I thought I’d better hurry writing the May report, otherwise I might not remember anything anymore about it. It was a good month overall. I am not sure if it was the best month of the year so far, but it was pretty close. I got a lot of sales from TikTok, all my books were profitable, my ads were making me money and on the last day of the month I was able to publish a new book (the e-book version).

Still freelancing, but I am doing some calculations right now, and it looks like the revenue brought in by KDP is now comparable to one of my contracts. This is great, I feel the closest I have ever been to make KDP a full-time gig.

Data Freelance

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Data Internships

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Soccrbets

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Freelancing

Still doing it. Two clients, but might become one soon. I am not looking for other opportunities though.

Publishing

I committed myself to write one book per month, and I managed to do it right at the end of the month. On the 31st of May. I am hopeful for this book and I personally think it could do well. Not exceptionally well, but better than the books I have published so far. The most important thing, is that I feel I have applied all the lessons learned in the last 6 to 9 months, and this book is the result.

The rest of the time was spent promoting and fixing the puzzle book I released in March. This is a completely new niche for me, and I didn’t really know what to expect. I got some 1-star reviews, that made good points regarding the quality of the puzzles, but sounded a bit harsh. Anyway, I fixed the issues with the puzzles and so far I have not received any more negative reviews. Apart from that, I decided to test TikTok and partnered with a creator to publish 5 videos (spread out over 2 to 3 weeks). Those have been quite successful I think, probably better ROI than advertising. But it’s hard to say.

For the other books, I am not doing anything special. Running ads, managing them, updating the A+ content (I am still not using it to its full potential) and improving the covers and descriptions. I noticed that many publishers neglect their old books, but I think making small improvements over time helps a lot with conversion rates and in the long term these tiny changes compound, like everything in self-publishing.

The cashflow

Let’s look at how much money I made with KDP this month.

It’s the best month of the year so far. And I notice that I have a lot of costs that can be classified as production costs for my next book. Since I am publishing one book every month, these are basically recurring. But if I had to stop publishing and just wanted to profit from the books that I have already published, I would probably make around $500/month net.

My goal at the beginning of the year was to reach $1000/month in gross revenue. That happened last month, and I am now above $1.5k. My next goal is to reach $500 in profit after all expenses. Or $1k in net profit considering all ads, which are a big part of the expenses and the main long term cost of this business.

The Summer months ahead are usually a bit slow for KDP. But it depends on the niche of course. My efforts in the Summer will go towards publishing two new books and start working towards a series. Fingers crossed it will make me closer to my ultimate goal which is to make KDP my main source of income for the next decade.