# 28 Days to 10K: Can I Break 5 Figures? ($6500 - now with Recap)



## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

Thought this would be a fun challenge and way to explore a variety of topics in a hands-on fashion. *Stuff like promo stacking, free runs, BookBub results, writing a novel in ten days and so forth*. If that sounds like a lot of ground, all that activity is being funneled toward one challenge:

*I'm going to make $12,400 in royalties during February (28 days). *That's about double my best month ever.

And I'll be chronicling it every step of the way with daily recap posts on KBoards + weekly overview posts on my site. Will I fail? Maybe. Can I succeed? Definitely. But whatever happens, it'll be instructive. And maybe inspiring. I dunno. Hopefully it won't be boring.

Week 1: 28 Days to 10K - A Five Figure Challenge
Week 2: How to Hit the Top 100 in the Kindle Store
Week 3: A Brief Guide to Perfectionism & Analysis Paralysis For Writers + Episode 9 of Publishing Without Supervision: Perfectionism, Analysis Paralysis & What's Stopping You
Week 4: A Nano Guide to Writerly Finances
Week 5: The Art of Turning Failure into Opportunity
Recap: 28 Days to 10K: A (Not Quite) 5-Figure Blueprint 
Post-Mortem: Comparing My Two (Failed) Earnings Challenges

Now, a little bit about the challenge.

*Didn't You Write an Entire Treatise on Habits?*

What are you, an elephant? Anyway, good memory. Yes, I did. While undertaking a challenge might seem to contradict the general thrust of that post - which can best be summed up as "goals are ineffective and usually suck" - I was mainly driving home a point. Habits get short shrift in self-improvement literature - which is unfortunate, because they're the bedrock of long-term change. What they lack in sexiness and Instagramability they make up for in sheer effectiveness.

But challenges - or goals, or resolutions etc. - have a place _if they're designed correctly_. The most critical principle of a good challenge is _intensity._ A well designed challenge can shock us out of complacency and get us off a plateau faster than ingrained habits can. I've actually never really set many goals in regards to earnings; as I've hovered around 5 - 6k as my top for a little bit, I thought maybe I could blast through with a laser-focused challenge.

Unlike traditional SMART goals, I have a much better and easier framework for goals: we must undertake only one crystal clear challenge at a time; it must last no longer than three months; and someone has to hold us accountable (or we must have a higher purpose/mission - e.g. saving the whales or the planet, or providing for our family).

To generate big results, you need to put all your focus into a single task. That's why you won't see anything about word count goals, mailing list subscribers, # of ads tested or any other benchmarks that I might want to hit. None of that stuff matters.

Everything is focused on hitting that money target. The road there doesn't matter. Which leaves me with a lot of options.

There's a lot more about the nature of challenges/intensity in the Week 1 post. If you want to join in or create your own challenge, then I'd suggest reading it, since it clarifies a few nuances that require way more text to convey.

But if more light reading is not in your future, let's just head to the plan.

*Which Leads Us to a Plan*

Points in bold are already scheduled and paid for.

*BookBub on a boxed set (Kindle Countdown Deal) on Feb. 3; lead-up ads on Feb 1/Feb 2 to maximize impact*
*Free run for Vanishing Midnight (dystopian novella) on Feb. 10*
_Finish Lightning Blade: Extended Edition_ by Feb. 10
*BookBub on a standalone book (permafree) on Feb. 19; lead-up ads on Feb 16 - 18 to maximize impact*
Book release in that series on Feb. 17
Massive free run on _Lightning Blade: Extended Edition_ on Feb 19 (~30 days after original release)
Release the sequel to _Lightning Blade_ on Feb 19
*Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy KCD on all three books from Feb. 23 - Feb. 26*
Release boxed set of Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy on Feb. 27

*What You'll (Hopefully) Learn*

Basically, you'll see me use what I talk about in the various guides I've written - just in real-time. Kinda like a field guide. Or, in other words, how all that information applies. That means a couple things: 1) it'll be a little messy and imperfect, since you have to roll with challenges/glitches as they happen (e.g. the also-boughts murking my latest release) and 2) hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and use them to do better.

I've been impressed at the number of people who have used some of the guides I assembled and then proceeded to blow what I'm doing out of the water. *Hopefully that happens here. *

1. You'll see me assess promos in real time and deciding where to spend money/what to push/when to scale up to full price and so forth. I think these are the decisions people struggle with when it comes to launches and promo, particularly when their graph has been dormant for days or weeks. Once you get a little pop, it can be difficult to think clearly. With a couple launches and four separate promo runs for three different authors, you'll get a lot of data to work with. This is kind of a play-by-play of the type of results you can expect from the Ultimate Guide to Promotion

1a. How to structure an optimal launch. There will three of them this month, with varying strategies.

2. Insight into maximizing BookBub ads (the featured deals - not the PPC). Lots of threads asking about that - hopefully you'll get some ideas for paid and free runs here. Also applies to smaller, non-Bookbub promo runs.

3. How to use a challenge in a yin-yang way to increase the effectiveness/capacity of your habits. This isn't meant to be a one-off thing; it's meant to shatter mental barriers and also raise my own standards to a new level beyond what I might think is possible.

4. How much I mess up and am indecisive on a regular basis. Not that I'm the pinnacle of success, because there are dozens upon dozens of authors on KBoards who are way better organized, are further along craftwise and are selling more books. But I think it's instructive to see someone along the edge of the midlist stumbling in the dark. If only for your own edification that yeah, you can do this too.

*Two BookBubs?*

Persistence pays off; I've submitted probably 150+ times. These are my ninth and tenth ads. They aren't for the same author (I technically run a micro press), so there won't be any cross selling. But obviously these will be pretty critical in breaking through that 10k barrier.

But that's a good lesson in luck when it comes to indie publishing. Yes, that looks lucky as hell. But I've actually been admitted at _lower_ than their ~15% acceptance rate. Undeterred, I kept submitting. Voila. It's just a matter of time and constant improvement (also known as _kaizen_).

And, um, the occasional ill-advised challenge, I suppose.

*On Planning*

I think it's great when an author succeeds out of the gate. That's not the norm, though, so it can be occasionally discouraging to read through instantly successful posts when you feel like you're slogging away in the weeds. This represents about 52+ months (over 4 years for the math haters out there) in for me; the first year, I sold 14 copies of my novel. I wanted to quit a lot; I have no idea why I didn't. But here I am, so might as well share what I can.

Whatever the outcome is a month from now, it will seem like a foregone conclusion. But, really, I have no idea what will happen. I could fall laughably short. Maybe one of these BookBubs goes bananas - or _Lightning Blade_ gets its act together (come on, Lightning Blade. You're actually a pretty good book). Or maybe everything sucks and falls apart.

Either way, I'll have tried hard to make it succeed. And that's all you can do.

It looks like this challenge was tossed together, but it clearly wasn't: most of the sites have 3 - 4 week wait times, meaning this started percolating in January. Once the second BookBub came through, and I was trying to come up with a plan to revive the DOA _Lightning Blade_, everything came together. Which is another important point about goals/challenges: if you're going to aim for one, make sure you're set up to succeed beforehand. The day-to-day will be difficult enough without scrambling to put pieces into place that should've been scheduled beforehand.

There's a lot to be said about seizing opportunity, too. I'm not great at this, but there's a couple things I did somewhat right. By having a backlist/working with other authors, I was in the position to get multiple BookBubs and book lots of ads. And my backlist gave me additional options. For example, right now dystopian fiction is going bananas on Amazon. I retweaked a backlist book's blurb to reference 1984 and a Brave New World and dialed up a little promo. Will it do anything? I have no idea. But that's a good shot to take, with a massively asymmetric payoff.

And that opportunity was only there because I finished a little novella a year and a half ago and published it. *Backlist never dies, people*.

*Revenue & Costs*

Total revenue after throwing in D2D/Google Play/paperbacks/double checking: $6567
Total costs including covers/proofreading/Vellum etc.: $2674

Final Net for February 2017 as of March 2nd = $3893

*Which Leads us to a Sub-Plan*

This has to be split up weekly, otherwise it's too much work to think about (at least if you're me).

_Week 1 (Feb 1 - 7)_

1. Finish the main draft of Lightning Blade: Extended Edition.
2. Get reviews for Lightning Blade. Hopefully I can get up to 5 in time to submit to promo sites for the 19th. 

Got 2/3 of the way through Lightning Blade additions/revisions. Not good enough; had time to do it, just didn't get it done.

_Week 2 (Feb 8 - 14)_

1. Finish the final draft of Lightning Blade.
2. Get reviews for Lightning Blade.
3. Revise Lightning Blade's blurb.
4. Schedule Lightning Blade free run. 

_Week 3 (Feb 15 - 21)_

1. Finish the final draft of Lightning Blade (but seriously this time)
2. 35,000 words of Shadow Flare (6389 words)

_Week 4 (Feb 22 - Feb 2_

1. Finish Shadow Flare (50,000 words). (32333 words this week; draft currently 38622 words)
2. Reformat 20 books in Vellum. (19 books reformatted)
3. Release Half-Demon Rogue Box + Kip Keene Box #2
4. Put Kip Keene books in KU.

*In Closing*

I'll be posting in this thread every day at around 3 PM EST with an update on the sales/ranks/word counts/generally interesting events that transpired over the past 24 hours. If a certain topic strikes my fancy, or there's a common problem I run into, I'll probably delve deeper into that. *Questions are openly welcomed and encouraged; I'll answer those as best I can, if I have a solid answer to give. Also, if anyone wants to join in with their own challenge (be it a word count thing or something else), definitely do so*. We're hitting the ground running on the 3rd with a BookBub, so I'll get to discuss some of my more advanced promo stacking ideas right off the bat.

See ya then.

Nick


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## DC Swain (Feb 24, 2013)

Good luck Nick. Looking forward to watching this


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Fascinating stuff! Looking foward to following along. I won't say good luck, because with something as well-planned as this, luck isn't really a factor, so I'll just say: enjoy it! And thanks for sharing.


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## writerc (Apr 15, 2016)

Following on and cheering from the sidelines!


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## Longtime Lurker (Sep 14, 2016)

Looking forward to following your journey.


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## Dax (Oct 20, 2016)

Bookmarked. Thanks for sharing.

Nick, "Instagramabilty." Oh, I live.


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## A. N. Other Author (Oct 11, 2014)

Good luck. Looking forward to the results!


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## lincolnjcole (Mar 15, 2016)

Interesting stuff, will love to see how it all turns out.


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## AliceS (Dec 28, 2014)

Posting to get alerts when you post!


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## wingsandwords (Nov 1, 2016)

Awesome! You can do it! 

I can't wait for updates, you always have the best information. 


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## Fel Beasley (Apr 1, 2014)

This looks like so much fun!

I'm going to be eagerly following this. (Like I do all your posts. Seriously, I'm like a stalker. You should be careful.)

My goal for February is 115k words or so. Ultimately, whatever is needed to finish up three projects by the end of the month.


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## Susanne123 (Jan 9, 2014)

[/quote]


AliceS said:


> Posting to get alerts when you post!


Good idea. Me too! I'll be cheering for you Nick.


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## S.L. (Jun 6, 2016)

Excitedly following along!


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## Chinese Writer (Mar 25, 2014)

Good luck! I love to see you hit your goal.


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## Cxxxxxxx (May 30, 2015)

Following and good luck! 

I've been wanting to challenge myself in a similar way, but have been floundering around, unsure of what to do, exactly. This is super helpful, as all your posts are.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## Sonya Bateman (Feb 3, 2013)

Following! Good luck, Nick -- though I'm sure you can do it!


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## barryjhutchison (Feb 21, 2016)

Following along - good luck!


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

To everyone who posted encouragement or that they're following along - thanks. I read all your comments. Hopefully following along isn't an epic bore or a massive disappointment.



Felicia Beasley said:


> My goal for February is 115k words or so. Ultimately, whatever is needed to finish up three projects by the end of the month.


That'd be very impressive. I always find it more challenging to spread the words over more projects and keep all the story threads straight. Keep us updated!

Onward to recapping. Revenue/sales are going to be Amazon only, because D2D generally updates a day later and right now the books being promo'd are Amazon exclusive. For the curious, I made an epic $14 on D2D on Feb 1...about 3 weeks removed from a pretty good BookBub run. Gotta love going wide, right?

I'm going to start with the horror boxed set ranks and then switch over to whatever I'm promoting. We'll track Lightning Blade throughout, since I'll be trying to jab that in the neck with epinephrine. Thus far that's been tricky.

Note: page reads are being calculated at 0.005 cents (half a cent) per page. That could definitely be wrong, but it's been hovering around there for the past few months. Consider me an optimist.

*Feb 1 & 2: Smooth sales curve*

Feb 1

Fiction words: 2278
Revenue: $110
Sales of horror boxed set: 63 (+ a retirement worthy 196 pages)
Rank of horror boxed set: #4843
Rank of Lightning Blade: #29,165

Feb 2

Fiction words: 0
Revenue: $208
Sales of horror boxed set: 228 (+ a lucrative 996 page reads) 
Rank of horror boxed set: #832
Rank of Lightning Blade: #26,446

*Lightning Blade Status Check*



*Current Revenue*

$328. But that's to be expected, since most of the stuff (new releases, BookBubs, bulk of promo) is either in progress or not yet done.

*First Mistake*

Didn't check the back matter of the box set before going the BookBub kicked off. Everything's in order (it could have a better mailing list offer, TBH), but this is worth double checking. You'll often either find that something is amiss, or you've thought of an improvement since the last time you checked. Or, alternatively, your back matter is missing references to Books 4, 5 & 6 etc. which is kinda crucial for sell-through (not applicable here, since it's a complete trilogy).

*The BookBub Strategy*

BookBub day. Going well thus far - 1200 sales as of 3 PM EST - and knocking on the door of the top 100.

Basically four things going on here with the strategy:

0) I let the deal run until the 5th on BookBub's website. Basically you get a nice tail (maybe a 1/4 sales the next day, then 1/8 of the BB sales on Day 2 - so if you got 2000, it'd be ~500 and ~250). With the KCD at 70%, this makes a lot of sense. It also makes a lot of sense if you're trying to maximize your chances of getting sticky, since you continue to get traffic from BookBub's website/email if you tell them the deal will run longer. That'll give me a solid 5 day sales history.

By contrast, I ran a BookBub on a boxed set a year and a half ago and had the price switch back to full the next day. On Day 2 I sold an incredible 9 copies. Other people have had luck with switching immediately back to full price.

Note that I do not do this with regular promo sites; I tell them the day(s) that I want to book only, because I don't want to remember seven or eight different cut off dates and then worry about making them angry.

1) 5-day free run on Book 1 to funnel traffic toward the boxed set with a link at top of Book 1's description.

This is actually really useful for when you release a Book 2, too. You get maybe a 2% sell-through rate right off the bat to Book 2 (if it's $0.99), and if you structure your free promo to backload (which I didn't do here), you can also get an enormous boost for Book 1 as well. I'm planning on doing this with Lightning Blade and Shadow Flare later in the month.

2) ramp up the sales curve over a short 3 day window. What I've seen is that a one or two day spike is basically disregarded by Amazon (e.g. I sold 150+ copies of Lightning Blade on release day and then the also-boughts didn't kick in until like two days ago). But once you get to three days, you start getting some organic love. If you're not doing a kitchen sink promo (which I'm not), then it's also a good length to maximize available firepower. Basically going for this:










You can calculate an optimal sales curve using the free Excel sheet here. It calculated that I'd be around 650/700 with my numbers at Day 2's end; it hit #832. So not perfect, but surprisingly useful for an estimate. And a good way of visualizing the concept: you want to schedule your promos to generate a gradually increasing salves curve.

3) keeping promos to a relative minimum. Lineup looks like:

Day 1: Booksends (63 sales) + Fiverr on Book 1 (55 downloads)
Day 2: ENT/Robin Reads (228 sales) + FreeBooksy on Book 1 (1064 downloads)
Day 3: BookBub

I could have stacked this up way more, but I didn't. Since you don't get your money back for at least 60 days - 90+ in this case, when booking promos way out in January - that means you have to manage your cash flow. This is a critical aspect of business that's easy to neglect. What happens without cash on hand is that you have a great month - say February - and then your hands are tied in March and April because you don't have your money back. Building on momentum is key. That's why I "held back": I have a lot of books; there are probably going to be better opportunities available over the next three months than getting an extra 15 downloads for $30. By keeping powder dry, you give yourself a little flexibility.

The other reason is simple: I've used most of the free sites for Book 1 3+ times. Returns have been diminishing. I hadn't, however, used any of the sites for the boxed set - which meant that I would get most of the juice (e.g. 80-20) from just a few key sites. *You can see that in BookSends #s, which are larger than normal, as well as ENT/RR. If you have never done a promo for a book, you can actually get it pretty high with just a few "normal" sites*. The other sites would also perform well for their first time around, but the extra money wasn't worth the minimal ranking boost to me here.

Back tomorrow with details on how the BookBub went.

Nick


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## Berries (Feb 5, 2015)

Following!!


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## Kyla S (Apr 15, 2016)

This is awesome! Following.


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## Alvina (Oct 19, 2015)

Great!    Replied to follow.


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## PityPityPity (Apr 10, 2016)

Great insight, thank you! Watching closely.


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## The one with all the big dresses on the covers (Jan 25, 2016)

Looking forward to seeing how this plays out


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## My Dog&#039;s Servant (Jun 2, 2013)

You go, guy!  We'll be here rooting for you.


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## Longtime Lurker (Sep 14, 2016)

I just bought 4 of your books   Thank you for your updates!


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## Evenstar (Jan 26, 2013)

I love your posts Nick, and pounced on this one. Will be following and cheering you on

added: I'd like to help. If you pm me a link and date, then I'll send it to my mailing list


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## MKK (Jun 9, 2015)

Darn...got to the end of page one, but there was no page two (yet).Wishing you a ton of success. I'm following along with everyone else.


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## Bookread (Mar 8, 2016)

That's awesome. It's encouraging to hear about others' successes. : )


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## Sarah Shaw (Feb 14, 2015)

Following with great interest. I didn't understand this, though: "and if you structure your free promo to backload (which I didn't do here), you can also get an enormous boost for Book 1 as well."
What does backloading a promo mean?


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

Devyn Jayse said:


> I just bought 4 of your books  Thank you for your updates!


Thanks, Devyn, that's awesome and much appreciated.



Evenstar said:


> I love your posts Nick, and pounced on this one. Will be following and cheering you on
> 
> added: I'd like to help. If you pm me a link and date, then I'll send it to my mailing list


That's awesome, Evenstar - I'll definitely take you up on that offer! Unfortunately, I am barred from pre-orders ATM (for the second time, no less), so I'll have to PM you on release day when everything is actually live and I have a proper link. But thank you! I'll send you a message in a couple weeks.

To anyone else who posted or is lurking out there - good to have you along and thanks for the encouragement.

Onward to BookBub day!

*Feb 3 Results*

Fiction words: 0
Revenue: $1010
Boxed set sales: 1769 (+ 2736 page reads/157 free copies of book 1)
Boxed set rank: #54
Lightning Blade rank: #29195

*Lightning Blade Status Check*

let's not talk about it

*Current Revenue*

$1338. Good start.

*BookBub Check-in*

This went about as well as it could have. Horror is a small category; BookBub estimates you'll "only" get 900 sales. Almost doubled that (1769) and hit the Top 100 in a pretty small category. I thought the revenue might be off; sometimes Book Report is janky with the KCD deals. But the file size is 0.86 MB, which means delivery fees are $0.13/book, and the 0.99 quid price in the UK includes the VAT. So that's probably right. Anyway, a recap:

Day 1: Booksends (63 sales) + Fiverr on Book 1 (55 downloads); rank = #4843
Day 2: ENT/Robin Reads (228 sales) + FreeBooksy on Book 1 (1064 downloads); rank = #832
Day 3: BookBub (1769 sales); rank = #54

Cost of this specific promotion = $491; that was doubled in one day. Overall successful.

But the ramp-up also worked well. Compare to this BookBub, in a bigger category (action adventure) for a similar three book boxed set in KU in 12/2015:

BookBub sales: 2310 (don't have it split out to UK/US) (+1591 page reads)
Rank = #57

So um, yeah, breaking news: BookBub works, guys. But you can maximize the effectiveness of any promo - and get more organic visibility/a longer tail - by slowly ramping up the sales over time. Check out my recommended promo sites here if you're wondering which are the big hitters and which are smaller.

I say this, and then I never do this for the launches. And we have Lightning Blade. 

*Topic of the Day: Why Are My Books Not Selling as Well as Others?*

This is something I've been contemplating over the past few weeks. I'm sure it crosses others' minds as well, so I figured I'd spare a moment to get into the psychology.

