March was a good month. My Italian book was successful, I had a nice surprise with my other giftable book (since Easter) and launched another book at the end of the month. I smashed my revenue target and in general I see sustained growth in my self-publishing efforts month after month.

Most of my revenue still comes from freelancing, but I am getting to the point where the net profit from it is going to match one of my contracts. At that point I will have to make a serious decision, since the time spent on self-publishing might already be more financially efficient than spending time freelancing.

Data Freelance

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Data Internships

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xTopics

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Soccrbets

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Freelancing

I took a pause with one of my clients in March. So it was only 20 hours this month, less than 1 day per week.

Publishing

I finally published a book that I have been working at for almost 2 months. For this one I hired two people and I spent time mostly managing their work and formatting the book. This one is very visual, it cost me almost $1k to make, and it might not go as planned. I have just launched it at the end of March so it’s still early to say, but it definitely had a slow start.

The rest of the books have been performing all right. The Italian book peaked around Italian Father’s Day, which is what I planned it for. So at least that was expected and well executed. I think I am learning something, launch timing is very important.

I have also spent a bit of time creating some A+ content for almost all my books. Nothing fancy really, just one A+ module, made with Canva, that I think gave a little boost to the ads conversion. Each of those graphics took me less than 1 hour to create, and they are modeled on the same template so they are easily repeatable for all the next books.

The cashflow

Time to look at how much money I made/lost this month (without freelancing).

I fell back in the red this month. Of course this is completely due to the fact that I spent almost $800 in production costs for my new book. If I had not spent that money, I would be $300+ in the green.

Now, the expectation is that I will make back this money in book sales in the next few months. I am not going to lie, I have big expectations for this puzzle book. It’s in a niche with lots of demand and no competitors yet, has the potential to start a series, and it’s been fun to work on it. But I must also say that the book has only sold a handful of copies in the first week, and my ads are not performing very well. It’s probably too early to say. Let’s see at the end of the month. But I need to define what success would look like for this book pretty soon. My competitor is coming out with a new book at the end of May and I can benefit from the wave that will come soon, if my book is promising enough.