at home and my sister with her family visited us. They arrived on Friday before Christmas and left Tuesday afternoon. Practically every night we chatted in the living room till the early AM hours. My sleep schedule went down the toilet.

On Wednesday we visited my mother in law and my wife’s uncle, so it was another day not dedicated to business.

All I managed to do in that period was writing and publishing on Quora every day.

Big Potential

I still consider myself utterly hopeless when it comes to leveraging the Big Potential. Yet, I recognized and followed some opportunities. I needed to invest my time into them.

When Bryan Cohen gave an interview on Pat Flynn’s podcast, I commented on his episode on the Smart Passive Income website. Bryan followed up and we ended up on a short call getting to know each other better. Bryan was fascinated by my business model.

Several months before I had joined my mastermind, the guys read the book 12-Week Year and they already implemented this framework in their businesses and lives. Danny Bauer offered to lead a short coaching program about this for newcomers. I jumped at the opportunity. We had a single 1-hour call in December and I got busy with some homework and preparation for implementing the 12-week year program starting the beginning of 2019.

In November Patrik Edbald invited me into a book giveaway he scheduled for the beginning of January. I was sure it would be profitable and I immediately agreed. So, I had to prepare a few things in December to get ready for the giveaway.

I created a new opt-in form. I created the landing page. Then I tweaked the PHP code of my template (for over 90 minutes!) till I got the page that has no menu on it, only the content. A junior developer could do that in 5 minutes. I only managed it because of my IT background.

12-Week Year

Part of the homework for the 12-week year group was hammering out the plans for the first quarter of 2019. One of the goals I set was to shape my Resurrecting Books service into a business. I decided to start an LLC at last. So far, I was acting as an individual. A formal structure would help me with systematizing processes; it won’t be a solo venture too long if the business in the way I want it to grow.

Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I started to prepare for the new routine. New goals strengthened my resolve to wake up early, I can do so much more in the morning. I even woke up before 6 am once!

I followed the Business on Purpose framework from the beginning and outlined the vision story for my business.

Good Sales

First of all, “Power up…” was the main engine for my sales in December. The book sold over 1,100 copies in December and almost half of them were full-price sales after the launch. I made back my investment for the book’s production within a month. Mostly, because I invested relatively little into marketing.

But I also sold almost a thousand copies of my other books (over a thousand, if I count audiobooks). I didn’t even realize before writing this report that I broke the barrier of 2,000 sales a month for the first time!

The fact is, starting a new set of 1,100 ads for all of my books just prior to December certainly helped. And it was the pre-Christmas season!

The Christmas season was good for my customers as well. The revenue from Resurrecting Books also set the all-time record at over 25 hundred bucks.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:
Amazon royalties: €1506.92 ($1717.89)
Coach.me fees: $295.53
Draft2Digital royalties: $39.26
Audiobooks royalties: $56.47
PWIW personal coaching: $386.84
AMS service remuneration: $1684.15
“Trickle Down Mindset” deal in Korea: $1560.33
writer’s fee from Better Humans publication on Medium: $9.85

Total: $5750.31

Costs:
$29, Aweber fee
$37.53, royalties split with co-author
$1285.72, Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$29.38, Book Bub ads
$338.56, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$515.9, formatting for “Power up Your Self-Talk”
$151.25, promo sites services for “Power up Your Self-Talk”
$30, a refund for ResurrectingBooks customer
$15.97, books

Total: $2903.93

Net Result: $2846.38


Previous Income Report: November 2018

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