One, my initial reaction: this is BS. Obviously I'm more [talented, clever, Hemingway-esque, humble, focused, attentive, passionate, meditative, pizza loving] than other authors. But none of these explanations, ego satisfying as they are, really got to the heart of the matter and gave me an actionable answer. Because really, you have two options:

1) believe that you are more talented and getting screwed. Which means everything is luck, and you are essentially buying scratch-offs.
2) accept that you are inherently biased and, perhaps, your assessment of your work + output is inaccurate. Which means that you can change what you're doing to increase the chances of your success.

#1 is more alluring on the surface. But #2 is more empowering, because it gives you the opportunity to get better. *Everything is ultimately in your control.* Each individual promo, launch and thing you do has variance: some things will flop that should be successful and so forth (and vice versa). But over time, and a constant commitment to improvement, those ups and downs smooth out and reveal your true skill at three things:

1) business. Managing money, scheduling + planning, making tough decisions about series/what to write and all that stuff. A lot of administrative stuff. Seems simple; most people do dumb things (spoken as an expert in doing dumb things).
2) marketing. Getting eyeballs on your books, getting people to buy them, turning them into fans. Relatively simple principles, hard to master.
3) craft. 
*
If someone is more successful than you or more skilled, they are likely doing - and have done things - that you are not doing*. This is a relatively obvious statement, but requires self-reflection. Which is hard, because it means _one_ of those areas - or maybe all of them - is potentially lacking. There's a fourth component, too, which is *persistence*; you can nail all three of those aspects, but if you only have two books, it's entirely possible you got unlucky. Come back with ten. Or twenty. Variance will be smoothed out over time.

Anyway, my main assumption is this: if a book isn't selling, I did something wrong. Not that I failed or that this is bad; simply that there's some error I'm missing. After reflecting on this for a couple weeks, I came up with a couple high leverage areas that need improvement:

1) blurbs. Some of these are good, but they're relatively uneven. That's because I get lazy and sometimes ignore my own advice. One problem is burying the hook, or excluding it; this might point to a problem in the books (that they don't have a strong enough hook). 
2) launch planning. I talk a lot about this, but generally run around like a decapitated chicken in the week coming up to launch.

These aren't the only things that _can_ be improved. To be clear, my writing is not Hemingway-esque. A few of my covers could be tighter branded. Those things will be worked out in time. But these are the most glaring problems currently. This does not, however, mean I'm going off to revise all 45+ blurbs in my catalog (some of them are fine). Instead, I'm going to focus on two things:

1) Lightning Blade + Shadow Flare's blurb. With a launch coming up, that's my highest leverage (80/20) point. Lightning Blade actually has a pretty unique hook for UF (think Blade Runner cyberpunk crossed with UF + darker + anti-hero female protagonist + a time loop a la Source Code), so that should work in my favor. 
2) Lightning Blade's relaunch + Shadow Flare's launch.

Notice, also, that these points are free: planning better and retweaking two blurbs doesn't cost me anything but mental energy. Yet it'll (hopefully) have huge dividends. That'll take some time to see; but the nice thing about writing a good blurb is that it's _forever_. A couple of the ones I've written have definitely been instrumental in convincing BookBub to give me an ad.

Anyway, something to think about. Find your biggest problems and tackle them; if you don't have the money to slay your biggest demon (covers, promo etc.), pick the second-biggest and get to work on that.

*The Other Big Reason I'm Not Making Progress as Fast as I Want*

Sandbagging.

It's so easy to sandbag and just go through the motions. Step 1 is just showing up; most productivity books talk about that as the be-all, end-all. But when you show up, you gotta push yourself with intensity to do things that you haven't done before. You gotta make sure what you're practicing is quality; otherwise you're simply practicing making garbage.

Some sandbagging is obvious: see those consecutive zeroes for fiction? I could tell you about errands I had to run or something, but that's nonsense. Obvious sandbagging.

But sometimes sandbagging is less obvious.

I'll give an example outside writing: I've played guitar for almost 10 years. None of this is interesting, except for this anecdote: sometimes I'll do my "practice" while watching videos or reading blog posts. I put it in scare quotes because, really, this is just generating bad habits and not doing anything. I'm going through the motions. Within 3 - 5 days, my mechanics start to decline; my speed goes way down and a general sloppiness enters my playing. Not only am I _not_ improving, there's a substantial body of evidence that suggests I'm actually doing harm with this fake "practice." Because I'm practicing the creation of unfocused crap.

Putting in the hours isn't the same thing as being present. 1 hour of actual practice/work is better than 10 hours of mindless "practice" or work for generating results. A good reminder and hopefully inspiring to those who have full-time jobs: if you intensely focus during the minutes you have (re: focus on _only_ the task at hand), you can accomplish an astounding amount of work in little time.

Nick


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

Sarah Shaw said:


> Following with great interest. I didn't understand this, though: "and if you structure your free promo to backload (which I didn't do here), you can also get an enormous boost for Book 1 as well."
> What does backloading a promo mean?


It means putting your heaviest hitters at the end of the promo period instead of the beginning.

For a 5-Day Free Run, it might look something like this:

Day 1: small site, small site
Day 2: small site, small site, small site
Day 3: medium site, medium site
Day 4: medium site, medium site
Day 5: medium site, medium site, medium site, big site, big site

There probably aren't that many good promo sites out there, but you get the idea: you put the bulk of the firepower on the last day. Then, when it comes off free, it's at its highest free rank/visibility + you continue to get traffic etc. from folks subscribed to the promo sites. Some of them will buy it anyway; others will borrow it from KU. You can sell 50+ copies of a book the day after a free run by doing things this way.

Of course, you lose all the potential free downloads you would've gotten had you put the heaviest hitters on Day 1. Which might be 500 - 1500 over 5 days; not a big deal, in my estimation. But with BookBub, it might be 10,000+. Which changes the equation a little bit.

Nick


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## Marseille France or Bust (Sep 25, 2012)

I'm surprised Bookbub allowed you to run 2 offers in one month. They told me I could only run 1 a month.


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## VanessaC (Jan 14, 2017)

Another great post. So useful to see everything broken down. Thank you!


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

Marseille said:


> I'm surprised Bookbub allowed you to run 2 offers in one month. They told me I could only run 1 a month.


Different authors. Two different pen names could also separately qualify for ads in the same month, but yeah, these are two completely different authors in different categories.

Nick


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## Marseille France or Bust (Sep 25, 2012)

Oh, okay. )



Nicholas Erik said:


> Different authors. Two different pen names could also separately qualify for ads in the same month, but yeah, these are two completely different authors in different categories.
> 
> Nick


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## TaraCrescent (Mar 21, 2015)

Good luck with this challenge, Nicholas. 

I find every single one of your posts incredibly inspirational. The stuff you said about sandbagging really rings home. I have an unfortunate habit of writing while watching TV (on days when I think it'll be too hard to turn brain.fm on and do a sprint) and I really see the speed/quality difference. A good reminder to knock it off!


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## AliceS (Dec 28, 2014)

Nicholas Erik said:


> Putting in the hours isn't the same thing as being present. 1 hour of actual practice/work is better than 10 hours of mindless "practice" or work for generating results. A good reminder and hopefully inspiring to those who have full-time jobs: if you intensely focus during the minutes you have (re: focus on _only_ the task at hand), you can accomplish an astounding amount of work in little time.
> 
> Nick


I discovered this with my last book. I "pushed through" writing when I had severe brain-fog due to allergies/sinus infections for about a month. My first reader handed that draft back and said, "Nothing happens". So I've learned that I totally avoid conflict when I don't feel well. I even wrote a battle from the pov of a non-combatant...had a lot of rewriting to do on that one. So I should have just waited until I could concentrate better and spent my brain-fog tim eon formatting or somesuch.


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## EC Sheedy (Feb 24, 2011)

Following this thread avidly--see sometimes an adverb is okay. I always learn from you, Nick. 

May you meet and best your challenge!


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## T E Scott Writer (Jul 27, 2016)

I've been looking at lightening blade and it seems strange that its not taking off. The only thing that occurred to me was that the cover might be a bit too blue? I know that sounds weird, it's a cool cover but maybe a more vibrant colour (a flash of orange flames around the bottom, for example) might liven it up a bit?


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## AmpersandBookInteriors (Feb 10, 2012)

I'm watching this, Nicholas, and also admiring your honesty throughout this whole thing.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

To everyone who posted and joined along: thanks and welcome. And hello again to any new lurkers.



TaraCrescent said:


> Good luck with this challenge, Nicholas.
> 
> I find every single one of your posts incredibly inspirational. The stuff you said about sandbagging really rings home. I have an unfortunate habit of writing while watching TV (on days when I think it'll be too hard to turn brain.fm on and do a sprint) and I really see the speed/quality difference. A good reminder to knock it off!


For the days where you're just thinking _nope, impossible_, I've found that if you just get started, most of those objections go away within 5 minutes. Sometimes they don't. But momentum works both ways - for you and against you. By getting started, you get the ball rolling down the hill.



AliceS said:


> I discovered this with my last book. I "pushed through" writing when I had severe brain-fog due to allergies/sinus infections for about a month. My first reader handed that draft back and said, "Nothing happens". So I've learned that I totally avoid conflict when I don't feel well. I even wrote a battle from the pov of a non-combatant...had a lot of rewriting to do on that one. So I should have just waited until I could concentrate better and spent my brain-fog tim eon formatting or somesuch.


Sometimes the best - and hardest - thing you can do is take a break - or a nap. We're conditioned to think that's "lazy," but rest is recuperative + helps restore our focus, particularly something like a walk, nap or engaging book. Talking to a friend or family. Or using that time for less intensive tasks is good, too. Ironically, I suck at this and would rather do no work with my eyes half open than take an hour to lie down and pull things together.



T E Scott Writer said:


> I've been looking at lightening blade and it seems strange that its not taking off. The only thing that occurred to me was that the cover might be a bit too blue? I know that sounds weird, it's a cool cover but maybe a more vibrant colour (a flash of orange flames around the bottom, for example) might liven it up a bit?


I agree with that; the color is oddly cool and washed out for an urban fantasy cover. To be clear, that was my choice, not the designer's (I wanted the lightning to be white-blue). The others are far more vibrant:










Shadow Flare was actually supposed to be the first book. I forget why I switched them around. Anywho, there are three problems with Lightning Blade that I can see:

1) I set up the launch wrong. I was frantic to get it out, and just barely did it under the wire. As a result, I used my newsletter + Genrecrave Book Blast all in one day. Then...nothing except a Bargain Booksy five days later. Extraordinarily poor spacing. 
2) the blurb is a nice chunk of text at this point. Again, frantic, didn't have time to do the formatting.
3) most of the books in the genre run longer (60k words). It's sitting at 143 estimated pages and about 37k, I think, at this point. Extended edition will be longer.

Probably #1 & #2, mostly. The also-boughts didn't kick in until two weeks after release, which suggests Amazon's algorithms were nonplussed by 170+ sales on a single day. Or I just got unlucky and they glitched. Either way, nothing you can do.

*Feb 4 results*

Words: 53 pages of Lightning Blade revised 
Revenue: $427
Boxed set sales: 259 sales (+4131 pages)/85 free downloads
Boxed set rank: #68 (Amazon Author Central must just take the peak rank...it was down in the 200s by the end of the day)
Lightning Blade rank: #26159

*Lightning Blade Status Check*

Better, since I started revising it. Amazing what action can do. Lesson: focus on what you can control.*

*I'm actually not that bothered by Lightning Blade's face plant to do date. It's happened so many times at this point that I'm (almost) immune. Still, working on the Extended Edition made me more optimistic about its future prospects.

*Current Revenue*

$1765. Have made back all my ad costs + most of the production costs for the coming release titles. And I still have three promos (one of them a BookBub) and three book launches to go. That's a positive, I think.

*BookBub Check-in*

Day 1: Booksends (63 sales) + Fiverr on Book 1 (55 downloads); rank = #4843
Day 2: ENT/Robin Reads (228 sales) + FreeBooksy on Book 1 (1064 downloads); rank = #832
Day 3: BookBub (1769 sales); rank = #54
Day 4: nothing (259 sales); rank = #68

Fewer sales than I expected (I was thinking about 400 - 500 would come in, based on previous experience). But that's still a good day. Hopefully the page reads kick up when it flips back to paid. It's more attractive to borrow an $8.99 book via KU. The page read tail will really be critical in reaching 12k. The BookBub I referenced above in 12/15 did 280k+ in page reads in the 30 days after. And that series wasn't popular in KU at all; the current boxed set was much, much more successful in KU (and I think it's more KENP, too). We'll see after today...

*Topic of the Day: Focus on What You Can Control*

As I mentioned yesterday, there are ups and downs in indie publishing. Things that should work don't - and vice versa. Individual outcomes - how well a certain book does, how readers react to it - are often impossible to predict. I came up with a plausible story for why I think Lightning Blade isn't doing well, but the truth is, I don't know.

And I'll never truly know. The same way I was expecting about 400+ sales for the boxed set yesterday, and got "only" 259. The day prior, the book hit the Top 60 - which exceeded my expectations. Ups and downs. Day to day. Riding that wave up and down each day is exciting, but it's also exhausting.

Normally I don't focus this much on variance, since I'm not checking ranks and all that. BookBub has gotten less exciting after the 9th go round. As with all things, you adjust. But it's still easy to get sucked into worrying about things that you can't control. This feels productive - if I'm not vigilant and worried, then I can't fix things! - but that's an illusion. Truth is, I have no control over the day-to-day fluctuations of Amazon's rank - or how many page reads come in for this boxed set.

All that I can do is set things up to the best of my ability (blurb, promo planning, cover, book - in this case, the novels aren't mine, but often they are) and let the chips fall where they may. Any time spent trying to influence forces out of your control is energy better spent on new blurbs, new covers and new books. This promo - and Lightning Blade's launch - are over. The results aren't changeable; I can do nothing to influence them now.

Or, for example, the revenue. I'm 14% of the way toward my 12.4k target after 14% of the days in February are done. That's pretty tight - will I make it? What if I fall behind? What if today is bad? Today, actually, I'm falling behind - which sets off all sorts of warning bells. But I can't do anything about this particularly promo. The tail will be the tail, regardless of how I feel about it.

No use endlessly ruminating on the past - or reflecting on its glory for too long, if things go well. Endlessly worrying about a future I can't predict isn't helpful, either. Focus on what you can control right now. For me, that's making Lightning Blade better - and doing a relaunch when Shadow Flare comes out. Everything else is out of my hands.

Nick


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## AsianInspiration (Oct 12, 2016)

I really liked your guides and follow all your posts, but this one feels a bit.... clickbaity?

I mean I always thought you were a six-figure author already. Wouldn't that mean you normally hit the 10k/month mark, or at least close to it anyway? It wouldn't be much of a challenge if you made 50k/month on average...

So is this a push at increasing your revenue/profit (if so by how much?) or just showing us how your normal month is like?


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## PiscaPress (Jun 13, 2014)

This is great to follow, thanks!


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## Fel Beasley (Apr 1, 2014)

AsianInspiration said:


> I really liked your guides and follow all your posts, but this one feels a bit.... clickbaity?
> 
> I mean I always thought you were a six-figure author already. Wouldn't that mean you normally hit the 10k/month mark, or at least close to it anyway? It wouldn't be much of a challenge if you made 50k/month on average...
> 
> So is this a push at increasing your revenue/profit (if so by how much?) or just showing us how your normal month is like?


In his post he mentions why he picked 12k (or five figures). It's double his best month he's had so far.

Right from the OP (2nd paragraph)


> I'm going to make $12,400 in royalties during February (28 days). That's about double my best month ever.


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## AsianInspiration (Oct 12, 2016)

don't know how i missed that. Thanks.


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## MQ (Jan 5, 2011)

Thank you so much for sharing your experience, Nick.  I always learn something from your posts   

I don’t want to derail the thread but I’m finding it harder and harder to promote these days.  Bookbub won’t even take my money.  AMS will take my money but won’t spend all of it.  Facebook will gladly take my money and spend it like a drunken sailor with disappointing results.  Many of the promo sites have lost their effectiveness, IMO.    So it’s really frustrating not knowing what else to do to promote the books.  

BTW, Instafreebie has been great at building a mailing list but I have not sent them a ‘sale’ email yet (I’ll see what the response is once I do).  

Anyway, I’m going to go through your posts again to see if there is something I can use going forward.  Thanks again, Nick!


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

AsianInspiration said:


> I really liked your guides and follow all your posts, but this one feels a bit.... clickbaity?
> 
> I mean I always thought you were a six-figure author already. Wouldn't that mean you normally hit the 10k/month mark, or at least close to it anyway? It wouldn't be much of a challenge if you made 50k/month on average...
> 
> So is this a push at increasing your revenue/profit (if so by how much?) or just showing us how your normal month is like?


Yeah, as mentioned above, all those points are addressed in the OP. But for further clarification: nope, not a six-figure author.

This will definitely not be a normal month. Even if I hit the threshold, I fully expect my earnings to drop by around half in March, unless the boxed set does gangbusters and takes off.



finchambooks said:


> Thank you so much for sharing your experience, Nick. I always learn something from your posts
> 
> I don't want to derail the thread but I'm finding it harder and harder to promote these days. Bookbub won't even take my money. AMS will take my money but won't spend all of it. Facebook will gladly take my money and spend it like a drunken sailor with disappointing results. Many of the promo sites have lost their effectiveness, IMO. So it's really frustrating not knowing what else to do to promote the books.
> 
> ...


I would recommend focusing on one or two promotional avenues. For a long time all of my promotion was centered around promo sites. Which is why I know a lot about which sites work and which ones don't; how to structure them; how to maximize the tail; little quirks in the algorithm, like backloading the promo. I've run probably 50+ of them at this point, so I've seen tons of permutations and how Amazon's algorithms change.

Right now, I'm focused on AMS ads. I'm spending an hour a day just on AMS ads in February trying to crack the code. The past couple months I did a few InstaFreebies and played with that. But I try to introduce things slowly and get a feel for whether they're a good fit for my personality and whether they're actually effective.

Narrow your focus to one or two things. I talk about this in my guide; focus on three targeted traffic sources. But if you're struggling with them all, just do one. And get actually good at it. I focused on promos for 3+ years before branching out. That's too long - probably six months would've been sufficient - but you get the point. I'm still too focused on getting BookBubs, to the detriment of other soruces.

If you don't like promo sites + PPC, then dark romance author JA Huss has a good 6 part free video series (no sign-up required) on 



 that includes things like giveaways, swag, Facebook, cover reveals and so forth. Her perspective is different than mine, but she also sells many, many more books than me. So her advice is worth trying if you're struggling with "conventional" methods. She's really innovative with her marketing and puts a lot of work into it.

*Feb 5 results*

Words: 30 pages of Lightning Blade revised
Revenue: $178
Boxed set rank: #249 (author central definitely only takes peak rank; it was at around 500 late last night)
Boxed set sales: 129 (+ 3117 page reads)

*Adjustment*

Gonna stop following Lightning Blade and stop updating the boxed set's rank after today. Rank is really a product of other factors - blurb, cover, promo, a book that resonates etc. Too much focus on it is shortsighted, I think. While it's fun to watch, we're out of the Top 100 and it doesn't really matter now.

I'll return with ranks when Shadow Flare + the next BookBub comes out, since I'll be chasing a #1 spot in the Free Store. But it's really more of an amusement thing.

*Current Revenue*

$1943. Probably going to be a stretch where I fall off the pace between now and the 19th. Just have to hunker down and write.

*BookBub Check-in*

Day 1: Booksends (63 sales) + Fiverr on Book 1 (55 downloads); rank = #4843
Day 2: ENT/Robin Reads (228 sales) + FreeBooksy on Book 1 (1064 downloads); rank = #832
Day 3: BookBub (1769 sales); rank = #54
Day 4: nothing (259 sales); rank = #68
Day 5: nothing (129 sales); rank = #249

Yesterday followed the expected pattern (halving of sales from the day before). Edging toward the 2500 mark. Sales way down today, as expected; page reads haven't picked up. We'll see what happens.

*Topic of the Day: On Advice*

Terrible advice is all over the place. This isn't unique to the book world; it's pretty much endemic to all areas. Subsequently, one of the best skills you can develop is a good BS filter. I don't have some system to develop that; basically, I read a lot of bad books and bad advice, and slowly learned. Do I still get tricked? All the time. I usually feel like this:










With all the dubious advice and information out there, it can be easy to simply throw your hands up and say _forget it_. But there's something interesting I've found: even bad information and inaccurate views of the world can generate surprisingly good results if the person takes action.

For those unfamiliar with the paradox of the donkey and the two bales of hay (called "Buridan's Ass"), it goes like this. An ass - because only an ass would do this - is caught between two similarly enticing bales of hay. Instead of choosing one, he sits between them, unable to make up his mind. Endlessly debating the merits of each bale, the sun sets. Then rises. Still the ass deliberates, desperately concerned about making the wrong move. Days pass; his mind runs around in knots. One looks better, but it doesn't have the same crispiness as the other bale.

