Motivation fades when results don’t arrive. This is why I finally feel motivated these days. And I’m eager to write these posts.

In February, I think I finally reaped what I sow in the previous 3 months. After having published 3 books, I think I learned something from my mistakes, and this reflects in the revenue numbers. This definitely feels like progress, and it’s a combination of three things I think.

• Learning, from other people and from my mistakes.
• Focusing on one thing at a time.
• Investing money in activities that move the needle (coaching, advertising, producing high quality books).

My main income still comes from freelancing, but I only devote 2 days per week to it. It looks increasingly likely that I will not need to commit more time to freelancing in the next months.

Data Freelance

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Data Internships

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xTopics

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Freelancing

Roughly working 60 hours per month, or around 2 days per week.

Publishing

My strategy was simple.

• Optimizing existing ads for my books.
• Publish one more book in a small niche.

The new book I published is in the Italian market. And it’s something new for me, because I never published in my local market. The demand is definitely lower, but on the other side, there is also less offer and the quality of the books is also lower. At the beginning of February I was able to find a book that was doing quite well for Italian standards, getting around 120 sales/month which is very good for my standards. And they had a bad cover, bad title, bad description. So everything was pointing in the right direction. I couldn’t believe it, so I asked the Royalty Hero community which I am part of and Sean himself encouraged me to pursue the KW, since the “Italian market is still in its infancy” and I could definitely make a better job than my competitor. I didn’t jump on it immediately, but I was able to publish the book by mid-February, the book production took a bit more than a week and I designed the cover myself with the help of AI of course. One day after the launch my competitor left a 1-star review, without even reading the book (I had not sold a single copy and had not yet shown the book to anyone). This shows you how cut-throat the Italian market can be. And in such a small market, even one bad review can make a difference. Anyway, I was able to counter that with the help of some ARC reviewers, and now I have got an overall 4 star-rating and the book is sitting at 5k BSR, selling 2-3 copies per day. I am now competing with the bestseller, but I still have a lower price, which gives me around $4 royalties per book. One thing that I am doing, that Italian competitors seem reluctant to do, is to run ads aggressively. I have set up ads to target many keywords, but also physical products. I don’t think this strategy is popular, but it’s quite cheap for the Italian market, and it makes sense for this type of book (and many others I suppose).

During the month my existing books kept performing decently, I am not losing money on ads anymore and actually one of them is performing surprisingly well, with a BSR that went as low as 45k at some point. I attribute this again to my Ads strategy. It looks like I’m targeting keywords with low volume but even lower competition, so basically I am getting tons of clicks even with few impressions.

My Quantum Physics book got a price-strike from Amazon. I think that’s because my e-book is selling well (at only $0.99) but my paperback is not. And in fact my paperback BSR is still at around 200k, and it’s getting even worse. If I could go back in time, I would not write a book in this niche. There is too much competition. But I might publish in a lateral niche in the future.

The cashflow

This is the detailed report of how much I made and spent in February.

I go back in the green after several months. To be honest, I didn’t expect to get to profitability already this month. My target was $300 which would put me at break-even. And I thought I would need another couple of months or at least a 10k BSR book to reach profitability. I guess it’s true that the self-publishing business is very beginner-friendly. And I am after all still very much a beginner.

The only downside is that the margins are low. I spent 60% of my revenue on ads. But to be honest, I really don’t mind. If I can get to the point where I make $10k, and I spend $6k I still get $4k in profit, which is more than I am making freelancing. And it leaves me much more free time, which is ultimately my goal. Long term the goal is to reduce the ad spend, and looking at this month numbers I think I am on the right track already. People say that a 50% margin is normal in this business. Again, I am more than ok with that. Margins are a vanity metric.

As you might have noticed, X revenue came back. I went viral a couple of times in February, with my usual shitposts. I guess the algorithm has become more friendly to my content in the last weeks. I tried to push the books under those viral posts, but I don’t see an uptick in sales. I won’t focus on X revenue, but with these payouts, I really think you can do this full-time and monetize, even if you have a small following. Even 1k followers are enough to go viral. Maybe one day I will repurpose xTopics to be an X topics analytics tool that does just that. Create viral and monetizable content. But not now, Now it’s time to focus on self-publishing.

For the future, I’m already working on the next book. This is something bigger, that I have been working with for over a month. I will be going into a unique niche, where there is only one competitor at 1k BSR, making a lot of money. I will invest almost $1k in production costs for this book. But I think it will be worth it. In general, I am reinvesting everything into self-publishing. As long as it’s not my main source of income, and I don’t depend on it to put food on the table, it just makes sense to grow it as fast as possible and as much as possible, and keep making mistakes, learning lessons and improving.