Some people slow down in August. I decided to take the time to improve my books, write more titles and get ready for Q4. I can confidently say that I am going to publish and launch 4 to 5 more books before the end of the year. And I hope these will do well in the coming holiday season.

I am still freelancing, and since I am not doing well financially, I have also taken the time to look for other contracts. I might have found one starting in September. Fingers crossed. The long term plan is still to make self-publishing my main source of income. Despite the setback I had last month, I am confident I will succeed.

Data Freelance

I wrote a new post in the Telegram group, where I detail how I found my next contract. it was easier than I thought. Have a look above if you are curious to know.

Data Internships

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xTopics

Redesigned the landing page. In 10 minutes. With Copilot. Why not?

Soccrbets

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Freelancing

Still doing it. Still two clients, probably will become three from September. I need this because otherwise I won’t be able to put food on the table.

Publishing

This has been the first month without my bestseller. I had to take it down because of potential copyright issues. As fas as I can tell, all my other competitors are still up and doing pretty well. I think they are making around $600 in profit/month. Maybe I was too cautious. Only time will tell.

On the other hand, I have spent more money and pushed hard my last book, that I published in July. This is probably the first completely optimized listing I have, with full A+ content, video review, and video ads. The book has been still losing money (around $200) for all August. But now that it’s ranking, I am optimizing ads and seeing the first break-even week coming. Maybe next week will be already in profit. I have also optimized all my other listings. Added full A+ content to all books, improved covers and descriptions where needed, and also published the hardcover version of some of my books. I think I underestimate hardcovers. For each of my books I sell one or two hardcovers per month. And it’s just a no-brainer to spend 30 minutes making a hardcover version of the book. Most of the work is on the cover design and at this point I have become capable of doing it myself.

I have published two books in August. Currently still collecting ARC readers, and soon I will start running ads. One is a seasonal book, the other one is pretty much evergreen. I am going to run an aggressive ad strategy for those two, and let’s hope things go well. How many books have I published this year so far? Only six, I thought more. By the end of the year, I would have published 9 books I think. Not too many, my goal was 10 to 12 books by year-end. I have probably overestimated my capabilities from one side. But from the other side, I have noticed that I can probably write and format around 2 books per month now. The problem is launching them with the right timing and finding the budget to launch them properly and push with ads.

Last but not least, I have created a Trello board to keep track of all my books progress, from idea to production to marketing. It’s helping me a lot in finding where to focus my efforts, now that I have many books in the pipeline.

The cashflow

I am pretty sure I lost money this month. But it’s expected since I am investing heavily in new book promotion and

I am still above $1k in revenue. Which is very good, and a sign that, if you don’t take into account the book production and launch costs, I am basically profitable. Probably if I stop launching new books, I could net around $400-500/month. Probably more during Q4. I remember doing this calculation in June, when my bestseller was still on the market. And the numbers were not much different. Happy to see that my other books have almost fully compensated for the book I had to take down.

I am completely focused on Q4 right now. My next book is targeting Halloween. And then I have another one in the pipeline that will be perfect for Christmas. Plus, a lot of my books are giftable and should do really well during the gift season. The investment should pay off. How big? It depends on how skilled will I be at executing the launches of my next books. I feel like I have got much better at this, and I am confident these books will reach very low BSR and could be profitable for a long time.