And so he starves instead.

This is an example of analysis paralysis. Where we accumulate an information hoard, then do nothing with it. We stand at an infinitely forking road, and then sit down instead of choosing a path. One of the paradoxes of the information age is that of near-infinite choice: we're suddenly aware of all the things we cannot do. Did not do. Did not buy. All the ways we _could_ solve a problem.

And it freaks us out. So we often make no decision at all. We have the _illusion_ of competence - our knowledge gives us hope that, tomorrow, we can really change. That we "know" what to do. We protect our egos or give into our fear, satisfied that, if we wanted to, we can change. Because we know, right?

But without making a choice, all that knowledge is inert. And it often proves fool's gold.

But you don't know until you pick a bale.

What does this have to do with advice?

Simple: pick a path. It might be wrong. If it is, you'll improve at evaluating advice. There are plenty of templates to choose from on this forum. Multiple ways of reaching your goal of becoming a full-time author (if that is your goal). No one has all the answers; everyone has blindspots and weaknesses in their strategies. Upon careful scrutiny, you can poke a hole in almost any plan. Unfortunately, by doing this, you end up like the donkey. Surrounded by bountiful options, but bummed out and upset, totally frozen by indecision.

Most of the stuff in this business - get good, genre-specific covers, write good blurbs, publish at least every three months, continually build your newsletter, research your target market, find three targeted promo sources - is simple. Where we break down is the execution, often by not trying anything at all.

Just pick a hay bale. Even if it's not crunchy, it's not a disaster.

Obviously you should strive to get the best information possible. But sometimes you just don't know what's true and what's not. A lot of "data-driven" science is nonsense, for example, particularly in psychology. You just have to try it out for yourself and learn through trial and error.

By the way, if you look at the Wikipedia page for this paradox, you have a hilarious illustration of people throughout history overthinking this problem and totally missing the key point. Which serves as a kind of meta-commentary on over-intellectualizing simple problems.

Nick


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## T E Scott Writer (Jul 27, 2016)

'Analysis paralysis' - good to know thete's a phrase that sums up my life


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## Simply_Me (Mar 31, 2016)

Hi, Nick. Thanks for bringing so many interesting issues into discussion, and sharing your experiences. 

Why are you giving up on Lighting Blade? The month is still young, you have about a dozen days more to cash in. I suggest that you change the book's categories, at least two of them. 

Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Fantasy
Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Horror > Dark Fantasy
Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers & Suspense > Supernatural > Psychics

Also, is there any hint of romance, it doesn't have to be the real thing, just a hope of it? I'm asking because that could give you more options too. Best of luck.


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## Fel Beasley (Apr 1, 2014)

Nicholas Erik said:


> Just pick a hay bale. Even if it's not crunchy, it's not a disaster.
> 
> Obviously you should strive to get the best information possible. But sometimes you just don't know what's true and what's not. A lot of "data-driven" science is nonsense, for example, particularly in psychology. You just have to try it out for yourself and learn through trial and error.
> 
> ...


I'm the poster child for analysis paralysis. I started learning about self-publishing four years ago. My first book, a novella, was released January 2017. When I say learning about self-publishing, I don't mean an hour or two a few times a month. I mean, hours on Kboards, spending big bucks on courses whose teachings become obsolete in six months, making a new plan a few times a month but never ever following through because something new would contradict my plan and so I better change it or else I'll fail.

Four years controlled by my fear. Considering how fast I write, I could have had 16 or more books published by now.

It'd be funny if it wasn't so sad. (Well, it is still funny).

I do have a few questions about the focusing on three traffic sources. The idea of only doing three things when I'm brand spanking new is scary. How am I to figure out what works for my books if I'm only trying to master three things?

Do you have specific instructions for us who don't know the best place to start? I've read all your articles on your site but it still eludes me. I'm probably missing something really obvious.

So my thoughts (plus what I've been doing):
1) Building my newsletter list using Instafreebie and multi-author promos (some paid, some free)
~My one and only published book is the same book I give away for free. I have a preorder and another release in early March. That'll test whether how engaged my subscribers are.

Promotion sites for my 99cent release.
~I only booked promo sites 8 days before release when I put the book on preorder. The results have been dismal. The only site that gave me more than a few sales was bargain booksy. Got 23 sales. I spent about $200 for 72 sales. Don't get me wrong. I'm happy with the sales I've gotten and I learned a lot about what I did wrong. Using the wrong promo sites. Having an off-genre cover (I remedied that but I know it cost me).

PPC ads:
Facebook and AMS (Would you group both together or focus on just one of them? I'm wide.)
~I haven't cracked the code of AMS ads yet. I'm not getting enough impressions, which leads to low clicks, and no sales.
Facebook did little more for me. Got lots of likes on my posts and page but only a handful of subscribers.
I just don't have deep enough pockets right now to really pour money into it.

As of right now, I have no idea what's working and I've got a lot of user failure staring at me.

Any advice for an overeducated, analysis paralyzed, newbie? I write UF and I'm wide (because reasons that I question every day).


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

Simply_J said:


> Hi, Nick. Thanks for bringing so many interesting issues into discussion, and sharing your experiences.
> 
> Why are you giving up on Lighting Blade? The month is still young, you have about a dozen days more to cash in. I suggest that you change the book's categories, at least two of them.
> 
> ...


I should've been clearer: I'm not shelving Lightning Blade. I'm simply not going to report on the ranks until the next book comes out + promo kicks in. Nothing interesting is going to happen until then, so there's no point in relaying the same unexciting rank everyday.

But I have no plans on giving up on Lightning Blade. There will be at least three books in the series; we'll see where Shadow Flare (Book 2) takes us and go from there. If Book 3 comes out and people still don't want it, yeah, I'll be moving on.

Thanks for the category suggestions; it should be in more (according it to the keywords), but they haven't kicked in. I may or may not deal with it later; right now it's not ranking high enough to get any visibility from the additional category lists.

Nick


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## Fel Beasley (Apr 1, 2014)

Nicholas Erik said:


> I should've been clearer: I'm not shelving Lightning Blade. I'm simply not going to report on the ranks until the next book comes out + promo kicks in. Nothing interesting is going to happen until then, so there's no point in relaying the same unexciting rank everyday.
> 
> But I have no plans on giving up on Lightning Blade. There will be at least three books in the series; we'll see where Shadow Flare (Book 2) takes us and go from there. If Book 3 comes out and people still don't want it, yeah, I'll be moving on.
> 
> ...


I found with my release, the keywords I used didn't get me into the right categories even after waiting a little over a week. I emailed them and they put me in the categories, no questions asked.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

Felicia Beasley said:


> Do you have specific instructions for us who don't know the best place to start? I've read all your articles on your site but it still eludes me. I'm probably missing something really obvious.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> ...


I think the three things is primarily scary because the illusion of busyness _looks_ more productive from the outside. Everything you read about is about the grind. About how hard things are. About how you gotta work until you fall asleep on the keyboard.

There's a Zen saying from DROPPING ASHES ON THE BUDDHA: "Don't make difficult, don't make easy. Just practice." It's about students of Zen missing the point of Zen: they want "clear mind" to be difficult. Or they wish it to be easy. Just take things as they are; sometimes things are pretty simple.

By the way, I do recommend in the first part of my guide that, if you're new, you can explore more sources. It's hard to tell what will work for you. The main principle is to choose deliberately, not just run everywhere because some person on YouTube screamed that it's the next big social media platform.

Anyway, I wouldn't consider what you've done a failure. You're much further along than I was in my first year. A certain number of missteps is inevitable. Thus far you've learned about:

1) covers
2) promos
3) launches
4) novellas are difficult to sell

All of which is valuable information. Not really a failure; reframe it as another course, or a class in self-publishing.

And if you can write fast in a popular genre, that can paper over almost any marketing deficiencies (provided the covers/blurbs are reasonable).

What I would do is this:

1) stop doing PPC if your funds are limited. You're not going to see good results, because it requires testing, and testing requires potentially burning a lot of money. When money is tight, that's just going to stress you out.

2) focus on building your mailing list for the new release. Instafreebie/mailing list promos + giveaways. You have the novella, which is a good freebie to give away to people.

3) focus on getting some reviews for the new release. You can set up an ARC list through your email list by sending out an email (or having an autoresponder email) to everyone saying, hey, I have a new book coming out, does anyone want a review copy? Do that about two weeks before launch. Tell them when the book comes out. Email them on launch day to post them. Or you can upload a paperback to Createspace, publish it, then link it to the eBook pre-order. Then unpublish the paperback; people can still leave reviews on it before the eBook's launch.

4) book promos over 3 - 7 days for your new release. You can do something like this: Day 1, first half of your list. Day 2, second half of your list. Day 3, a couple promo sites. Day 4, a few more promo sites. Day 5 grand finale. Have a pre-order available for the next book upon launch.

5) go into KU with the new book. Urban fantasy does better in KU, and it's easier to gain visibility as a new author.

*Or...Do None of That*

We'll see if this works again with Lightning Blade, but over the summer I launched a completely new UF pen name (the one that now houses Lightning Blade etc.). Zero mailing list or platform - completely new author, other than what I knew.

Four things:

1) I didn't enter any keywords at all.
2) I didn't have more than two categories.
3) I didn't have the book in the urban fantasy category for awhile. 
4) Blurb had a typo in like the second line.

Which are not recommendations to replicate these errors; just to show that a few things (cover/book genre) matter a whole, whole lot more. Anyway, the plan:

I booked a $0.99 promo and put it up on Library Thing for reviews. Bombed. Book made $291 in its first 30 days of release. Which doesn't sound bad, but the promo cost me more than that. It was definitely about to die.

So I did a free run instead around Day 31. Over two weeks, I made $257 after giving away only 1234 copies. Mind you, the 30 day window is already shot. Then I did another two day promo run to coincide with Book 2's release, 6 weeks after Book 1's. This time all out. Gave away 5000 copies.

Made $2700 over the next 30 days between the two books. Books also made another $1100 in September w/o additional promo.

Two lessons there:

1) free runs are an underrated launch tool. 
2) it's really important to get Book 2 out - and then keep hitting people with the sequels. How important? I decided to go back to my sci-fi pen name instead of writing Book 3 and releasing that in August. The space opera I wrote tanked. I finally released Book 3 of the urban fantasy series on January 19. Over the past 18 days, it's made $320. No promo or anything (that's coming up this month). But that'll probably be 1/2 of Book 2's take ($900) in its first month of release - with a much bigger mailing list and the book being _twice_ as long in KU.

Basically, if I'd have kept hammering these out on a month-to-month basis, I'd have reached a really nice number.

Which leads us back to narrowing our focus: it's harder to gain momentum when our attention is split between eight different tasks. Or, in this case, two different pen names. I could've done _way_ less work over the past six months (I wrote 3 other books and like 4 novellas) and simply wrote _two books_ in that series in August/September, and crushed my earnings.

Oh, a third + fourth lesson:

3) Write longer books. I would've made twice as much money with those two books if they were 70 - 80k instead of 42 - 45k. Maybe more, since people like longer books and these pop up as like 170 estimated pages. Which could deter some folks.

4) don't be afraid to raise your price. I kept DEMON ROGUE at $0.99 for a long time. That cost me a bunch of money, both in page reads (people borrow the book more often when it's full price - they'll just buy it for $0.99) and royalties.

*To Summarize*

1) KU. I know - wide for reasons. But KU is gonna be far easier. 
1a) write novels of a decent length (60k+)
2) build your mailing list any way you can so that you can email people on release day and get ARC reviews.
3) stop doing PPC until you have more money.
4) do a $0.99 launch for Book 1 over 3 - 7 days. If that doesn't work, do a big, all-out free run to coincide with Book 2's launch. 
4a) don't be afraid to raise your price.
5) make sure Book 2 is available within 30 - 60 days.
6) if the series takes off, keep writing books in it. Don't get distracted by other series/genres/pen names.



RobCornell said:


> I'm behind in my Kboards, it seems. Always nice to see a new post from you, Nick.
> 
> Sometimes it feels like it does, though.


Ebbs and flows, right? Most of my titles are dormant at the moment. I like to think they're just awaiting the right opportunity.

Nick


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## Fel Beasley (Apr 1, 2014)

Nicholas Erik said:


> I think the three things is primarily scary because the illusion of busyness _looks_ more productive from the outside. Everything you read about is about the grind. About how hard things are. About how you gotta work until you fall asleep on the keyboard.
> 
> There's a Zen saying from DROPPING ASHES ON THE BUDDHA: "Don't make difficult, don't make easy. Just practice." It's about students of Zen missing the point of Zen: they want "clear mind" to be difficult. Or they wish it to be easy. Just take things as they are; sometimes things are pretty simple.
> 
> ...


Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions so thoroughly. It's very helpful.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

*Feb 6 Results*

Words: 10 pages of Lightning Blade revised
Revenue: $129
Boxed set sales: 10 sales (+ 3360 pages read)

*Current Revenue*

$2072. Glad to pass the $2k barrier; definitely going to fall behind on the pace until most of the bigger guns come in later in the month. Would estimate somewhere around $3,000 circa the 16th. We'll see if that prediction holds.

*BookBub Check-In*

Day 1: Booksends (63 sales) + Fiverr on Book 1 (55 downloads); rank = #4843
Day 2: ENT/Robin Reads (228 sales) + FreeBooksy on Book 1 (1064 downloads); rank = #832
Day 3: BookBub (1769 sales); rank = #54
Day 4: nothing (259 sales); rank = #68
Day 5: nothing (129 sales); rank = #249
Day 6: nothing, back to full price (10 sales)

Quite the drop, though not unexpected. The book was at $0.99 for about eight hours on the 6th, so some of those are at $0.99. I need page reads to pick up (3360 read yesterday). Judging by today's numbers, that might happen a little bit.

*Topic of the Day: Genre Targeting is the Most Important Thing in the World*

You really need to understand your target readership, then create everything - the story, the cover, the blurb - with them in mind. Most of us probably harbor a (secret) desire to write a mainstream bestseller - the type of book that explodes out of its niche and is suddenly on everyone's lips. That's not gonna happen, and it leads to bad decision making.

This crossed my mind when browsing through the LitRPGs on Amazon. My initial inclination was _well, I could write one of these - and maybe I'd make it more accessible to the mainstream_. Visions of a Ready Player One epic success danced before my eyes.

That was a dumb idea. Trying to replicate any bestselling, mega-hit book is a fool's errand; they're all black swans. That means they're fundamentally unpredictable - any explanations for their success after the fact are guilty of the narrative fallacy. Side note: also a dumb idea to get distracted. Writing in a completely different genre is a good way to kill any momentum I might build this month.

But in attempting to emulate a mega-hit, you make certain of one thing: it appeals to no one. It doesn't have enough wizards (or game mechanics, in the case of LitRPG) to stand out with its core audience. So you miss pretty much just p*ss off everyone. People like what they like; you're not going to be the one to change that through a sneaky bait-and-switch.

We're afraid of shooing readers away with a broom, so we make our blurbs and covers milquetoast and vague - or make them desperately appeal to readers outside the target demographic. By doing this, you ironically shoo away _all_ readers. You get crappy reviews, conversion rates and targeting, which leads to crappy results and Amazon (rightfully) burying your book. Instead, you need to focus on who will love your book - and then deliver blurbs, stories and covers that resonate with them. The goal of LitRPG is not to convert epic fantasy fans, or convince space opera readers that they're missing hit tables and loot drops in their books. _It's to appeal to LitRPG fans_.

This is an obvious statement, right? But so often I see actions that contradict that. It's the same in any genre: contemporary romance authors need to make the best contemporary romance book possible. Urban fantasy authors need to do the same. Why are there people with glowy hands on every urban fantasy cover, basically ever? Because that's what readers want.

Even in a crowded market you can stand out by hitting the notes that are important to your core audience - and doing it well. You just need to understand what those key notes are. This is harder than it seems; think about what a great movie _Die Hard_ is, then think about all the terrible action movies you've seen on basic cable. Or consider how bad the most recent Die Hard film is. The original is nothing earth-shattering in terms of plot, but it's incredibly well executed. Which makes it a top 5 all-time action flick. Same with The Bourne Trilogy. Nothing insane. Just really well done. Top 5.

Controversial opinion: *It's much harder to execute something well than to be original.*

Nick


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## mmandolin (Oct 16, 2014)

Nicholas Erik said:


> With all the dubious advice and information out there, it can be easy to simply throw your hands up and say _forget it_. But there's something interesting I've found: even bad information and inaccurate views of the world can generate surprisingly good results if the person takes action.


Such a true and undervalued point.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

*Feb 7 Results*

Words: 3 pages of Lightning Blade revised
Revenue: $135
Boxed set: 5 sales + 4688 pages read

*Current Revenue*

$2201.

*BookBub Check-in*

Day 1: Booksends (63 sales) + Fiverr on Book 1 (55 downloads); rank = #4843
Day 2: ENT/Robin Reads (228 sales) + FreeBooksy on Book 1 (1064 downloads); rank = #832
Day 3: BookBub (1769 sales); rank = #54
Day 4: nothing (259 sales); rank = #68
Day 5: nothing (129 sales); rank = #249
Day 6: nothing, back to full price (10 sales)
Day 7: nothing (5 sales)

1 week total = 2461 sales + 19,814 page reads. Anyway, the boxed set sold more copies in one week than it had in its first six months of release.

Page reads are picking up, to between 4 and 5k per day. This will be the last BookBub recap for this run. I'll come back next week with more tail #s.

*Topic of the Day: How to Hit the Top 100 in the Kindle Store*

Basically a distilled version of my Week 1 ramblings and results, so if anyone wants to catch-up (and learn how to structure an optimal promo) without reading about donkeys and Zen quotes, they can do so by reading this 2000 word post.

Nick


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## writerc (Apr 15, 2016)

I just love your posts  

They are super helpful.

You also have good taste in music  

The blog visit is worth it to see what new cool track you've picked. Thankyou!


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## EllieKeaton (Apr 12, 2014)

Thanks for sharing - love these types of posts


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

catlife said:


> I just love your posts
> 
> They are super helpful.
> 
> ...


Cool! Glad you enjoyed them.

*February 8 Results*

Lightning Blade: no work
Revenue: $112
Total revenue to date: $2313

Page reads are picking up on the set. Happy to see that trending upward.

*Topic of the Day: Most Days are Boring*

So, uh, not a lot going on these past few days. I don't expect that to really change until the deluge of launches and ads later in the month. But that brings us to an important topic: dealing with boredom. You see, when you go on KBoards - or the internet, or social media - you're bombarded with novelty. It seems like everyone's hitting the top 1000, launching a new book or trying a new, hot genre. Or there's, ahem, some idiot trying to break 10k in a month and then not following his own plan.

All this information is useful. But you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg: people only post when they've got something novel to share. They pick and choose the best moments in their lives to broadcast to the world. This is why it seems like all your friends are constantly on vacation and eating at #thebestrestaurantever when you "check in" with them on social media. In reality, that's 0.2% of their lives or less.

Most days, however, are boring. Unfortunately, the modern world makes this obvious truth much less obvious. We crave novelty, and the current web landscape - Facebook, YouTube et al. - feeds this psychological tendency constantly. Plays off our desperate desire for constant stimulation. That's why we'll have YouTube open, a movie on the television, and we'll be using some app. Distraction isn't even enough any more; the modern world trains us to crave multi-tasked distraction.

How can we allow our minds to become fractured by distraction, when it's so devastating to all aspects of our lives: focus, happiness, productivity, our big dreams?

Because boredom _feels_ bad, and we're terrified of it. But to achieve something worthwhile, or become good at something, we must endure hours of boredom. See that word endure? It's wrong. Because boredom isn't suffering. It's merely a part of life - and a big part of getting better.

Let's take an example: I came up with a new urban fantasy series. Cool concept; I think it could be fun to write. Instead of finishing Lightning Blade, I want to immediately jump into this new novel. Stupid wisdom would be like _yeah, do it_. But here's the thing: starting novels is easy and fun. The middle of the novel is like a mud swamp filled with alligators and Ambien. Either you're terrified that what you wrote is nonsense and everyone will think you're a hack, or you're so sick of your characters that it makes you want to stay in bed all day.

The middle of the novel is often boring to write. Revisions are often boring. Writing blurbs are usually boring. All of this stuff is necessary.

We all have days where we don't "feel" like doing things. I have them all the time. The goal isn't to never feel bored; the goal is to ignore your feelings, because, quite frankly, they're BS. A four year old follows their feelings and does whatever the hell they want. For some reason, this is also viable for adults, now, all of whom must find their "passion" (gag). Guess what: even if you love, love, love what you do, there's still going to be mountains of BS involved that you do not want to take care of. Is anyone passionate about paying their taxes? No. But you gather up all your receipts and other nonsense because you have to.

