I Went Bonkers: Eleventh Income Report — February 2014

(The naked truth about self-publishing; episode 11)

Michał Stawicki

Published in

Ascent Publication

4 min readFeb 28, 2019

Are you curious about the time delay? I explained it in my first income report.

On February 1, 2014, I was very carefully checking the promo stats after 10 a.m., so after midnight in the USA.

Wow, my book landed in #100 free books on the whole Amazon, #84 to be exact

The last day of the promo was good. I got over 2,000 downloads. There were almost 4,000 put together for the whole promo period.

I was apprehensive. It was four times better than any of my previous promos so I could expect sales four times bigger. Something like… 250 sales a month of this book!
And it was my first book I priced at $3; the first book to earn 70% of the price. Even with 30% tax withholding it meant a few hundred bucks, which equaled to about 15% of my salary from the single book!!!

I could not resist to check my sales later on.
By 3 PM, (so it was still an early morning in the USA) I already sold seven copies!

I was like:

I knew intellectually that the process [of the free promo] works well; other authors confirm that all the time, but it is different to actually experience it!
I feel like an author! My book was ranked higher than Brian Tracy’s “Eat That Frog” or “Writing Habit Mastery” of my mentor, Steve Scott. It’s SOOOOOO FRICKING COOL!!!!!

(that’s the actual entry from my Progress Journal)

I earned 20% of my January’s royalties from a single book in the single day. I went bonkers.

The next day was even more shocking. I sold 59 copies of Master Your Time in one day plus an additional 15 copies of my other books. I earned 3.7% of my salary in one day…

I was dazzled with realizing that I had seventy-four sales in one day! More than May’s, June’s, and July’s sales combined.

I painstakingly tracked my sales in February. The zero sale days became the thing of the past. Master Your Time In 10 Minutes a Day stayed on the first page of the Business -> Time Management bestseller category for the whole month.

Investments

I worked a few days on the monster post describing Master Your Time launch in the vivid details. I shared it with a few authors’ communities and got some positive feedback.

Starting with that post, I proofread all of new content on Expand Beyond Yourself. I just went to Fiverr and hired some proofreaders for that job. It was some trial and error, but (unlike with cover designers) I was very satisfied with their job. Even an average native speaker could find numerous mistakes in my posts and when I finally found the pro-editor, I spent at least $50 in coming months going through my old content.

I also decided to re-do all of my book descriptions. I hadn’t even proofread them prior to Master Your Time launch. Chris Bell who helped me with the launch rewrote the descriptions for $120.

With my sales skyrocketing, I felt confident enough to invest more in my business. It was a very wise move. On February 28, I noted in my journal:

“I replied to a few comments on my blog. It stops to be a ghost town. People actually read and comment my stuff. What a pleasant turnaround.”

Failures

February 2014 wasn’t all honey and sugar. At the beginning of the moth, in the last possible moment my guest post for Firepole Marketing was rejected. I was optimistic about this endeavor.

Their negative feedback undercut my confidence about my next book project and discouraged me completely. I put the started draft (about 7,000 words) in the back burner. I started writing a book about overcoming shyness instead.

I also noticed that TOC in my books on Kindle is not integrated properly with the Kindle app. I spent long hours to fix that issue. Well, in February I wasted many hours because I was able to fix this issue only after a few months.

I made a free promo of my parenting book because it was doing poor. The promo didn’t go very well. I spent a lot of money on improving book description and marketing, but I gave away just under 500 copies and it helped the sales only temporarily.