Better late than never right? I had a terrible month in September and I think that’s why I procrastinated writing this post. My last three book launches were either failures or not making money yet. I guess I am still too unexperienced, or maybe I am just unlucky. Or it could be both.

Luckily I am still freelancing. My dream of making self-publishing my main source of income seems to get more and more far as time goes by.

Data Freelance

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Freelancing

I started a new collaboration. This one takes me most of my time, and it’s a full time. This obviouslyt akes a lot of time away from self-publishing which is not ideal.

Publishing

I launched two books this month. They are both activity books, one is focused on Halloween. And they have completely flopped. There are a few reasons for that which I try to list below

• Amazon has become quite slow on updating books. I have launched a book with a terrible cover and listing, and it took forever for Amazon to approve the changes. Now I am satisfied with my listing, but I completely lost momentum. Which is important, especially for a Halloween book. Lesson Learnt: spend a few extra days to improve your listing, especially if you are targeting a specific holiday (like Christmas or Halloween).
• Ad spend is crazy high for low-content books. I had to bid at almost $1.50 to get any impression on my word search book. I am never going to do a word search again. I am not even sure how people are profitable in this niche. I guess I am not ready yet and maybe never will be.
• I have launched too late. I thought that to target a specific holiday the best way is to launch exactly one month before. It kinda worked for the Italian market before, but it’s way too late for the US one. The first month is honeymoon period, but the real profits come from the second month onwards. Next time I will launch at least two months before the holiday.

All in all, I lost a lot of money in ads for books that didn’t sell. I guess it’s a lesson. Quite expensive, but still a lesson.

The cashflow

Let’s see how much money I lost.

Good news, I am above $1k in revenue. But the rest is very bad. This month is also not going very well, and I am considering a new strategy. I need to slow down because I cannot create more than one book per month, I think. And this means that I have to move my target a bit. I am considering a few options

• Keep publishing in low-competition niches in the US market. This way I will still make 1 or even 2 books every month. Each of them might make $50-100/month in profit. And I aim at making 20 books, which will bring me to $1k-2k/month in profit.
• Publish in the Italian market and focus on marketing books with cheap ads. The ads in Italy cost 2-3 times than in the US market and the competition is much, much smaller. The problem is that it’s very hard to get reviews in this market.
• Stop publishing and start marketing on TikTok. I have tried TikTok at the beginning of the year. It’s time-consuming and requires a completely different set of skills. But I have seen it give huge results. Might be survivorship bias?

I have just published an Advent Calendar book this week. The hope is that it can be profitable in November. But I should have published much earlier in the year, to give myself the best shot. Let’s see how it goes, you never know. I will not publish anything else before the end of the year, launching in Q4 is brutal. I will just optimize my Ads, pray Amazon Gods, and hope to turn profitable again in October and have a nice end of the year.