The modern world thinks that somehow, because you're not "feeling" marketing or writing chapter two, it's okay to sandbag. But feelings are dictated by actions. Take action and you'll immediately feel less bored/scared/etc. than you were before. Most of your feelings are illusions.

And most of them are murdering your dreams or any chance of success you have. [/melodrama]

Back to boredom: it's unavoidable. I'm releasing two books this month, doing five promos (with two BookBubs), overhauling my autoresponder, writing update posts every day, writing a how-to guide weekly...and the past couple days I've been bored as hell. Which is why my output numbers have dropped: I've given into feelings - that, somehow, boredom is a good excuse to not do what I need to do.

As Pascal said, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." I see a lot of posts about "burn out" or not being able to write faster or having writer's block. Is that true, though? I'm not throwing shade at anyone; it just strikes me that, really, most people don't want to sit down and be alone in a room and crank out the words. Not that they can't.

Won't.

There's a big difference between those two. For me, it's rarely a matter of "can't." It's always a matter of _won't_. To be clear, you can't just work for 15 hours a day and suffer no ill consequences; but if you "can't" write more than one novel a year, I'm calling BS on that. I think you're probably not doing as much work as you think you are, because you're distracted.

I forget who said it (and I'm paraphrasing), but there's no worse fate than desperately seeking novelty. Of course, this runs counter to everything marketers are selling; how all our major social media platforms are set up; what the news tells us; and even the stories we tell, which are often about massive, heroic change in a brief period of time.

If anyone's tried building a habit like I laid out in this guide, you probably encountered something: the first few days were awesome and frictionless, then somewhere around Day 4 - 8, you got really bored and discouraged when the initial novelty/rush wore off and you realized that change was still relatively far off. The cure - spoken from someone who has bounced around from system to system - isn't a new strategy.

It's to become well-acquainted with boredom. And to be able to find novelty and interest _within_ this distraction less state. Which is obviously difficult, but the alternative - fractured focus and no success - isn't really much of an alternative at all.

Nick


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## JaclynDolamore (Nov 5, 2015)

Enjoying this thread. Lots of good advice, as always, and even reminders for those of you who theoretically know better. (Yes I am in the boring middle of a book right now...)  I wanted to be a writer in my teens but never finished a novel. In my early twenties I stopped messing around and started writing a novel a year. I was traditionally published and kept with 1-2 novels a year during that time (lots of writing but also LOADS of rewriting...they were good learning years). Then when I got into self-publishing I bumped it up to 1k a day, which last year worked out to 4 novels. This year so far I've stuck to 2k a day which should work out to 5 or 6 novels. I'm also still looking for that third productive marketing channel so learning that and planning promo runs and maintaining AMS is also some work. I doubt I'll push it farther than that unless finances demand that I do...but basically, learning good habits and constantly improving on them through boredom is so important.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

*Feb 9 Results*

Lightning Blade: done! just kidding, zero again
Revenue: $153
Total revenue to date: $2466

Page reads picking up on box set. Work ethic declining. Hmm.

*Topic of the Day: Sloppiness*

Technically this happened today, not yesterday, but whatever. You know how I was talking about "opportunities" and giving away my dystopian novel away for free on the 10th because of how BRAVE NEW WORLD and 1984 were selling like gangbusters?

Good plan, right?

It would be, except for one little thing: I didn't actually schedule the promotion in the KDP dash. So, uh, I got an email from FreeBooksy this morning telling me the book was $3.99. They were nice about it and offered a refund or reschedule (neither of which they had to do - big thanks to them). Basically, I got a free pass, and everything will go on as normal, just a week later or whenever they have space to run Vanishing Midnight.

However, I do things like this pretty frequently. I've spoken about back matter a lot - the importance of asking for reviews etc. Which I stand by. But some of my books have terrible back matter. Lightning Blade actually has none at all.

In isolation, each of these little pieces is harmless. In aggregate, they're killer, and you kind of see why something like Lightning Blade isn't doing well.

I'm very much focused on the whiz-bang things like launches. But I mess those up a lot too, because I'm impatient and sloppy with the planning.

Anyway, all of this is to say that doing the fundamental things well - setting up a promo correctly (or, um, setting it to start at all), getting your back matter right, setting up a reasonable email funnel - is shockingly simple. But a lot of us aren't doing that - even when we should know better. I think we're all looking for some new, awesome technique, or someone to crack AMS or whatever. And that's fine.

But it doesn't really matter when you don't schedule the promo in the first place. Which is shockingly easy to do.

Nick


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Nicholas Erik said:


> Lightning Blade: done! just kidding, zero again


LOL!



> Anyway, all of this is to say that doing the fundamental things well - setting up a promo correctly (or, um, setting it to start at all), getting your back matter right, setting up a reasonable email funnel - is shockingly simple. But a lot of us aren't doing that - even when we should know better. I think we're all looking for some new, awesome technique, or someone to crack AMS or whatever. And that's fine.


All of these things are simple in themselves, but I'm finding that as the number of books piles up, the number of simple individual tasks multiply to an overwhelming extent. Here's what I've been working on just this week:

- 3 separate promos
- new covers for fantasies
- preparing and releasing a box set
- preparing Regencies for paperback versions
- planning covers for next Regency series
- monitoring results of recent release and promo
- setting up my first ever audio auditions and offer
- modifying mailing list signups to keep pen names separate
- reassessing long-running AMS ads
- sending out beta version of next Regency

Oh yes, and I did a bit of writing too! It's not always this frantic (thank goodness!), but there are always multiple things going on, and it doesn't surprise me in the least that things get forgotten or borked.


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## Jenny Schwartz (Mar 4, 2011)

Thanks, Nick. I find your posts useful to make me stop and think. Sometimes I under-appreciate that just doing something (other than panicking) is useful. Doing nothing sure doesn't generate sales!


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

PaulineMRoss said:


> All of these things are simple in themselves, but I'm finding that as the number of books piles up, the number of simple individual tasks multiply to an overwhelming extent. Here's what I've been working on just this week:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Oh yes, and I did a bit of writing too! It's not always this frantic (thank goodness!), but there are always multiple things going on, and it doesn't surprise me in the least that things get forgotten or borked.


You're absolutely right. I have 45+ titles across 5 author names now. It's just impossible to keep up with everything. As much flack as trad publishing gets for lack of marketing/not leveraging a backlist properly, I fully understand why. It's not incompetence, it's a matter of resources. I'm one person; I'm getting to the limits of what I can handle.

This is one of the problems with "write 12 books a year" and then leverage your backlist. If Amazon's algos aren't kind to you, that's a _ton_ of promo + admin work/monitoring to get those titles selling. Which takes away from writing and so forth.

It's a tough balancing act; one I clearly haven't yet mastered.

*Feb 10 Results*

Lightning Blade: zero
Revenue: $138
Revenue to date: $2604

Closing in on $3,000 about right on expected schedule (16th). Page reads have picked up for box. I'm gonna have to push Lightning Blade back, and that's gonna hurt my chances.

*Topic of the Day: Wide vs. KU*

I didn't work on Lightning Blade yesterday (don't worry; I'm getting back on it today), but I did do some reflection. After the missed promo, and Pauline's comments about responsibilities proliferating like rabbits (my interpretation of her words), I decided to look at just what the hell my backlist is doing. A few facts that may or may not be interesting:


I have 45+ titles published on Amazon et al. currently across 5 different authors.
Two of these names are mine, the three others are separate authors
21 or 22 of those titles are mine
I have another 5 - 6 novellas/lead magnet books that are only available for free
The books are in about every genre besides romance/children's/MG
Almost half of them are currently wide

There are other people who make a lot more money than me here. But there are very few that are exposed to the range of data I have. It's also why I'm such a proponent of 80/20, and have gradually narrowed my marketing focus to a few key things: there are just way, way too many tiny changes I can make that don't matter (categories, keywords etc.). I've tested them across a lot of titles.

Anyway, the reason I'm bringing up these points is this: I'm a huge fan of wide. Being exclusive to Amazon makes me very nervous. I would prefer to have my books available everywhere. I've tried it with 30+ books.

I have never gotten one to sell consistently (even with a BookBub). I've never gotten a permafree to stick on another store (even with a BookBub). It's just really, really hard to sell books on other retailers if these things don't happen; their automated recommendation engines suck in comparison to Amazon's data beast. I've had 5, I think, wide BookBubs now; each spikes and then craters. But I've stuck with it for about half the books I publish. This despite the fact that it multiplies my admin work considerably (oh, you have a link to an Amazon book in the back? iBooks says NO! oh, you have a bracket ([) in your file name? this retailer says NO!). The latter point is not a joke - have a bracket in your ePub name and see what happens when you upload to D2D. I forget which retailer doesn't like those.

Oh, and in the middle of a BookBub, I got a kind email from a reader telling them me that the auto-generated NCX (or whatever it's called on other eReaders) was borked when you downloaded the book on Kobo. My fault, to be clear, but literally impossible for me to know beforehand without access to like 15+ eReaders.

I really like D2D, by the way. I think they're a great company with great service.

But, outside of a BookBub in January, I've made $300 wide with my personal titles under this pen name over the past year. I've probably made more on paperbacks, which is either sad or impressive. To be fair, these titles don't perform in KU, either. Most readers don't tend to like these books. But this is more about an admin issue than anything else. I can definitely match that in KU, and cut my annoyance by half.

I've tried a bunch of stuff: Genius Links (www.geni.us) to automatically redirect users to the right store. Promo (16k+ free units of one title; awful sell-through).

I've known this for a long time, but I've stuck wide with these titles. And I'll still try titles that didn't succeed in KU out wide; there's no reason not to.

Wait, what?

Because here's the thing (and the real point of today's topic): this isn't a KU vs. wide debate (wait a second, it's not?). No: it's a _if something's not working, try something else_ debate. You see, if your titles suck in KU, there's no reason _not_ to go wide. But people are scared of losing the little bit of a foothold they have on Amazon. The same argument is true in reverse, in my case. But these are illusions: I'm literally giving up nothing. Year 2 will not be different than Year 1 unless something changes with the other retailers. I've given it a shot. The market's responded with a resounding verdict.

But I'm glad I tried. Because it's really difficult to tell which books will succeed where. A good deal of it is random, or so obscured from our understanding as to be random, for all intents and purposes.

I'm not so glad I kept with it this long. There's a point where persistence becomes folly. Where that is, exactly, is a matter of intense philosophical debate through the ages. Sometimes we need to keep digging; sometimes the writing is on the wall in month 3, and we ignore it.

The goal, as with any undertaking, then, is not to divine exactly what will happen by a wide or KU move. It's to try it and gather your own data. I'm keeping a few books in from this pen name and from my other authors; they perform okay, if not wonderful. But these seven need to be removed. The data is unequivocal on that. But we often let emotion get in the way of what the facts are telling us. Anyone who has witnessed one of the myriad threads here on the topic will be familiar with that.

By the way, this debate sometimes devolves into three insinuations: one, that the people in KU are sitting on a powder keg that will explode once the evil 'zon decides to murk them (and then those foolish authors will receive their comeuppance). And two, those who "failed" wide didn't actually try to succeed (permafrees, promo, merchandising etc.) and just sat there. Finally, three, that the wide authors are fools guided by idealism rather than business (e.g. they can't even see the huge pots of Amazon exclusive gold staring them right in the face).

I believe none of these. Most of the time, one tactic or another just doesn't work, and we don't really know why. As writers (and humans), we can confabulate plausible explanations for events that look reasonable in hindsight. Unfortunately, this is simply an example of the narrative fallacy. In truth, we need to take the best data we can beforehand (e.g. how a genre/similar series of books performs in either KU or wide) and base our initial decision on that. Then, when we have our own data, we update those assumptions and make our decisions based off that. Not anyone else's opinion.

This goes for everything: Facebook ads, cover reveals, newsletters, social media, whatever. Test it with the best data you can find from others, then gather your own.

Anyway, I doubt that this will result in any massive earnings bump. But it will probably increase earnings for one reason: I'll be more willing to promo, since I won't have to reset multiple price dashboards at once and then set them all back. Is that a lot of work? No.

But add it to a long list, and it becomes the straw that breaks the camel's back. You cannot do everything.

By the way, to bring this full circle, the biggest changes you can make?

1. your cover. It matters more than any other element by a wide margin (other than the book itself; but the book itself does not induce people to buy in the first place)
2. a mailing list offer in your front matter. That link will get 5x the clicks as the sign-up in your back matter. You want people to see something important, put it in the front matter. 
3. rotating promo every month. I would only do a specific title once every three months at most; but by having three series, or multiple entry points into the same series (e.g. month 1 you do Book #1, month 2 you do the Books 1, 2 & 3 box) you can spread this out well. 
4. writing a new book

More tomorrow on Lightning Blade.

Nick


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

*Feb 11 Results*

Lightning Blade: 15 pages revised
Revenue: $137
Revenue to date: $2741

Page reads steady at around 7k. Gonna be getting into a much more exciting stretch, here.

*Topic of the Day: Numbers at the Expense of Revenue*

There are lots of so-called vanity metrics in every industry. Indie pubbing is no exception. Whenever there's a thread or a book about marketing, the question is _how big is your [mailing list/social media following etc.]? How did you get [a hundred reviews, sell two hundred books at $0.99 etc.]?_

These seem like good questions on the surface. But rarely is a question asked - or considered - regarding the only thing that matters.

Did you make money?

To be fair, part of the reason people don't ask that on a public forum is etiquette. But, although not a mind reader, I believe that a lot of people aren't even thinking it - nor are they trying to hash through the thicket of numbers and get to the real story. I know this because I'm often blinded by magnificent metrics that, ultimately, mean nothing.

*Sales numbers can be deceptive. *I've sold 8,000 copies of a book this year. I'm rolling in it, right? Wrong - that book has made me about $3500. After ads, less than $3000. Nothing to sneeze at, of course, but then we factor in all the covers I had made for it, the fact that it sold less than 500 copies over the first 2.5 years of release, the little detail that it's actually an omnibus of _three_ novels...

I have to sell 11 copies of this book to equal _one sale_ at $4.99.

You get the point. Not that impressive.

I'm closing in on 50,000 books sold. That means I've made anywhere from around $350,000 gross (+ KU reads), or $17,500 gross (+ KU reads), depending on whether the books sold for $9.99 or $0.99. I.e. the difference between making a comfortable living and making no living at all. Which means, while that sales figure sounds impressive for a newbie, I've literally told you nothing about my business by sharing it. But your mind is probably more inclined to believe it's a number closer to the former than the latter.

*Mailing list numbers can be deceptive.* I now have almost 3,000 people on my various email lists. I guess around 3,500, if you count those subscribed to my various authors' lists. Sounds great, right? Must be great for launch, eh? Not bad, except my last launch (Lightning Blade) went out to about ~1200 people. Maybe 80 of those bought a book for $0.99. Still awesome, right? My mailing list provider (ConvertKit) costs $49/mo ($441 if you pay upfront). Uh oh. And then you have to factor in the time setting up all those fancy autoresponders, tags and everything else. Writing reader magnets. That type of shiz. Instead of writing a Book 3 immediately in the summer, which would've probably netted me high 5 figures, I put those words into two prequel novellas that I give away for free (and cost $600+ to produce after proofreading/covers). The costs of that huge mailing list sound pretty high, right?

Want to know the most effective launch I've had? To a list of 60 people. Got 13 reviews and sold ~25 copies/200+ first week. Cost? Free. No reader magnet to get them to sign up, MailerLite/MailChimp don't charge at that point. Just, hey, you wanna know about Book 2 in the back of Book 1's back matter. That was it. Took two minutes. Best launch I've had (at least out of the gate), on an efficiency basis.

*Publishing speed (or words per hour) can be deceptive.* Sure, you can write a book in two days - but how many do you actually polish and publish? Or, for those with their nose to grindstone, publishing 12 novels a year - but how long were they (since this affects KENP payouts)? Were they actually polished, competent products? Or were they just churned out? Volume's not gonna help you unless you have a product that people already want and can sustain quality while ramping up your speed. Too many people are writing 12 novels that don't sell instead of 4 novels that don't sell. I should know: all this does is increase your production costs. If you don't have reliable marketing method to sell said novels, then you're pretty much just throwing prayers into the wind - and spending lots of money to do so.

To whit: many of the six figure authors on these boards publish 4 novels or less per year.

There are dozens of other examples, but for the sake of brevity, I'll leave them to your own imagination. The point is this: Raw numbers sound really impressive, but often don't tell you a damn thing. A mailing list of 10,000 people can be an incredible asset or incredible garbage. Same thing with writing a book a month, number of ARC reviews, peak rank...the list goes on and on. Sometimes these things are signal (e.g. integral to that author's success) other times they're just meaningless noise.

If you're trying to make money in this business, there's only one metric that matters.

And that's, well, money. Net revenue, if you want to be technical about it. Everything else is mostly smoke.

Nick


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Nicholas Erik said:


> Lightning Blade: 15 pages revised


Hooray!



> If you're trying to make money in this business, there's only one metric that matters. And that's, well, money. Net revenue, if you want to be technical about it. Everything else is mostly smoke.


Agreed. Which is why threads like this one, where Chris Fox talks about his financial year, are absolute gold:

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,245910.0.html


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## geronl (May 7, 2015)

I'm going to start me a thread, 28 days to $5


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## AmpersandBookInteriors (Feb 10, 2012)

geronl said:


> I'm going to start me a thread, 28 days to $5


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## KL_Phelps (Nov 7, 2013)

following


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

*Feb 12 Results*

Lightning Blade: 3 pages
Revenue: $124
Revenue to Date: $2865

Was happy with those 3 pages, actually. Grind getting through them. Some days are just like that.

*Topic of the Day: On the True Nature of Planning*

Plans aren't really meant to be followed _exactly_. They're more like beats or a barebones outline: a rough roadmap to get you started. Deviating from those is expected. Yet, with a plan, we often feel guilty or like we've "failed" when our paper future doesn't precisely match the actual one.

If you do continue to set goals, what you'll find often is two things:

1) it was impossible - you vastly overestimated the amount of work/what you could accomplish in that period of time.
2) life comes in and makes you reorganize your plans.

Both of these require an adjustment to a plan. At this point, however, many people just scrap _everything_ and decide they've failed. When all they needed to do was tweak some of the steps. Remember Nietzsche (paraphrased): many people are obstinate about the path, few about the destination. Different paths will open up to you as you progress through a challenge.

I won't claim that something unexpected burst into my life and demanded my absolute attention. To be honest, that rarely happens to me. I think it rarely happens to anyone; some people are just good at making up "emergencies" or drama as a form of avoidance. I just didn't do things that could've been done. So at that point, you can fold up shop and call yourself a failure, or reorganize. There's still 16 days left; that's plenty of time to reboot and refocus.

New Plan:

Free run on dystopian book on Feb. 15 (Feb. 14 - 1
Book release in adventure series on Feb. 16
Free run on adventure book on Feb. 16 - 19 (BookBub on 19th) + Books 1, 2 & 3 discounted
Free run on Lightning Blade on Feb. 21 - 24
Box set release (Demon Rogue) on Feb. 22
Box set release (Kip Keene) on Feb. 22
KCD on individual volumes in Demon Rogue series Feb. 23 - 26
Shadow Flare (sequel to Lightning Blade) release on Feb. 24

A few tasks have been shuffled by a day or two; one (the Kip Keene box) has been added. Nothing major - nothing catastrophic. Yet how tempting was it to pack things in when I missed the first deadline for Lightning Blade (10th)? Very. Instead, I decided to see how I could make the other elements work for me a bit better. Since I couldn't get more reviews for Lightning Blade (yet), I sent out email blasts to my lists asking for ARC reviews for the sets. This brought in a handful of reviews for the individual volumes, and also lined up 15+ people between them set to review the new sets.

If you can't make progress in one area, or are stalling, find another one. The "setbacks" that so often derail us are usually nothing at all.

Nick


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## The one with all the big dresses on the covers (Jan 25, 2016)

Nicholas Erik said:


> Plans aren't really meant to be followed _exactly_. They're more like beats or a barebones outline: a rough roadmap to get you started. Deviating from those is expected. Yet, with a plan, we often feel guilty or like we've "failed" when our paper future doesn't precisely match the actual one.
> 
> If you do continue to set goals, what you'll find often is two things:
> 
> ...


This reminds me of something I once heard about dieting - saying (as so many of us do) 'oh well, I already cheated once today, so now I'm going to eat whatever I want for the rest of the day' is like saying 'oh, I dropped my phone on the ground, I might as well stomp on it too'. So now, whenever my husband or I are tempted to abandon a goal at the first failure, the other one will say 'don't stomp on your phone!'


