In October, I was almost back to my routine. I still traveled a bit, but spend most of the time at my parents’ place in the South of Italy. Still not an ideal situation work-wise, but much better than September.

My focus was on freelancing work. I have kept working on existing clients and started a new contract, which hopefully will last for several months and give me some stable income.

I was positively surprised by the book sales. It’s one of the best months so far and looking at the stats, I have already made 155 sales this year, which is the same as the total number of sales I made last year. If I keep selling at this rate in November and December, it will be a 20% increase in book sales year-on-year. The only thing I changed in Summer, was to add a small sentence where I asked for reviews inside the book. Apparently, it worked, because I got 3 more reviews since July, while I only had 2 since the book was published. I am convinced those reviews are what made my sales accelerate a bit in the last months. Good reviews can bring you a long way on Amazon.

I am keeping working on my side projects. For Data Internships I have started to automate the job fetching mechanism, and I am spending some time curating the collected jobs, writing the newsletter and the LinkedIn page associated with the website. My idea is to start publishing some content on LinkedIn and attract new subscribers this way. Right now I have 50 subscribers, most of them came after a post on LinkedIn, but some also from organic search (which is my main channel of growth). Stoic Quotes instead is almost dead. I am not working on it actively, maybe I will turn it into an AI powered Stoic assistant, maybe I will let it die, but I think I should use it for some experiments, marketing or tech related.

I have made more money than ever from freelancing. It’s still not matching what I was making when I had a salary, but if someone had told me 6 months ago that I would have made more than $6000 per month by freelancing I would have been pretty happy about it. I keep getting asked about possible new contracts, in general I get one new inbound opportunity every week. Most of them will not get anywhere, but it’s nice to know that there is still demand for Data Scientists in the market.

Freelancing generated revenue but is also taking quite a bit of my time. Right now I am working 4 days per week on different contracts, and it is taking time from other activities, like growing Data Internships or experimenting with new ideas. The problem is that those numbers are before taxes and with a 47% tax rate they translate into a bit more than $3000 per month, which is ok but nothing life changing. Also, lifestyle wise, I would like to be able to work less than 5 days a week, which I cannot really do at the moment.