I’m keeping the habit of writing reports. Even though this month might really not be that interesting. I have decided to focus only on one side project and I have pressed the pause button on everything else.

Like many others, I probably suffer from shiny object syndrome, and often stretch myself too thin working on too many things at once and adding more and more stuff to my plate. This month was the same, but I had the discipline to let go and keep focusing on my only side project, publishing a new book.

Data Freelance

Paused.

Data Internships

Paused.

xTopics

Paused. It’s kinda broken right now. I know it because I use it every day to find inspiration for my social media content. I don’t have time to look into what’s broken, so it stays like this until I publish the book.

Soccrbets

Paused.

Freelancing

Still doing it, otherwise I won’t be able to put food on the table. I have two clients and I don’t plan to add more. I usually write updates on it a dedicated TG channel.

Publishing

I’m going to take this seriously. Since publishing books has been by far my most successful side projects since 2020, when I published my first book on Machine Learning for soccer betting. My books (four so far) have brought me a constant stream of income, from 100 to a few hundred dollars every month, without any effort in marketing. I guess it’s the power of a marketplace like Amazon.

For the next book, I decided to follow the advices by Sean Dolwett, which really are common sense in any business.

• Do keyword research and write in a low competition, high demand niche.
• Research the competition and write a better book.
• Outsource what you are not able to do (like the book cover).
• Launch and promote with ads, but make sure to be profitable.
• Reinvest profits in the business.

So I went into keyword research and found a few keywords that look promising. If you follow me on social media you probably already know what I am talking about. The best book in this niche is selling well, generating royalties of $3000 per month. But it would be hard to compete with that book straight away, since it has almost 2000 reviews. Another book that is selling well had only 50 reviews or so, and is making $600 per month in royalties. My target is to get in that ballpark after the launch. I hope to get around 50 reviews, and see what happens later.

I started to write the book at the beginning of the month (not going to outsource this one for now but maybe in the future) and I am around 50 pages. A book like this should be in the 100 to 150 pages range, so I am not that far, and I feel like I’ll be done by the end of the month. The launch should happen in mid-November, so that it will be able to pick up some steam from the Q4 sales. Let’s see how it goes.

In the meantime I am experimenting with ads for my other books. I don’t have any goal with this, just to play around and see how it works. In fact, I lost money with them, because I spent $84.65 and made only $130 in sales, which after the Amazon cut, gives me a negative return. But I have already made adjustments to the ads to make it more targeted.

The cashflow

Time to look at the income for this month (without freelancing).

I’m thinking if it even makes sense to include X Premium in the costs. I guess for now I will leave it there, because it’s a promotion channel after all, even if I’m using it less and less.

Till the next month!