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## mmandolin (Oct 16, 2014)

Nicholas Erik said:


> *Topic of the Day: On the True Nature of Planning*
> 
> Plans aren't really meant to be followed _exactly_. They're more like beats or a barebones outline: a rough roadmap to get you started. Deviating from those is expected. Yet, with a plan, we often feel guilty or like we've "failed" when our paper future doesn't precisely match the actual one.
> 
> ...


Right on, Nick. Loving this thread 

What many authors fail to recognize is you can _improvise_ on your launch plan easily, as long as you've already outlined the strong underlying points to your launch/promo.

I "screw up" stuff with my launches and promos all the time, but since I have a clear general launch strategy already in place, I can comfortably make stuff up as I go along. And the results are usually pretty good, especially in retrospect - even when the original plan goes slightly haywire.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

MelanieCellier said:


> This reminds me of something I once heard about dieting - saying (as so many of us do) 'oh well, I already cheated once today, so now I'm going to eat whatever I want for the rest of the day' is like saying 'oh, I dropped my phone on the ground, I might as well stomp on it too'. So now, whenever my husband or I are tempted to abandon a goal at the first failure, the other one will say 'don't stomp on your phone!'


You're right - I took the idea from health/dieting books. Setbacks are pretty much inevitable if you're doing something difficult!



mmandolin said:


> Right on, Nick. Loving this thread
> 
> What many authors fail to recognize is you can _improvise_ on your launch plan easily, as long as you've already outlined the strong underlying points to your launch/promo.
> 
> I "screw up" stuff with my launches and promos all the time, but since I have a clear general launch strategy already in place, I can comfortably make stuff up as I go along. And the results are usually pretty good, especially in retrospect - even when the original plan goes slightly haywire.


Absolutely. And it becomes easier to improvise the more you know and the more you have launched. If I'm being perfectly honest - and this really just clicked together now - the two worst launches I ever had were the best planned. Everything was lined up in a neat little row. Flop; massive negative ROI. Cognitive dissonance must block those out, because I write about planning launches all the time and still try to emulate those two examples.

Even though course correcting gives much better results (that I've MEASURED!), I'm still chasing the perfect plan - where the dominoes line up, I step back and then they fall. Human psychology is strange.

*Feb 13 Results*

Lightning Blade: 0 (admin stuff)
Revenue: $104
Total revenue to date: $2969

Was taking care of formatting, scheduling and some other things yesterday. Not a good excuse; plenty of time to work on Lightning Blade. One problem I've noticed is headaches from staring at the screen too long. I wear glasses (used to wear contacts), and the light reflects at an odd angle. Couple that with a smaller screen (14" instead of a 24" monitor) and later in the day things can get pretty blinky.

Just another reason not to waste valuable time watching YouTube videos, I suppose.

*Topic of the Day: Go!*

There's something you really need to take care of that you're putting off. No, I'm not a mind reader; I have a list of ten or fifteen things that fit this bill. We all do.

Ask yourself _why_ you're procrastinating (e.g. money/time/your skills aren't there/you're thinking it'll be super hard). Navigate around this roadblock; if it's not possible, pick a different task and go through the same process. Find something that needs to be done and will help your business grow and that you have the resources to accomplish. Could take 5 minutes; could take 5 hours.

Then do it.

You'll feel this immense sense of relief, particularly if it's been hanging over your head. I say this, and then I'm always shocked at how good it feels to take action on something I've been putting off. And, usually, how much less difficult it was than I anticipated.

Mine? Finishing up Lightning Blade.

Nick


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

*Feb 14 Results*

Lightning Blade: 0
Revenue: $146
Revenue to date: $3112

Hmm, after a rousing call to action yesterday, it seems I failed to heed my own words. Granted, I did take care of a bunch of admin stuff, since apparently that needs to be done. But spending 2+ hours importing paperbacks into KDP (seriously, it takes forever) was not a good use of time.

I hit $3k a couple days earlier than the projection (which was the 16th). But still a pretty good estimate.

*BookBub Check-In*

Here's a recap of the first week:

Day 1: Booksends (63 sales) + Fiverr on Book 1 (55 downloads); rank = #4843
Day 2: ENT/Robin Reads (228 sales) + FreeBooksy on Book 1 (1064 downloads); rank = #832
Day 3: BookBub (1769 sales); rank = #54
Day 4: nothing (259 sales); rank = #68
Day 5: nothing (129 sales); rank = #249
Day 6: nothing, back to full price (10 sales)
Day 7: nothing (5 sales)

1st week total = 2461 sales + 19,814 page reads. Anyway, the boxed set sold more copies in one week than it had in its first six months of release. 
2nd week total = 21 sales + 49,965 page reads.

*Topic of the Day: A Brief Guide to Analysis Paralysis & Perfectionism*

Less technical, more cerebral - an exploration of analysis paralysis/perfectionism, and a few ways to identify if they're even an issue, and if so, some rules for overcoming them. Check out the 3,000 word guide on the blog here.

Nick


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## VanessaC (Jan 14, 2017)

Really enjoying this thread, thank you.  Love the updates and thoughts for the day. Great blog post too. I do like the seven second rule.  

On perfectionism, have you read Rettig's Seven secrets of the prolific? 

Suspect many people here have moved far beyond that but when I was starting to think seriously about writing I kept getting paralysed and found that book really helpful in identifying that, yes, I am a perfectionist and some tips to tackle it. At least now when I get stuck it's because I haven't thought the plot through, not because I'm fretting over a choice of word. Progress!


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## JayandFunGoo (Jan 20, 2017)

Good luck! posting to follow your journey!

_Edited. Drop me a PM if you have any questions. - Becca_


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

VanessaC said:


> Really enjoying this thread, thank you. Love the updates and thoughts for the day. Great blog post too. I do like the seven second rule.
> 
> On perfectionism, have you read Rettig's Seven secrets of the prolific?
> 
> Suspect many people here have moved far beyond that but when I was starting to think seriously about writing I kept getting paralysed and found that book really helpful in identifying that, yes, I am a perfectionist and some tips to tackle it. At least now when I get stuck it's because I haven't thought the plot through, not because I'm fretting over a choice of word. Progress!


I haven't read that, no. Glad you liked the post!



JayandFunGoo said:


> Good luck! posting to follow your journey!


Thanks!

*February 15 Results*

Lightning Blade: 10 pages revised
Revenue: $117
Revenue to date: $3175

From here on out I'm resetting the pages read estimate to .0045. Seems Amazon jumped back down to 0.0048 this month, so that should be a safer estimate. Thus you'll see that today's revenue doesn't exactly add up with yesterday's in terms of the current total. That's why.

Better to underestimate and be surprised than overestimate and be punched in the mouth.

*Topic of the Day: Optimal Systems vs. Adherence *

Tim Ferriss mentioned something on his blog that's gotten me thinking a lot: "People tend to abandon the good system they'll follow in search of the perfect system that they will quit."

It related back to the topic of adherence, which I've thought a lot about in a number of contexts.

Most of the products, courses and advice we receive is based around what others view as "optimal" - e.g. the absolute "best" way of achieving something. Of course, often these things are outright lies or wrong, but assuming that there is one single "optimal" path to success, that doesn't necessarily make it the best one for you. Why?

Studies of dieting have shown that the type of diet doesn't really matter. I know that this will cause paleo/vegan/raw food/calorie counters et al. to howl in grief, but it's true. What matters most is _adherence_. You can have the dumbest eating system in the world and lose weight if you adhere to it. This is obvious when you think about it; many of the ways people lose weight/get fit outright _contradict_ each other (e.g. veganism/paleo). How can that be?

Because the key ingredient is not some sort of mythical silver bullet. It's sticking with something long enough to see results. *The key ingredient is persistence, which is a product of consistency/adherence.* Remember how I said a few days back that people can follow stupid information and get great results? This is because of adherence. Naturally, in a perfect world, you want perfect information and then execute on that.

But all information is imperfect and missing some piece of the puzzle, no matter how robust or well-researched. Thus, you need to choose the best possible system that you can actually stick with long term.

Which is why I generally recommend bumping up your current capacity by 10% - 500 words to 550. Focusing on habits. Making small additions - like adding one traffic source at a time. And then doing it relatively methodically. Maybe start with one Facebook ad. Or two. Not split testing thirty-five different variants at once. Yeah, it's gonna take a while to learn at that pace, but it's gonna take less time than if you're running zero for the next year.

Long-term progress compounds faster than you think. But it only starts compounding if you start working now.

Bringing this back to the topic at hand, there might be a specific methodology of publishing/writing that is most efficient. In fact, we see this with outlining vs. pantsing. There is no question that outlining is more efficient in terms of pure speed. However, some people can't write at _all_ when they outline, which makes it entirely useless for them. Or their stories are terrible and predictable. Subsequently, adherence is low, hence the "optimal" way of doing things is, in reality, sub-optimal when compared to alternatives.

Process the information and advice, then pick out habits & rules that work for _you_. Build up your own repertoire of data - both on yourself and your books - and make decisions from that. Not based on some mythical perfect human. Not based on where you desperately wished you were.

Based on what you can do right now.

Because what is optimal is not some $500 course or $10 self-help book - what is optimal is what you can actually execute. If you can't use it, then it's useless. Doesn't matter if someone else used it or preaches that it must be done; either you're not ready (e.g. don't have the skills/resources) or it's a poor fit for your personality. Always be wary of the One True Way.

Nick

_Edited to alter quoted post and response to it. Drop me a PM if you have any questions. - Becca_


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

*Feb 16 Results*

Lightning Blade: 10 pages
Revenue: $145
Revenue to Date: $3320

*Book 8 Launch*

We're finally back with some exciting stuff. Book 8 in this series came out yesterday. For reference, the first volume came out four years ago in March, so it's been published at around two volumes per year. I think it's a reasonable proxy for what you can expect if you put in a medium amount of promotional effort (e.g. promos/mailing list).

Books 1 - 3 set ($0.99): 10 sales
Book 4 (free): 444 downloads (Book Adrenaline) 
Book 8: 35 sales @ $2.99 (+5 wide). Sent only to the mailing list (236 people, all organic and signed up to receive updates)

Book Adrenaline gave me about a +300 download lift over the day previous, which had no promo at all. For $25 that's acceptable; I'll probably use them again. It's run by the same folks who own BookBarbarian.

I decided to test launching at $2.99 instead of $0.99 (which I did for Book 7 w/ a 135 person mailing list). Sold 61 copies of Book 7 during launch week by comparison. So I think the $2.99 launch was better for a more established series (it's discounted $3 from its $5.99 price). We'll see what happens with the BookBub et al. in a few days.

*Topic of the Day: Experiment*

I was hesitant to try launching at $2.99, even though the stakes were pretty low. I'd actually never done it before (believe it or not). But the economics of continually launching at $0.99 don't really work, unfortunately, which means that I had to test an alternative.

It did fine. I think Book 8 will sell more copies than Book 7 did. To be sure, it's a small launch. These are (slightly) more niche books that have done impressively well, I think. But they're not Jack Reacher/Tom Clancy type thrillers, which narrows their appeal. I don't have the marketing budget to pound Facebook Ads etc. constantly. So throughout their history, I've tried positioning them a number of ways (they seem to do better as "adventures" rather than "thrillers") and experimented with a number of marketing methods.

Even then, we can be really hesitant to lose the small beachhead we've carved out. It's difficult to get any readers at all, or gain traction (for most), that when we taste even a sliver, we stop growing. That's a recipe for locking in to whatever earnings level/number of fans you currently have.

Since this whole challenge is about doing something that hasn't been done before, that necessitated doing things differently. I'm still going to launch my urban fantasy books later in the month at $0.99. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway, never stop trying new things. The "risk" is usually non-existent.

Nick


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

*Feb 17 Results*

Lightning Blade: 18 pages
Revenue: $156
Revenue to date: $3465

Lightning Blade is _almost_ there. Can I get it done in time to have a realistic shot at finishing Shadow Flare? Tune in tomorrow, on 28 Days of Procrastination and Questionable Work Habits.

*Free Run + Book 8 Launch*

Here's the lineup for Book 4:

Feb 16: BookAdrenaline (444 downloads)
Feb 17: Fiverr/SFB/Bbassett/Ebookhounds/eBookbetty/ManyBooks (915 downloads)
Feb 18: FreeBooksy/Booksends/RR/ENT
Feb 19: BookBub

Books 1 - 3 set: 26 sales
Book 8: 17 sales

The set is piggybacking nicely off Book 4's promo. Some excellent numbers today with the heavy hitters; but we'll leave that for tomorrow's discussion.

*Topic of the Day: Free Run Same Day Sell-Through*

Making money off a free run depends on sell-through. Sell-through can be achieved either _after_ a reader finish the book or before they even crack the book. The former has a number of obstacles: they have to open the book in the first place (probably less common than we'd all like to know), then get to the end, then go find the next book on Amazon through your link or website etc. That's a lot of steps.

But wait, what? That last point makes no sense: how the hell can we sell them the sequel/other books in the series without them reading the free one?

Trust me, it makes plenty of sense: I'm talking about getting them to pick up one of your other books when they download the free one. This is basically "cross sell" - which you'll be familiar with if you've ever shopped online (e.g. get a new Dell laptop, they ask you if you want a printer, too as you checkout). Amazon's also-boughts are all cross-selling similar books to your own.

Which is why we should cross-sell our own books on the freebie. Two reasons to do this:

1) you make back some money immediately
2) you further invest them in the series

Take the example above: Book 4's free run. 26 folks also picked up the discounted ($0.99) Books 1, 2 & 3 on the same day. They're more likely to read the series, since they've got four of them (and paid a little money for them). Which means I'm more likely to get them to read the whole series.

Cross selling sounds like some big fancy marketing term, but it's remarkably simple in practice. Just put a note at the top of Book 4's Amazon description about Books 1, 2 & 3 being discounted. This generates around 1.5 - 3% instant sell-through. You're not minting money with the discounted book or boxed set, but you are getting people deeper into your funnel.

One important note: I've tried this before with the _entire_ series. You do get people picking up all the books at once, but this has an overall negative effect. Why? Because you can't make money selling 4 - 5 backlist titles at $0.99. What you want to do is offer one book (say, a boxed set or the next book in the series) for a discount in conjunction with the free run to get people more invested/get more books of yours on their Kindle (two covers takes up 1/3 of a Paperwhite screen, for example - harder to brush past), then have the rest available for full price.

26 people doesn't sound like a lot. But let's say 1/5 of those go on to buy the full series. That's $8.99 + $4.99 + $5.99 - $20 x 0.70 = $14/reader. $70 total. Spread out over four days of promo? That's 100 people buying the next three books. Around ~20 buying the complete series. Which is an extra $280 or so. Which doesn't include things like ranking boosts to the box set and so forth. All for something pretty easy to set up.

Again: don't give away everything for $0.99. You're going to be happy when you look at your sales #s - hooray, I sold 400 books! - and then really, really sad when you look at your royalty numbers. But if you can get readers more invested in your work upfront, they're more likely to _read it_ - and become fans down the line. If possible, I always want to turn someone into a paying customer - even if that's for only $0.99.

And, of course, that note at the top of the description serves another purpose: those who just download the free book are now _aware_ that a box set exists. And that deal expires (I mention at the end of February). So they're more inclined to check out the fourth book, read through it (or at least some of it), so that they can figure out if that deal is worth grabbing.

These are fairly little things. But they're easy to do and have a big long term impact.

Nick


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## mmandolin (Oct 16, 2014)

Continually good stuff, Nick. Thanks again.  

I hope you put some of this into a book or course. It's basically better than anything else out there on the topic, particularly for its honest analysis and dissection of the self-publishing mindset.


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Still following along - lots of interesting stuff. This caught my eye in particular:



Nicholas Erik said:


> Just put a note at the top of Book 4's Amazon description about Books 1, 2 & 3 being discounted. This generates around 1.5 - 3% instant sell-through.


I know a lot of people do this, but isn't it technically against the TOS to put time-sensitive information in there? Or is it one of those things that's honoured more in the breach than the observance?

I should add, as a point of interest, that I regularly see this kind of instant sell-through anyway, even though I never put any advertising in the description, but only on the Regencies. If I have book 2 of the series free, I'll see a bunch of sales of book 1 on the free day too. This doesn't happen with the fantasies though - maybe because they're not as clearly delineated as a series.


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## AmpersandBookInteriors (Feb 10, 2012)

PaulineMRoss said:


> Still following along - lots of interesting stuff. This caught my eye in particular:
> 
> I know a lot of people do this, but isn't it technically against the TOS to put time-sensitive information in there? Or is it one of those things that's honoured more in the breach than the observance?


I think as long as you don't state a time that it ends they dont' count it as a time-sensitive piece of information?


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## Fel Beasley (Apr 1, 2014)

PaulineMRoss said:


> Still following along - lots of interesting stuff. This caught my eye in particular:
> 
> I know a lot of people do this, but isn't it technically against the TOS to put time-sensitive information in there? Or is it one of those things that's honoured more in the breach than the observance?
> 
> I should add, as a point of interest, that I regularly see this kind of instant sell-through anyway, even though I never put any advertising in the description, but only on the Regencies. If I have book 2 of the series free, I'll see a bunch of sales of book 1 on the free day too. This doesn't happen with the fantasies though - maybe because they're not as clearly delineated as a series.


I wonder if the effectiveness of sell-through during a sale is because readers can see the discounted books in both the series thingy and the also-boughts, especially the series thingy. They see book 1 free, book 2 99 cents and book 3 99 cents and just get them all with the assumption the price is only that low for a limited time. I know I do this. I actually grabbed all your fantasy books when they were 99 cents (a while ago) before reading any of them.

No regrets!


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Write.Dream.Repeat. said:


> I think as long as you don't state a time that it ends they dont' count it as a time-sensitive piece of information?


Well, prices and advertisements are likewise not allowed! Yet people do this all the time.


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Felicia Beasley said:


> I actually grabbed all your fantasy books when they were 99 cents (a while ago) before reading any of them. No regrets!


Oh wow! Thank you!


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## AmpersandBookInteriors (Feb 10, 2012)

PaulineMRoss said:


> Well, prices and advertisements are likewise not allowed! Yet people do this all the time.


True  And URLs, which I uh... *cough* well. You know.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

RobCornell said:


> I find this so weird. Most of the time, my ebooks open on the first chapter of the book and I never see these front matter mailing list links unless I purposely go back into the front matter. (In through the out door?) But you have data that supports the front matter working better?


The front matter displays in the Look Inside. Any links in there are live. I get quite a few signups from it.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

PaulineMRoss said:


> I know a lot of people do this, but isn't it technically against the TOS to put time-sensitive information in there? Or is it one of those things that's honoured more in the breach than the observance?


The latter (and Colleen is correct, too, the TOS can be intrepreted that URLs aren't technically allowed either). But permafree can also be interpreted as a TOS violation, yet support will change your price if you ask. Everyone can determine this for themselves, but Amazon could easily shut down the mention of promo/links in the description (for example, if you have even a whiff of this in your blurb on D2D, iBooks will say absolutely not).

By the way, Amazon's TOS currently says this:

"You may not include in any Digital Book any advertisements or other content that is primarily intended to advertise or promote products or services."

So it would seem we're all potentially in breach by A) mentioning our other books (products) or B) mentioning a mailing list (an advertisement).

Amazon seems very concerned about the reader experience, so I use that as my primary guide when determining whether or not I should do something. I only link within Amazon at the top (if I link at all). You _can_ link outside of Amazon (e.g. to a mailing list) and generate a _monster_ number of sign-ups. However, that makes me nervous, so I don't.

But, in the interest of fairness, I'll be running an experiment later in the week - the prices/promos won't be mentioned at all. So we'll see what I get in terms of comparative sell-through and see if it's worth taking a "risk."

In short, I think if you use KDP's tools in ways that sells books and makes customers happy, they aren't going to get mad. The TOS is purposely vague, and Amazon could immediately stop this behavior with an automated script if they wanted to, as iBooks does.

*February 18 Results*

Lightning Blade: done
Revenue: $203
Revenue to date: $3668

*Free Run + Book 8 Launch*

Feb 16: BookAdrenaline (444 downloads)
Feb 17: Fiverr/SFB/Bbassett/Ebookhounds/eBookbetty/ManyBooks (915 downloads)
Feb 18: FreeBooksy/Booksends/RR/ENT (4732 downloads)
Feb 19: BookBub

Books 1 - 3 set: 91 sales
Book 8: 3 sales

First of all, solid sell-through (1.9%). Secondly, holy crap did sales of Book 8 fall through the floor. Them's the breaks, however.

*Topic of the Day: Finances*

This whole series is pretty much centered around making more money. I think almost every marketing post I see - on KBoards or otherwise - also revolves around this idea. It makes sense right - make more, get closer to being a full-time author. And true, you can't be making like $200 and support yourself (at least not in the US; probably not anywhere).

Nonetheless, I think I've gotten it into my head that I need to make 6-figures a year to really "support" myself. Maybe you think that as well - or think it's $70k or whatever.

I think I've been wrong, and it's far, far less than you think. Yes, self-employment taxes are a b*tch and all that. But we're all spending vast quantities of money by not cutting costs that need to be cut.

You see, no one would ever accuse me of being thrifty. Or, really, particularly good at money, despite running my own business & having a finance degree. The latter really only means I understand the concept of compound interest and NPV (net present value)...except I didn't. Not deep within my bones, really, because my reaction to any $20/mo recurring payment or monster cover outlay was always _it's an investment_. Never, can I get this for cheaper - or do I need this at all?

As one particularly embarassing example, I used to pay $1000/yr for hosting. I guess I thought I was some hotshot blogger who needed the fastest damn servers available...except like three people a month visited my site. That's so obviously stupid that you're probably saying, _yeah, Nick, I don't do stuff like that_. Good. You're smarter than 25 year-old me was.

Nonetheless, after perusing Mr. Money Mustache for the past few days (and coupling it with the information I've already learned from the excellent I Will Teach You to be Rich), I've also decided that I was a lot dumber than I thought. At some point, I'm going to do an entire series on just managing your finances - because things like credit cards and outrageous health insurance premiums are the real things keeping you from being a full-time author. You probably only need to make ~$20 - $40k _net_ if your spouse works, or you have some secondary income.

That's a lot more doable than _write a book every six seconds until your hands fall off._

I'm not exactly as ready to be as extreme as Mr. Mustache, here, although I've gone from thinking he was insane to hilarious/basically spot-on within the span of a few days. What I'm talking about is being conscious of your spending - and focusing on the _long-term_.

This is why bad promo sites are lethal. Not because they cost you $10. But because that $10 is actually worth $19.67, assuming you invested it at a 7% return over the next ten years.

Or consider the cost of cable: $80/mo over ten years = $13840. And a whole lot of writing time wasted.

Or, um, the cost of InstaFreebie: $20/mo over ten years = $3460.

Or InDesign: $21.67/mo over ten years = $3575. Vs the cost of getting a used Mac + Vellum ($1180 over the next ten years). So I'm paying 3x as much for vastly inferior eBooks and significantly more headaches.

Needless to say, I will soon be purchasing a MacBook Air.

Note that all these figures include compounding, assuming that you would invest the money elsewhere. That's critical, too: you can't be locking in a net loss in a 0.2% "high-yield" savings account. But obviously that's a discussion for another post. In retrospect, I've been a huge fan of making more money. I still think that's a worthwhile effort.

But keeping spending in check is just as important, if not moreso. Because if your lifestyle/expenses keep rising with your income, as they're wont to do, you'll often find that no amount of income is satisfactory. Further, when you project out the cost of some of these services, you begin to realize just how expensive they really are. For example, do I need ConvertKit to charge me $441/year? No - that's madness when I could've gotten MailerLite for _free_ for years.

Instead I wasted $600+ on Aweber before I had any subs/sent a single email...then switched to a number of providers, and now pay CK for the privilege of having a list where 50%+ people don't open my emails. That's insane! We're all led to believe that's normal - yeah, open rates are typically like 20% - but that's nonsense from the email service providers to maintain massive lists of unresponsive customers.

Anyway, three rules:

1) never, ever charge anything on your credit card unless it's a BookBub. That's the only thing you can do on credit. Covers? Absolutely not. I'm _still_ paying off covers I bought 2.5 years ago (that I don't use, because I messed up the genre) at a ghastly 22.99% APR. That's actually a much higher EAR (Effective Annual Rate) (25.57%), since if you look at the fine print on your cards, the interest compounds monthly. Yes, somehow what was already a borderline loan-shark rate is actually worse than you thought. By the way, I knew this (hooray finance degree) and ignored it anyway. So on two $600 covers, I've paid $461+ in interest. That actually was way worse than I thought, and made me sad on the inside. Monthly compounding is absolutely murderous.

2) stick with mostly free stuff. I always thought it was stupid when people did their own covers. Now I see, thinking long-term, that might've been a huge mistake: over the past 5 years, I've spent $17,000 on covers. I'm not going to do all the compounding over that period, but assuming I just took that and invested it today at 7%, it'd be worth almost $24,000 in 5 years. By the way, if I learned how to do Photoshop, then I'd have a skill that could make _me_ money.

3) no cable. This alone will save you a massive amount of money, but more importantly it will save you 3 - 5+ hours of _time_ each day that you can reinvest into your business.

If you cannot do #1, then you do not have the money to do whatever it is you want to do. Figure out a way to learn it or trade for it - or go without it. I know, I know, Nick is super mean and keeping you from your dreams of being a full-time author. No, Nick is speaking from experience: if you're starting a business on a credit card, or funding it with a credit card, you do not know enough about business to be in business. Hence there is a high chance you will vaporize your money out of ignorance. By not wasting money, you have more money to spend on important things that will make you returns - which 22.99% interest payments (or 12.99% interest payments) do _not_ do.

Don't take #2 as a suggestion to become an art whiz. I probably still wouldn't do it, but I recognize the flaw in my thinking elsewhere, with skills that I could've easily learned but lazily paid for instead.

Anyway, if you want to calculate out how much a monthly expense is costing you over the next ten years (assuming you invested the money elsewhere), multiply the monthly cost by 173. A weekly expenditure (e.g. going out to eat once a week)? Multiply by 752. Rules of thumb from Mr. Money Mustache, which I recommend checking out. I will never do all of the suggestions, but my god, just cutting the dumb stuff out will save my business 10k+ over the next ten years. For like 10 hours of work. I don't know who else is paying me $1,000 an hour at this point (hint: no one).

Now excuse me while I rethink my entire business, since the monster I've created is less of a business and more of a giant money sieve.

Nick


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

RobCornell said:


> I find this so weird. Most of the time, my ebooks open on the first chapter of the book and I never see these front matter mailing list links unless I purposely go back into the front matter. (In through the out door?) But you have data that supports the front matter working better?


Patty is correct: it displays on the Look Inside. Also, people flip back through and start from the cover (I do this, although I don't take my own reading habits as a good proxy for the general populace). I've tried to get it to open to the offer page (or anywhere beside the opening chapter), but thus far my attempts at tweaking the formatting have been stymied by Amazon's automated start points.

Anyway, click data (all from the same book, just rotating different offers):

Offer - Book 2

Front matter: 96 clicks
Back matter: 41 clicks

Offer - Starter Library (3 novels)

FM: 59 clicks
Back: 10 clicks

Offer - no offer (just updates)

FM: 20 clicks
Back: 9 clicks

Offer - novellas

FM: 22 clicks
Back: 22 clicks

Click data obviously isn't the same as actual sign-ups, but it's about the best we can do. You're gonna get anywhere from 2x to 5x the clicks on the front. I don't know what happened with the novellas; that's a little strange. Even then, they're even, so you effectively double your sign-ups by including a link in the front matter.

Nick


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## Kate. (Oct 7, 2014)

I'm loving these updates, Nick, please keep them up!



> Needless to say, I will soon be purchasing a MacBook Air.


If you wanted to save even more, I use a program called MacInCloud. It lets you "rent" a mac interface for your PC computer. $10 for 10 hours. I've formatted 7 books in Vellum so far and even with all of my faffing about I'm not close to having to pay for a second set of hours. Of course, you might actually want a Mac for day-to-day use, so buying one would make sense - but if you only need it for Vellum, the rental system saves both money and space.


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## Berries (Feb 5, 2015)

> you probably only need to make ~$20 - $40k net if your spouse works, or you have some secondary income.


Um...no. I wish. This is largely dependent on where you live. I live in Los Angeles and 20-40K net/per year will allow you enough to live in the ghetto


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## Clementine (Jun 12, 2015)

Super interesting thread and your finance post is right up my alley. My husband and I stumbled upon Mr. Money Mustache several years ago, and while we aren't anywhere near as hardcore as him, we do run most financial decisions that we make through WWMMMD?
There was a (long) period in our lives where financial strain ruled everything and things were really bleak. Then we gained some breathing room and realized just how ugly things had been. In hindsight, we realized that the key was really keeping our recurring monthly bills as low as humanly possible and not just buying for the sake of having something newer and more shiny. 

We're super comfortable financially these days, but for the most part we still defer to being frugal in the exact ways that you mention. I could drive a really rad fancy car, but instead I bought a VW Golf with cash six years ago and realized that car payments suck a whole lot and that my Golf is pretty much the greatest thing ever (in fuel efficiency, reliability, and in how fun it is to drive). Making decisions like that opens our lives up for so much more freedom in so many other areas. 

It sounds like this may be a great turning point in your business. Best wishes!


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

I decided to use MacInCloud thanks to Kate's suggestion, which will save a few hundred bucks. Hooray!

And yes, Clementine, hopefully things turn around. But old habits die hard, as they say.

*February 19 Results*

Revenue: $560
Revenue to Date: $4198

So nine days to go and $8200 needed. I believe the correct words for this are "not happening," but we'll see. Didn't start Shadow Flare, because I was lazy.

*Free Run + Book 8 Launch*

Feb 16: BookAdrenaline (444 downloads)
Feb 17: Fiverr/SFB/Bbassett/Ebookhounds/eBookbetty/ManyBooks (915 downloads)
Feb 18: FreeBooksy/Booksends/RR/ENT (4732 downloads)
Feb 19: BookBub (30,458 on Amazon + 7482 downloads wide)

Books 1 - 3 set: 742 sales
Book 8: 6 sales

Sell-through was decent (2.4%). Secondly, 187 people bought an unadvertised Book 1 at $0.99, despite the first three books being available at the same price in the set. That's good for sell-through of 0.61%. Which was surprising. These are standalones, too, so Book 1 isn't even required.

Hit #2 in the Free Store; was blocked by a cozy mystery box set running the same day, which probably got an unseemly # of downloads.

Book 8 is on page 2 of the also-boughts for most of the books, which probably explains why it's being out-sold by the other volumes, despite being cheaper/newer. In any event, it passed Book 7's launch week sales at a higher price, so that's a big plus.

*Topic of the Day: Taking Action (The Only Ways to do It)*

Productivity is like the most popular subject on the internet, mostly because we're all wishing that, by reading some Top 5 Ways to Kill Procastination NOW article that somehow gathered 612 comments and rave reviews, the article will magically do our work for us or somehow will make work not be work. Naturally, this never happens, because the reason it's called work and not "fun time" is because the only way most humans will do much of it is for cold hard cash. Very few people get paid to go to the movies. Reading books, it would seem, is generally more fun than writing them. Unless, like here, I can just wing things off the top of my head and convince myself I'm a genius, which is very enjoyable indeed.

Ahem.

This productivity pilgrimage inevitably ends in the same way each time: undeterred by repeated failure/rampant charlatanism, we head on to the next resource, an ironically named Productivity Hacks of Elite Performers, which is a 25 minute video with seven CTAs to the "Power Productivity Course," pithy refried quotes from Warren Buffett or Michael Jordan (bonus points if you can weave in someone a little less mainstream), and a notable lack of any elite performers (hint: someone on YouTube making $20k a year doesn't have any secrets or know WTF they're talking about).

By the way, as I'm sure such videos and pages with those exact titles exist, allow me to give a disclaimer: I made up those titles myself without any research or Google searching.

Trying to reform myself of such fanciful and futile quests, I've determined that these are the only sources of action. If you have more, I'd love to hear them, but I'm pretty sure these are about it.

1) *habits*. Things you do automatically, regardless of the items below. 
2) *energy management* - sleep, diet and exercise.
> controls intrinsic motivation - the feeling of "wanting" to do something.
> controls willpower - the ability to overcome "nah, I'm not doing that.
3) *extrinsic motivation* - accountability (having to pay the rent or a bet with a friend) and deadlines.
4) *a purpose*. Which is technically intrinsic motivation, but it transcends that with either maniacal focus (e.g. I want to become Picasso and will paint for 16 hours a day to do so) or some sort of greater good/sense of community/changing the world (e.g. an impact bigger than yourself - can be your kids, can be your company, can be changing the world with an idea).

That's really it. Those are the variables you can adjust if you want to take more action (or, um, basically change your life). And yes, they interact with one another. But when you look at it simply, you can see what switches you can flip, rather than looking for more techniques and tricks. How many of us are getting to bed on time? How many of us are eating well? How many of us are buying $7 snacks a day that compound to over $36,000 in 10 years - and kill us slowly in the process?

The answer, if you look out your window, is self-evident. But Nick, those things are hard, you say. Not really. I thought about this, and only in recent history has eating fresh produce, delivered within days of picking from around the globe, been considered an unreasonable hardship requiring vast quantities of willpower. Nonetheless, I must "resist" the evil pizza and force myself to eat these horrid foods in a life of unfair suffering.

Obviously when you reframe certain things, you begin to realize what a moron you've been. Eating strawberries or lettuce or a salad is not some onerous burden on your life, it's a privilege to be cherished.

The other problem is the one true way: someone insists that one variable (usually #4) is the only way forward. This is usually cloaked in mysticism and a good vs. evil slant (you'll make bad products and hurt people if you don't like your work! - WRONG). That's why you get nonsense like follow your passion - when a purpose usually comes from deep understanding, which in turn only comes from years of experience in a field. Causality is mistaken.

Now excuse me while I go avoid my work and stuff my face with candy bars for another day.

Nick


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## AliceS (Dec 28, 2014)

Energy Management is a tough one for me, especially this time of year. Allergies suck the energy out of me and I have a blood sugar issue. Eating well is super important for me, and like the habit to write, you can get into the habit of eating well. You just have to change your favorites. Need a chocolate bar? Buy high quality, fair trade, organic. Need that salty, crunchy thing - that comes in low-fat, sea salt now. You don't have to give up treats, just make them what they are - treats - not lunch.


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## writerc (Apr 15, 2016)

Kate. said:


> If you wanted to save even more, I use a program called MacInCloud. It lets you "rent" a mac interface for your PC computer. $10 for 10 hours. I've formatted 7 books in Vellum so far and even with all of my faffing about I'm not close to having to pay for a second set of hours. Of course, you might actually want a Mac for day-to-day use, so buying one would make sense - but if you only need it for Vellum, the rental system saves both money and space.


Oh! how does this work? I have an ancient Mac that is too old to run Vellum. Do I still buy Vellum and then run it through the MacInCloud? sounds fantastic as I really want to give Vellum a try.


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## OEGaudio (Jul 26, 2012)

catlife said:


> Oh! how does this work? I have an ancient Mac that is too old to run Vellum. Do I still buy Vellum and then run it through the MacInCloud? sounds fantastic as I really want to give Vellum a try.


You do need to still buy Vellum. You basically log in remotely to a Mac and you can install Vellum onto it. It's pretty straight forward and works well. I set it up when I was at home in California and I just did a book on Vellum using it last week from Romania. There was a little lag, but nothing to prevent me from formatting the book.


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## Fel Beasley (Apr 1, 2014)

Remember you can try out Vellum for free. You can make your ebook and see if you like how it looks. You only pay when you want to actually download the book and use it.


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## writerc (Apr 15, 2016)

Felicia Beasley said:


> Remember you can try out Vellum for free. You can make your ebook and see if you like how it looks. You only pay when you want to actually download the book and use it.





OEGaudio said:


> You do need to still buy Vellum. You basically log in remotely to a Mac and you can install Vellum onto it. It's pretty straight forward and works well. I set it up when I was at home in California and I just did a book on Vellum using it last week from Romania. There was a little lag, but nothing to prevent me from formatting the book.


Thank you both 
that's really helpful!


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

I can indeed confirm that MacInCloud works fine, although it's a little laggy. Not a huge issue.

*Feb 20 Results*

Revenue: $277
Revenue to date: $4375

So I was going to pack it in yesterday. $1000/day to go? Fanciful, right?

WRONG.

I will be picking up the pace considerably here at the end and finishing strong. And making inadvertant rhymes, it seems.

*What About that Dystopian Free Run the Other Week?*

Yes. About that.

2105 downloads over 5 days, mostly as a result of FreeBooksy which brought in 1700+. 7 sales. 121 pages read. Retirement is imminent.

Also-boughts are totally murked, with similarly themed post-apocalyptic/sci-fi titles "A Winning Brand" and "Make Me Yours: Excite Spice Valentine's Day Anthology" entrenched on the first page. Ah well; got a review, at least.

*Free Run + Book 8 Launch*

Feb 16: BookAdrenaline (444 downloads)
Feb 17: Fiverr/SFB/Bbassett/Ebookhounds/eBookbetty/ManyBooks (915 downloads)
Feb 18: FreeBooksy/Booksends/RR/ENT (4732 downloads)
Feb 19: BookBub (30,458 on Amazon + 7482 downloads wide)
Fe 20: nothing (7337 on Amazon + 2262 downloads wide)

By the way, you can see the absurdity of BookBub in these numbers. It cost me $314 for all territories and generated 37,940 downloads by itself (0.83 cents/download). The other 11 sites I booked cost $333 and generated 6,091 downloads (5.5 cents/download).

Book 1: 27 sales
Books 1, 2 & 3: 183 sales
Book 8: 4 sales

It is really hard to create a tail with your launch without hitting critical mass. 60 sales in one day is not enough, at least in action adventure. I think you should probably aim for enough to stay on Top 20 of your sub-genre list for ~3 days. Just something to keep in mind.

*Writing a Novel in 7 Days*

In the interest of finishing strong, Shadow Flare will be completed in 7 days. The rules are as follows: I did not outline. It has to be 50,000+ words. And I started from scratch, aside from a tiny fragment of a scene (100 words) and a starting point (I decided I wanted it to start in media res, with our friendly protaganist Ruby Callaway dangling off a bridge - which became a skywalk).

Elevator pitch: Ruby Callaway and Colton Roark return to fight the Crusaders of Paradisum, an ancient cult sacrificing mortals to gain immortality, in Shadow Flare.

Day 1: 3367 words

I've decided to build this novel around theme. The holy trinity of writing is character, plot and theme. The characters in this book are fairly strong, since the book is written in first person. I like the interplay between Ruby and her partner Colton Roark. It works, and I've culled some of the "main characters acting like idiots" tendencies I've had in the past.

Anyway, what theme is that, you say? Belief/faith - the tendency for humans to become consumed by things that aren't true (or are true, but that no one else can see). I'll be reading The True Believer by Eric Hoffer over the next week to hopefully inject the philosophy with a little gravitas.

*Topic of the Day: Podcast Where I Talk About Perfectionism and Such*

Erica and Xavier of the Publishing Without Supervision Podcast were kind enough to invite me on and discuss perfectionism/analysis paralysis over the weekend. You can check out the episode here:

Episode 9: Perfectionism, Analysis Paralysis & What's Stopping You

I answer many questions you no doubt had, such as:

-what does this Nicholas Erik fellow look and sound like?
-how does one combat perfectionism/analysis paralysis? (make rules)
-doesn't just creating a lot of books lead to bad books? (the opposite)
-what are some of the reasons behind 28 Days to 10K? ($$$, power, world domination, the usual suspects)

And more. If you listen, you can now imagine reading these posts in my voice. Amazing. A couple things I forgot to mention:

-an excellent book on failure is Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed
-an excellent book on choosing your own path is The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness by Todd Rose

And the idea to discard nonsense comes from Bruce Lee: "Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own."

Also, ignore the relative lack of Amazon reviews/non-NYT bestseller status of both books. They're amazing and worth your $15.

Anyway, thanks again to Erica and Xavier for having me on.

Nick


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## rockondon (Aug 2, 2016)

Threads like these are kinda neat. 

I'm releasing my first book on march 1. Maybe I should start one, except it'd be more like 28 days to 10 bucks.


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## Jenny Schwartz (Mar 4, 2011)

"Retirement is imminent" LOL Thanks for the daily updates and thoughts, Nick. I'd realised BB was important, but wow!


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

*Feb 21 Results*

Revenue: $141
Total revenue to date: $4516

Well, this tail is choking and sputtering fast. My goodness.

*BookBub Check-In*

Feb 16: BookAdrenaline (444 downloads)
Feb 17: Fiverr/SFB/Bbassett/Ebookhounds/eBookbetty/ManyBooks (915 downloads)
Feb 18: FreeBooksy/Booksends/RR/ENT (4732 downloads)
Feb 19: BookBub (30,458 on Amazon + 7482 downloads wide)
Feb 20: nothing (7337 on Amazon + 2262 downloads wide)
Feb 21: nothing (2256 on Amazon + 874 downloads wide)

Still getting a good number of downloads (I put the end date as the 28th, so it's still on BookBub's site). But the sell-through anemic. One of the problems with writing a series of standalones (a la Jack Reacher) is that readers can buy one or two and be satisfied. I know readers claim to hate cliffhangers, but when you don't have an incentive to move on to the next book it kills sell-through unless they love, love, love the character. Something to consider when you're thinking about the Law and Order model.

*7 Day Novel Challenge*

Target: 50,000 words (no outline/no words to begin with)

Day 1: 3367 words
Day 2: 3022 words

Off the pace, obviously, but I can catch up.

*Topic of the Day: A Nano Guide to Writerly Finances*

I was going to write about how to hit #1 in the free store, but that didn't happen (peaked at #2, although I've done it before). Also, it follows exactly the same principles as hitting the Top 100, which you can read about here.

Instead, I wrote a little bit on the flip side of the coin: how to avoid unnecessary expenses and keep more of your hard-earned cash. Maybe you don't need to make $100k, or even $50k to enjoy your dream of becoming a full-time author. Anyway, read more about that in the guide to finances.

Nick


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

*Feb 22 Results*

Revenue: $104
Total revenue to date: $4620

*BookBub Check-In*

Feb 16: BookAdrenaline (444 downloads)
Feb 17: Fiverr/SFB/Bbassett/Ebookhounds/eBookbetty/ManyBooks (915 downloads)
Feb 18: FreeBooksy/Booksends/RR/ENT (4732 downloads)
Feb 19: BookBub (30,458 on Amazon + 7482 downloads wide)
Feb 20: nothing (7337 on Amazon + 2262 downloads wide)
Feb 21: nothing (2256 on Amazon + 874 downloads wide)
Feb 22: nothing (1008 on Amazon + 458 downloads wide)

Tail is sputtering and dying pretty damn quick. Can't complain, with over 55,000 downloads this week, but hopefully more of the other (full-priced books) are read soon.

*Other BookBub Check-In*

Day 1: Booksends (63 sales) + Fiverr on Book 1 (55 downloads); rank = #4843
Day 2: ENT/Robin Reads (228 sales) + FreeBooksy on Book 1 (1064 downloads); rank = #832
Day 3: BookBub (1769 sales); rank = #54
Day 4: nothing (259 sales); rank = #68
Day 5: nothing (129 sales); rank = #249
Day 6: nothing, back to full price (10 sales)
Day 7: nothing (5 sales)

1st week total = 2461 sales + 19,814 page reads. Anyway, the boxed set sold more copies in one week than it had in its first six months of release.
2nd week total = 21 sales + 49,965 page reads. 
3rd week total = coming tomorrow, but dropped

*7 Day Novel Challenge*

Target: 50,000 words (no outline/no words to begin with)

Day 1: 3367 words
Day 2: 3022 words
Day 3: 1115 words

Now well off the pace, but still not concerned. Maybe I should be. Learned how to use Vellum yesterday, and formatted some nice books. If you're not using it, stop whatever you're doing and go do so. This would've saved me hours of irritation.

*Topic of the Day: Launches & Not Giving Up*

Launched two books yesterday (a Half-Demon Rogue Box + Kip Keene Box). We'll see how things shake out over the next few days. Maybe I have a few tricks up my sleeve, yeah? Or maybe not.

Anyway, these topics will get necessarily shorter as a result, since I'll be focusing all my energy on getting Shadow Flare done, reformatting and trying to get these boxes off the ground. But I have no intention of giving up, despite things looking rather bleak, which leads me to today's (brief) topic.

There will be many times you want to quit. Believe that you can't do it. But you have to remember two things: if you quit, you get nothing. And things can turn in an instant if you keep plugging away. I've run 5 promos, I believe, this month. The BookBub tails are relatively anemic; I think Amazon's tamped down the effects even further. Lightning Blade's free run has been a bust thus far. The dystopian free run netted me nothing.

But it only takes one of them to have a tail or pop off for everything to work. That doesn't mean throw around your promo money like a gambler at a Vegas craps table. But keep setting yourself up for success with good shots and eventually one will hit. When that happens you can't be sure. But it definitely won't happen if you give up. And in the meantime, all your efforts are compounding - bringing in mailing list subscribers, a few new fans etc. So even if you never have some monster tail, or a book in the top 1,000, you can earn a living by building incrementally over time with solid promo and solid books.

Nick


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## Norman Steele Taylor (Nov 26, 2015)

Thank you for sharing your journey. I'm rooting for you, man. Keep pushing forward!


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## Samuel E. Green (Nov 26, 2015)

This is great, Nick. Good luck getting the book done in 7 days!


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## Yayoi (Apr 26, 2016)

I must say, I'm kind of jealous with the approach and attitude you have. I'm on the procrastinating side, whatever I know gets to be done ends up with me pursuing it after a month. And I easily get distracted over things I shouldn't even be doing in the first place. But I must say, my book one is nearly complete with two chapters still undone, while my book two is already in the works with about 20+ chapters more to go. (Sighs) I wonder, have you always been like this organized? Do you have other jobs?


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

RobCornell said:


> This might be a good topic of the day. I'm curious how it worked using Vellum through MacInCloud.


Sure, I'll cover it tomorrow. I've been comparing the file sizes and the KENP totals between InDesign & Vellum, which might be useful.



Yayoi said:


> I must say, I'm kind of jealous with the approach and attitude you have. I'm on the procrastinating side, whatever I know gets to be done ends up with me pursuing it after a month. And I easily get distracted over things I shouldn't even be doing in the first place. But I must say, my book one is nearly complete with two chapters still undone, while my book two is already in the works with about 20+ chapters more to go. (Sighs) I wonder, have you always been like this organized? Do you have other jobs?


I think this is a matter of experience. My first book (35,000 words) took five months, and I revised it 7 times - I wasn't done meddling with it even after it was published. So maybe 14 months, total, for one short novel that didn't sell?

I don't have any other job. So that helps significantly. But I'm still pretty disorganized in terms of execution. Things get messy and probably look neater in those posts than they actually are. But after a few years you start to hit a rhythm of what works for you, and things tend to go a little more smoothly. I still get distracted constantly and procrastinate far more than I should, though.

*Feb 23 Results*

Revenue: $171
Revenue to date: $4930 (I think I might've added something wrong along the way; this is the official # according to Book Report)

*BookBub Check-In*

Feb 16: BookAdrenaline (444 downloads)
Feb 17: Fiverr/SFB/Bbassett/Ebookhounds/eBookbetty/ManyBooks (915 downloads)
Feb 18: FreeBooksy/Booksends/RR/ENT (4732 downloads)
Feb 19: BookBub (30,458 on Amazon + 7482 downloads wide)
Feb 20: nothing (7337 on Amazon + 2262 downloads wide)
Feb 21: nothing (2256 on Amazon + 874 downloads wide)
Feb 22: nothing (1008 on Amazon + 458 downloads wide)
Feb 23: nothing (689 on Amazon + 328 downloads wide)

I must say, permafree is not very impressive these days. Not sure what Amazon did on the back-end, but sell-through is just low. Enough volume to make up for it, and I guess worth trying if your books are floundering in KDP exclusivity, but I don't think peramfree is a set and forget solution any more. Not that it has been for about two years, anyway.

*Other BookBub Check-In*

Day 1: Booksends (63 sales) + Fiverr on Book 1 (55 downloads); rank = #4843
Day 2: ENT/Robin Reads (228 sales) + FreeBooksy on Book 1 (1064 downloads); rank = #832
Day 3: BookBub (1769 sales); rank = #54
Day 4: nothing (259 sales); rank = #68
Day 5: nothing (129 sales); rank = #249
Day 6: nothing, back to full price (10 sales)
Day 7: nothing (5 sales)

1st week total = 2461 sales + 19,814 page reads. Anyway, the boxed set sold more copies in one week than it had in its first six months of release.
2nd week total = 21 sales + 49,965 page reads.
3rd week total = 12 sales + 35,185 page reads.

So yeah, that dropped pretty fast.

*Half-Demon Rogue Series + Lightning Blade*

I'm running a KCD on all three books in the Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy, a free run on Lightning Blade until the 24th, and have the complete Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy at $0.99 currently.

Book 1 (the one being advertised): 7 sales
Book 2: 6 sales 
Book 3: 18 sales
Box: 23 sales (from newsletter)

Lightning Blade: #1 - 213 (nothing), #2 - 192 (Choosy Bookworm), #3 - 208 (nothing)

You'll note that Moon Burn sold way more copies than the others, despite not being advertised. It came out a month ago, so Amazon is still organically recommending it to those who bought the first two books awhile ago. Just the power of the 'zon at work.

*7 Day Novel Challenge*

Target: 50,000 words (no outline/no words to begin with)

Day 1: 3367 words
Day 2: 3022 words
Day 3: 1115 words 
Day 4: 3678 words

Only 39,000 words in three days! Totally reasonable. But yeah, it'll get done.

*Topic of the Day: How Hard is Consistency?*

Consistency is really difficult until it becomes a habit. Even posting here everyday (without breaks) has, at times, been a struggle. Not that it's so hard on an individual basis; it's the fact that showing up every day, whether you want to or not, soon becomes a challenge in aggregate. Because the days where you don't want to show up are frequent enough to scuttle much of your progress.

And the bill for skipping your work comes due eventually. See what happened with Lightning Blade earlier in the month? That affected everything later - all the advertising, the schedule, everything. Pushing that back reduced my chances of hitting the challenge threshold. Eventually the bill came due. Instead of 9 days of Shadow Flare's release, which could have been substantial, we'll have that book go out on March 1st.

Is any of that disastrous? No. But it becomes a problem when you schedule promos around a launch, and then push the launch back. And then you have to do _more_ work in order to catch up. Compounding works both ways. Call it momentum if you like; but the spiral goes downward, burying you beneath a heavy load of dirt. Or it can lift you high in the air, propelled by a jet stream. Those are about the best cliched metaphors I can offer right now, but you get the point.

As an example, by not doing 30 pages of Lightning Blade one day, that becomes 60 pages the next day. But 60 pages is far more exhausting and onerous, which means that even if it gets done, the negative compounding effects on my sleep and energy mean that Day 3's output + quality are affected as well. Combine that with reduced promo effectiveness and a host of other little side-effects and you begin to see that this consistency thing is much bigger than you thought.

In fact, it's probably the difference between making it and breaking even (or losing money). Seriously. If you look at all the problems Lightning Blade caused, then you can see hundreds of dollars simply being incinerated.

If you crack the code of consistency (habits), then you can find yourself in a remarkably simple, easy life that seems to build on itself magically. Most people don't do this, and put in _more_ work just to stay behind. They experience chronic stress, are in poor shape, have no time for family or friends and are constantly overworked, relatively broke and often unhappy. Which is not a bit of judgment, but just aspects, I think, we've all experienced over periods where we've tried to catch-up. And the culprit is not being consistent, and only going for home runs. The problem is, when you do that, you tend to strike out a lot.

Nick


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## batmansero (Oct 10, 2014)

Nicholas Erik said:


> *Topic of the Day: Podcast Where I Talk About Perfectionism and Such*
> 
> Erica and Xavier of the Publishing Without Supervision Podcast were kind enough to invite me on and discuss perfectionism/analysis paralysis over the weekend. You can check out the episode here:
> 
> ...


Thank you Nick for taking the time to answer our questions and slowly enshroud yourself in darkness (you'll know what I mean if you watch the youtube)


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

batmansero said:


> Thank you Nick for taking the time to answer our questions and slowly enshroud yourself in darkness (you'll know what I mean if you watch the youtube)


Indeed, I was caught in a moment of analysis paralysis on whether or not to get up and hit the lights. Thanks again for having me on the podcast, Erica!

*Feb. 24 Results*

Results: $152
Revenue to date: $5082

*BookBub Check-In*

Feb 16: BookAdrenaline (444 downloads)
Feb 17: Fiverr/SFB/Bbassett/Ebookhounds/eBookbetty/ManyBooks (915 downloads)
Feb 18: FreeBooksy/Booksends/RR/ENT (4732 downloads)
Feb 19: BookBub (30,458 on Amazon + 7482 downloads wide)
Feb 20: nothing (7337 on Amazon + 2262 downloads wide)
Feb 21: nothing (2256 on Amazon + 874 downloads wide)
Feb 22: nothing (1008 on Amazon + 458 downloads wide)
Feb 23: nothing (689 on Amazon + 328 downloads wide)
Feb 24: nothing (1618 on Amazon + 237 downloads wide)

For some reason the free downloads surged on Amazon. No idea why. Didn't have anything scheduled, unless I forgot. I'll take it.

*Half-Demon Rogue Series + Lightning Blade*

I'm running a KCD on all three books in the Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy, a free run on Lightning Blade until the 24th, and have the complete Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy at $0.99 currently.

Book 1 (the one being advertised): #1 - 7 + #2 - 37 sales (BargainBooksy/FussyLibrarian/ReadCheaply/SFB/EileenCruzColeman/MyBookCave)
Book 2: #1 - 6 + #2 - 18 sales
Book 3: #1 - 18 + #2 - 29 sales
Box: #1 - 23 sales (from newsletter) + #2 - 31 sales

It's worth noting that the first book (Demon Rogue) has been run free a number of times on many sites. So that's going to mute the paid #s. I accidentally submitted it at $0.99 to Robin Reads and got accepted; then I decided to see what would happen, and built a $0.99 promo around it.

Page reads have been negligible, as is typical at $0.99.

Lightning Blade: #1 - 213 (nothing), #2 - 192 (Choosy Bookworm), #3 - 208 (nothing), #3 - 2578 (Uncarved on Fiverr/FreeBooksy)

*7 Day Novel Challenge*

Target: 50,000 words (no outline/no words to begin with)

Day 1: 3367 words
Day 2: 3022 words
Day 3: 1115 words
Day 4: 3678 words
Day 5: 6822 words

My idea was originally to get out ahead of the curve with some big days. That didn't happen, and it never happens for me. I also didn't factor in the warm-up period that usually ensues after a long layoff. I'd been mostly revising this month, so jumping in cold from 0 to 10k was a pipe dream. The first few 3k days felt like epic efforts. Now that I'm into it, that's quickly disappeared - but there's no time to waste in a 7 day challenge.

A better strategy would have been to write 5 - 6k for the first few days. That would put me in semi-easy striking distance, and also give me some time to explore the plot threads/revise, as most of the set-up comes in the first 2/3 of the novel. As it stands, I have 32,000 words left and a rather long weekend ahead of me. We'll see what shakes out.

I don't think there's any benefit to writing a novel this fast, other than to prove to yourself that you can.

*Topic of the Day: Vellum & Mac in Cloud*

As promised, here are my (not-so-brief) thoughts on Vellum + MacInCloud.

The remote Mac experience is definitely a little glitchy/laggy at first, but you quickly acclimate in around 10 minutes. This is largely because Vellum itself follows in the Apple tradition (although not being an Apple product) of being incredibly simple & intuitive to use. Things that took multiple button presses and were serious forms of annoyance in InDesign are absolute joys to fix or add in Vellum.

If you're using MacInCloud for anything that requires precision - Photoshop, web design - etc. it's probably going to be unusable. There are graphical glitches that appear when you scroll through a document. Similarly, if you're harboring thoughts of using it with Scrivener to write, that'll probably be a miserable experience due to minor input lag from the keyboard. This is due to latency, which is completely understandable. But just throwing that out there for those thinking about using it for other programs (I'm on the pay as you go plan, FYI).

But for Vellum, it's perfectly functional. I barely notice the lag. If you have your documents in Word (.docx) format, it's as simple as importing them; Vellum does the rest. Since mine are in InDesign, I have to copy and paste the contents over and then split the chapters manually, which adds work. But this is because of my unique situation; this won't apply to most people who have their files in Word.

For transferring files, I just linked my Dropbox to the MacInCloud. I save the Vellum/MOBI outputs to the Dropbox, and they appear on my Windows machine just fine (although I obviously can't edit the Vellum files). Dropbox is free and the easiest solution to easily shuffling files back and forth.

The styles are customizable enough to get something relatively unique that looks great. Obviously not as customizable as InDesign (which is the standard for industry EPUBs), but you also are guaranteed a working document across all platforms. Further, you can input your store links and then have Vellum _automagically_ generate specific EPUBs for each store. No reformatting required. Plus, the peace of mind knowing that your document will display 100% correctly everywhere is amazing. No more rooting through Kindle Previewer to make sure I didn't break anything...then finding that there were platform-specific glitches present that Kindle Previewer didn't display. I was getting reports of occasional minor glitches on other platforms with InDesign - stuff like the NCX not working properly, (?) symbols on certain platforms et al. It was just a massive pain in the ass to troubleshoot.

I was very concerned about the KENP page counts + file sizes, since those influence earnings. Vellum spits out some massive looking MOBIs, especially when you embed a cover or image. But something that appears as 3.85 MB on your PC is crunched down when uploaded to Amazon to a palatable 0.46 MB. That's still larger than the InDesign file (0.32 MB), but I embedded the cover + image. For an apples to apples comparison of straight, identical text, Vellum = 0.37 MB and InDesign = 0.35 MB for a 51,000 word, 37 chapter book.

As to the KENP, apparently I've been severely shortchanging myself, as here are some of the comparative #s:

Indesign - 241; Vellum - 281 (45,000 words)
Indesign - 244; Vellum - 282 (45,000 words)
Indesign - 437; Vellum - 503 (78,000 words)

I don't know if Amazon hasn't reset the start points or whatever, but I was worried about losing pages. Instead, it seems I've been losing 17% of my page reads for no good reason.

In short, I've used Word templates, played around with Jutoh + Sigil + Calibre, and used InDesign extensively for the last few years. I see absolutely zero reason to use anything other than Vellum, unless you need a highly custom interior (in which case you'll probably need to hire someone). For print PDFs, InDesign is still the undisputed king and fairly simple to use, since what appears on screen is what you get. Unfortunately, all that goes out the window with EPUBs, leaving you hunting unstyled gremlins through a document.

I've also gotten some highly customized interiors that ran me $150+. Those look more unique than Vellum (and better, I think), but the price is steep, and they're very easy to break if you ever go hunting in the code with a blunt ax in Sigil. Which I have a wont to do. I accidentally crunched together all the scene breaks one time, which led to some interesting reviews. My error (in case that wasn't clear), but the risk of updating a Vellum document and breaking it is nil, and the program costs $200 total.

For the record, I didn't see a bump in sales back when I swapped out to the really nice, premium custom interiors. Everything stayed the same, and no one commented that it now looked amazing. Indeed, the only comments I received were when I inadvertently broke the formatting. Which is to say that I think a certain level of professionalism will do (e.g., it's readable and looks clean); beyond that, you're not moving the needle.

The only minuses are this: it's frighteningly easy to move a chapter within a Vellum document and get your book out of order. Would be nice if the program asked you "are you sure?" or something like that. And, as of this writing, Vellum cannot produce print interiors (nor can it produce PDFs, to the best of my knowledge). There are rumblings that print functionality might be included later on, but for now, it's eBook only. I stopped producing print books, since no one bought them. But that might play into your decision.

All of these were for fiction, but you can definitely format a moderately complex non-fiction book with images, pullquotes and subheaders in Vellum. If you have a textbook, that'll be a no go. But it should work for most folks in that regard.

This is probably the best $200 (+$30 for MacInCloud) I've spent in a while.

ETA: apparently Vellum for Print is in beta right now. So that should be coming soon.

Nick


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

*Feb. 25 Results*

Results: $200
Revenue to date: $5282

*BookBub Check-In*

Feb 16: BookAdrenaline (444 downloads)
Feb 17: Fiverr/SFB/Bbassett/Ebookhounds/eBookbetty/ManyBooks (915 downloads)
Feb 18: FreeBooksy/Booksends/RR/ENT (4732 downloads)
Feb 19: BookBub (30,458 on Amazon + 7482 downloads wide)
Feb 20: nothing (7337 on Amazon + 2262 downloads wide)
Feb 21: nothing (2256 on Amazon + 874 downloads wide)
Feb 22: nothing (1008 on Amazon + 458 downloads wide)
Feb 23: nothing (689 on Amazon + 328 downloads wide)
Feb 24: nothing (1618 on Amazon + 237 downloads wide)
Feb 25: nothing (581 on Amazon + 199 downloads wide)

Week 1 (19 - 25):

Book 4 (free): 43947 Amazon + 11840 copies wide = 55787 total
Book 1 ($0.99): 287 Amazon + 85 wide = 372 total 
Books 2 - 7 (individual; full price $4.99): 92 Amazon + 30 wide = 122 total
Book 8: 19 Amazon + 5 copies wide = 24 total

Box 1 ($0.99): 1242 Amazon + 167 wide = 1409 total
Box 2 ($8.99): 20 Amazon + 6 wide = 26 total

Sales #s = $275 + $962 = $1237 
-$650 in expenses
=+$587 in profit

I didn't include Google Play, but that only adds like $20 or something.

And we're back down. To be honest, I'm not really that excited about how this panned out. Yes, the overall #s look very successful - if you throw in the previous days, we're well over 60,000 downloads and 2,000 sales - but the profit is kind of weak and the tail is dying quickly. No complaints, and BookBub is still spectacularly effective (obviously), but it's easy to get distracted by the big #s and then look at the net take and be less than impressed.

Assuming you had a BookBub every week of this magnitude, that would be $600 in profit or $2400/mo for this particular series. That wouldn't be enough to live on - with 8 books, no less, which is a bigger backlist than many people have. You'd take the $2400 profit, to be clear, but A) that's not going to happen since BookBub won't take you every week and B) Amazon seems really intent to mute the effects as best it can. So to anyone whose promotional strategy is "get BookBubs," or thinks all will be different afterwards, I think it behooves you to consider that, most of the time, they look like these two: a big bang and then a three week drift back to normal.

Of course, there are exceptions. And those can be lucrative indeed. Just no magic bullets, people.

And man, pour one out for permafree. I think it's just about dead as a useful strategy (temporary price pulses like this one notwithstanding).

*Half-Demon Rogue Series + Lightning Blade*

I'm running a KCD on all three books in the Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy, a free run on Lightning Blade until the 24th, and have the complete Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy at $0.99 currently.

Book 1 (the one being advertised 
Day #1 - 7
Day #2 - 37 sales (BargainBooksy/FussyLibrarian/ReadCheaply/SFB/EileenCruzColeman/MyBookCave)
Day #3 - 51 sales (Robin Reads)
Book 2
Day #1 - 6 
Day #2 - 18 sales
Day #3 - 15 sales
Book 3 
Day #1 - 18
Day #2 - 29 sales
Day #3 - 19 sales
Box 
Day #1 - 23 sales (from newsletter) 
Day #2 - 31 sales
Day #3 - 7 sales

Page reads totaled around 2700 on Day 3, which isn't spectacular, but better than expected at $0.99.

Lightning Blade: #1 - 213 (nothing), #2 - 192 (Choosy Bookworm), #3 - 208 (nothing), #3 - 2578 (Uncarved on Fiverr/FreeBooksy) = 3213 downloads

Sold 22 copies yesterday of Lightning Blade at full price because I backloaded the promo on the last day. Dropping back to normal.

*7 10 Day Novel Challenge*

Target: 50,000 words (no outline/no words to begin with)

Day 1: 3367 words
Day 2: 3022 words
Day 3: 1115 words
Day 4: 3678 words
Day 5: 6822 words
Day 6: 6100 words

Obvious adjustment needed to be made here, since I wasn't going to write 28,000 words today. That's fine; it just needs to be done by March 1 (when I told my list I'd have it ready). This was originally going to be a novel in 10 days (I re-read the original post; no I didn't edit the number to make myself look better, although that would be brilliant), anyway.

Reformatting books in Vellum really swallowed up a lot of time. I also tend to write longer posts here than I can afford, time wise, since I enjoy that more.

Oh, another thing: setting bad daily word counts. 10k is not a good # to aim for off the bat (for 99.9% of people). If I'd have got 5 - 6k, as stated yesterday, I would have been right about where I needed to be. A similar thing happens when sitting down to write: a lot of productivity books give terrible advice about blocking out a space of 3 - 4 hours at a time. *Almost no one can do high level work straight through for that period of time.* Most people can't concentrate/sit still for an hour; 4 hours is lunacy. The best musicians in the world often take _naps_ between their practice sessions (by the way, almost all of them practice no more than 5 hours a day; many less) because their focus is so intense.

The goal is not to be a donkey and work all day for low pay/low results. I think the goal is to be a race horse, where you race and train intensely and get paid millions of dollars to do so. If you're getting in 3 hours of real work per day, that's enough to push yourself forward.

I tried an innovative 6 hour block yesterday; predictably, the first 2 were doing mindless work in Vellum, the next 2 were spent intermittently revising and messing around on the internet, and then the final 2 were actually spent seriously writing. *Split up your work time.* 2x 2 hour blocks (e.g. morning/afternoon) would've been far more productive and cost me less time.

Also, a final note: cramming is not an effective life strategy. If this was your go-to move in school, you need to fix it (e.g. recraft your habits). Otherwise you're not going to make it. Books are just too long and the publishing process requires too much planning to wing them. This is a major problem for me, and leads to some of the sloppiness/disjointed stuff you see here. It also makes you work more and ruins your consistency - not that anyone cares, but I haven't been able to play guitar the past two days because I've been working on this book and in Vellum. That's stupid.

*Topic of the Day: On Failure*

There's 3 days left, but I think it's safe to say I'm not going to leap toward 10k unless something truly magical happens. I might not even be able to break my previous best mark.

But you know what?

That's okay. Because I think the end results will be _more_ helpful for you as a result. I'm excited to breakdown where things went wrong - obviously with Lightning Blade there were a number of unnecessary unforced errors - but also where flaws in my thinking, promo wise, were. For example, there tends to be magical thinking with BookBub - which, while great, goes away just like everything else. We tend to only hear about the career making ones, or see the early few days' worth of reports - authors tend to stop posting when the results get unexciting. That gives us unrealistic expectations and makes us focus on the wrong things (e.g. BookBub is the gatekeeper keeping me from riches - I must sell my soul to get one!!!).

I think it was always going to take a little luck (e.g. a nice tail) from one of these promos to break 10k (or the more fanciful 12.4k). But that's a breakdown in strategy, wherein I'm too reliant on luck/outside sources. That's a good lesson to put in my back pocket for next time.

Anyway, thanks for following along. We'll see where everything shakes out in the end.

Nick


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## doolittle03 (Feb 13, 2015)

Nick, thanks a lot for keeping up with this challenge and posting your numbers and thoughts in depth. This should be a sticky! There's so much good stuff in here. I have a similar ambition for this year and I've been following your thread closely because it's all applicable. Even the big push to write a novel in 10 days--I'm finishing one for March, and making the best possible use of my writing time, (I've found) is my biggest hurdle. It's crazy. I think there's a kind of anxiety around the creative process and I have to blank out every twenty minutes or so. 
Anyway, thank you and boy, I'll miss this thread.


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Just noticed and read through this thread yesterday and really enjoyed your insights and comments, so thank you for taking the time to share.

With MacinCloud, how do you access Vellum?  Do you have to ask them to install it on the computer you're going to use or does it not require an install?  I could probably track down the answer myself, but since you just went through setting it up, figured I'd ask you first if that's okay.


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## Kate. (Oct 7, 2014)

Nick, thank you for consistently updating this thread, and for the attitude you've adopted in the face of a not-what-you-wanted result. This thread has been a great motivator and learning experience. If you felt up to posting about what you think worked / didn't work, I'd read every word of it. =)



Cassie Leigh said:


> Just noticed and read through this thread yesterday and really enjoyed your insights and comments, so thank you for taking the time to share.
> 
> With MacinCloud, how do you access Vellum? Do you have to ask them to install it on the computer you're going to use or does it not require an install? I could probably track down the answer myself, but since you just went through setting it up, figured I'd ask you first if that's okay.


I think it depends? Mine had Vellum pre-installed but it was an old version. I had to ask the MacInCloud folks to update it, which they did within a day. I think the same interface is used by multiple people so if one of them installed Vellum before you won't have to do it yourself.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

doolittle03 said:


> Nick, thanks a lot for keeping up with this challenge and posting your numbers and thoughts in depth. This should be a sticky! There's so much good stuff in here. I have a similar ambition for this year and I've been following your thread closely because it's all applicable. Even the big push to write a novel in 10 days--I'm finishing one for March, and making the best possible use of my writing time, (I've found) is my biggest hurdle. It's crazy. I think there's a kind of anxiety around the creative process and I have to blank out every twenty minutes or so.
> Anyway, thank you and boy, I'll miss this thread.


Glad you found the thread helpful. I'll still be posting a couple more things after it's done (recaps and such), so hopefully those will be cool as well.



Cassie Leigh said:


> Just noticed and read through this thread yesterday and really enjoyed your insights and comments, so thank you for taking the time to share.
> 
> With MacinCloud, how do you access Vellum? Do you have to ask them to install it on the computer you're going to use or does it not require an install? I could probably track down the answer myself, but since you just went through setting it up, figured I'd ask you first if that's okay.


Happy you've found it useful.

Kate answered this, but a previous version of Vellum came pre-installed on my MacInCloud. Not sure if that's just standard or not; in any event, it's worked fine. Being lazy, I haven't asked to update to version 1.42.

I tried to install Vellum myself at first, but you don't get admin access with the pay-as-you-go plan. So I just rolled with ver. 1.41. But contacting support probably sounds like a smart idea.



Kate. said:


> Nick, thank you for consistently updating this thread, and for the attitude you've adopted in the face of a not-what-you-wanted result. This thread has been a great motivator and learning experience. If you felt up to posting about what you think worked / didn't work, I'd read every word of it. =)


Absolutely! I shall indeed be doing a recap/post-mortem post on events. I'd like to do a comparison to a previous challenge I did last summer (trying to earn $3k with my pen names), since I think it'll be interesting to see if I'm making the same mistakes. So those will come at some point after this all shakes out and I have the final #s.

Nick


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## Kate. (Oct 7, 2014)

Nicholas Erik said:


> Absolutely! I shall indeed be doing a recap/post-mortem post on events. I'd like to do a comparison to a previous challenge I did last summer (trying to earn $3k with my pen names), since I think it'll be interesting to see if I'm making the same mistakes. So those will come at some point after this all shakes out and I have the final #s.


Great, I'm looking forward to it!


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## mjl1966 (Feb 15, 2017)

Hi Nick,

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, your promos for sales generated more sales revenue than your free book promo? (i.e. direct sales promo beat sell-through promo.)  It's all kind of ... complicated.  But very enlightening.  Thanks for sharing!


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

mjl1966 said:


> Hi Nick,
> 
> So, if I'm understanding this correctly, your promos for sales generated more sales revenue than your free book promo? (i.e. direct sales promo beat sell-through promo.) It's all kind of ... complicated. But very enlightening. Thanks for sharing!


As of right now, yes. But there are other factors: the free book was wide, whereas the box set had a Kindle Countdown Deal (where you get 70% of the royalty at $0.99) and had the benefits of page read revenue. Not an apples to apples comparison, but in this instance the paid book beat free handily. We'll see how the tail shakes out for the free book.

*Feb. 26 Results*

Revenue: $182
Revenue to date: $5464

I've actually passed $6k with D2D + Google Play etc. but I'll wait to add that later.

*Half-Demon Rogue Series + Lightning Blade*

I'm running a KCD on all three books in the Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy, a free run on Lightning Blade until the 24th, and have the complete Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy at $0.99 currently.

Book 1 (the one being advertised)
Day #1 - 7
Day #2 - 37 sales (BargainBooksy/FussyLibrarian/ReadCheaply/SFB/EileenCruzColeman/MyBookCave)
Day #3 - 51 sales (Robin Reads)
Day #4 - 28 sales (BookBarbarian)
Book 2
Day #1 - 6
Day #2 - 18 sales
Day #3 - 15 sales
Day #4 - 52 sales (I believe I did the BookBarbarian double feature; I've advertised Demon Rogue for free there before, hence the massive discrepancy in Book 2 > Book 3 sales)
Book 3
Day #1 - 18
Day #2 - 29 sales
Day #3 - 19 sales
Day #4 - 32 sales
Box
Day #1 - 23 sales (from newsletter)
Day #2 - 31 sales
Day #3 - 7 sales
Day #4 - 13 sales (started some BookBub PPC ads)

2300 page reads. Back to full price today.

Lightning Blade 4 day free run: 3213 downloads
Day #1 paid: 22 sales at full price
Day #2: 3 sales at full price

Total for Demon Rogue Trilogy (individual books): 312 sales. 
I'm not going to break out the cost vs. revenue, but I about broke even. Will end up making $ when you factor in the tail/visibility etc.

Side note: it massively helps when your books are longer. Moon Burn was released far after the others (to a stupid degree), but even with that it's done reasonably well due to being 2x as long as the others. Page reads are helped substantially as a result.

*7 10 Day Novel Challenge*

Target: 50,000 words (no outline/no words to begin with)

Day 1: 3367 words
Day 2: 3022 words
Day 3: 1115 words
Day 4: 3678 words
Day 5: 6822 words
Day 6: 6100 words
Day 7: 6117 words

I'm doing this thing where I'm revising the beginning in the first 2 hour session, then writing new content in the second 2 hour session. This helps keep continuity straight and also ensures that everything is tighter (e.g. I can plant hints early on and then come back to them later). Haven't tried this before, but it's working reasonably well thus far.

*Topic of the Day: BookBub PPC Ads*

I decided to test out BookBub ads yesterday - because, really, why not? They're different than other PPC ads in that they're only available on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions basis). I'm not crazy about that.

Contrary to Amazon, where you'll set up an ad and then get like three clicks for a month, BookBub immediately starts running your ads and spending your money. I set them up about 16 hours ago and already have a charge for $50 on my credit card. Results? I have no idea. I'm inclined to say that some sales increased (I'm advertising box sets at $0.99). But the problem with being charged per impression (it's about $5 - $6 per thousand impressions) is that the majority of people are never gonna see your ad. It's at the bottom of the email, and they have to scroll down.

Indeed, that means it's shaking out to around $0.60/click. Which is pretty pricey.

On the other hand, the series that I just ran the free BookBub on is performing the best. Sales definitely spiked after I started the ads. But at $0.99, and a $10 daily spend, it's hard to break even.

My initial impression is that you could light a lot of money on fire if you're not careful - set your budgets low. Seriously; it munched through the daily spend in about three hours, then did it again by the time I was up the next day for 2 out of 4 of the ads ($10/daily budgets). I was going to set that at $40/day, but then decided it against it (thankfully). Not an advertising venue to use if money is tight. If you have an extended series it could be profitable, and I think it's an interesting way to get eyeballs on your $0.99 entry point. People seem to interact with them, as opposed to Amazon ads (or, at least, my Amazon ads at the moment). Definitely requires split-testing. So I'll try to drop a few hundred bucks in it and tweak things.

Nick


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

*Feb 27 Results*

Revenue: $198
Total Revenue: $5562

Lightning Blade died again, the trilogy box also died...basically, things are looking pretty sad today. Ah well. Onward. Apparently AWS is having issues, though, which probably accounts for the lower than expected sales. One of the (many) reasons why keeping too close an eye on your sales report leads to madness.

Note on sell-through for Demon Rogue (Book 1) to the others during the run: indeed, Pauline was correct upthread. Lots of people picked them all up together, and I made no mention of 2 + 3 being on sale in the description. These sales didn't spill over to the Complete Trilogy - so here's my official (re: not official at all) take on the matter.

If the books are linked in the also-boughts (2 + 3 occupy the first two spots on Book 1's also-boughts, as you'd expect them to), then you don't have to mention the sale at the top of the description. You might get higher sell-through - although I got damn near 50% throughout, so it's hard to do better than that - but it's definitely not necessary to let people know again.

However, if the books aren't linked in the also-boughts (the complete trilogy is new, and thus hasn't had enough time to get on the 1st page of Book 1), then you'll have to include some mention to let people know. Otherwise there's no chance of them knowing.

Incidentally, this answers the question of why some people's boxed sets sell and others don't, despite being better deals than the individual books. If the box set isn't linked on page 1 of Book 1's also-boughts (or pushed heavily in Book 1's back matter), then most people will never know it exists.

*7 10 Day Novel Challenge*

Target: 50,000 words (no outline/no words to begin with)

Day 1: 3367 words
Day 2: 3022 words
Day 3: 1115 words
Day 4: 3678 words
Day 5: 6822 words
Day 6: 6100 words
Day 7: 6117 words
Day 8: 4231 words

Wasn't feeling it. Not feeling it today, either. But we'll see what happens.

*Topic of the Day: Getting Ahead, Rather Than Behind*

I've batted the idea back and forth regarding release schedules - holding novels back and then releasing them over a smooth time frame (probably not all at once, unless you're super-prolific). There are plusses and minuses - the main drawbacks being you're not going to make much in the interim + if the new series flops, then you're out a decent amount of work (so a 3 - 5 month run of dry sales becomes the better part of 6 - 8 months).

Nonetheless, having the books done ahead of time - a month or two before release day - allows you to better plan launches. Instead of firing off a Lightning Blade promo into the dark 5 days before the book goes off.

It also prevents that feeling of constantly being "buried" and behind. Which leads to stress.

Not sure what I'll do going forward. But I feel that more preparedness - while certainly not the difference between 6k and 10k - would have helped me make more money. And the overall process would have been smoother.

Nick


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

*Feb 28 Results*

Revenue: $191
Total revenue: $5864

*7 10 Day Novel Challenge*

Target: 50,000 words (no outline/no words to begin with)

Day 1: 3367 words
Day 2: 3022 words
Day 3: 1115 words
Day 4: 3678 words
Day 5: 6822 words
Day 6: 6100 words
Day 7: 6117 words
Day 8: 4231 words
Day 9: 4170 words

Thanks to Amazon's delays yesterday, I decided to push the release back to Mar. 8. No reason to toss it out there when KDP may or may not be fully operational. Things like the sales ranks weren't updating correctly. Lightning Blade got partially murked because its also-boughts didn't kick in for almost 14 days. I can't imagine the servers all crashing would help expedite that for Shadow Flare.

Another reason: I could've pushed and finished the book, but I don't really like the weighting of the two plot lines. I'm not sure why there are two plot lines (three, actually), since it's pretty short. That'll necessitate a slightly longer book. As it stands, the main line (cult sacrificing people to gain immortality) is getting oddly short shrift.

That's what happens sometimes when you don't outline. Sometimes the story is better for it - e.g. you go somewhere better. In this case, that did not happen. It's not that this B Plot is bad or will be axed; more to the point that it's taking up way to much room, proportionally speaking.

*Topic of the Day: The Fallibility of Memory*

First: we're done, obviously. But I have a weekly recap post planned (On Turning Failure Into Opportunity) for tomorrow, an overall recap post and then a comparison between this and a challenge I did over the summer. So those should be fun. Final #s will come around the 3rd, since D2D etc. will have fully updated.

Anyway: here's why it's so important to keep records. Because you misremember things.

This whole challenge was to double my best month ($6200 > $12400). Simple, right? Yes, well, even my best month wasn't remembered correctly, because it actually totaled $6900+ and change with everything together. Oops. Even things that stick out in our minds are oftentimes incorrect. That revenue # is a perfect case-in-point. This is why it's so important to keep good records. Otherwise it can seem like you're failing.

For example, this month felt like a failure, word count wise. 42,606 in fiction. But that was actually better than _all but one_ month in 2015. It's my 9th best month out of the past 26 (since I started keeping those records). If I didn't have those #s in Excel, I would wrongly believe I hadn't made progress in terms of production capacity. But I very clearly have.

A few ways to keep records/what to keep records on:

> daily/monthly word counts
> monthly earnings/net earnings
> newsletter subscribers
> daily journaling/blog posts (weekly is fine, too)
> keeping track of habits - checking off each day you met your goal (e.g. I only wrote 12/28 days)

You have to strike a balance between robustness and accessibility; too many superfluous numbers and observations makes reviewing your records for insights terribly difficult. And keeping good records is absolutely critical to improvement, since they're a form of feedback. I think, too often, we expect our graph to suddenly spike vertical. But it ebbs and flows, up and down. If you keep showing up, the trend is upward over time. And then, it finally compounds enough - in terms of craft, in terms of marketing skill, in terms of knowledge, in terms of your fanbase - to where you hit an inflection point and things just take off.

Without the records it can seem like you're not making any progress at all. This is why I'm not a fan of these challenges: usually they end in failure, and that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Which leads to rash decision making or sandbagging. I had my second best month ever, and it feels _bad_. That's a system design flaw. I want to pack it in today and do nothing - mainly because I've been thinking about this for the past 28 days. But all this thinking, while it feels like "work" and was stressful, isn't actually writing/executing.

If I quit now, then I won't have instilled any habits. That's what happens in short bursts: the workload - both real and imagined - is onerous, and then you never want to see the task again on the other side. You think you're "done." But there is no finish line, no deadline. It's continuous. What you think is done is actually just the start. I believed my first BookBub would change everything; it was my first $1000/mo, but that's just a distant memory three years onward.

The real secret to the upward trend in earnings has been (inadvertent) persistence. The numbers don't lie, even when your emotions do. Robust records have told me the trend line is going up - even when it feels like everything is nose diving.

They've also told me, unequivocally, that challenges/goals are complete nonsense. I actually recognized this over the summer, when I talked about how the challenge I was doing was "dumb." Apparently that message didn't stick. Nonetheless, plenty of good things came out of this, so I wouldn't consider it regretful. I'm just not doing one again.

He says until next month.

Back tomorrow with final #s and so forth.

Nick


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Nicholas Erik said:


> The real secret to the upward trend in earnings has been (inadvertent) persistence. The numbers don't lie, even when your emotions do. Robust records have told me the trend line is going up - even when it feels like everything is nose diving.


This ^ I'm a numbers person, and I've kept accurate records of all sorts of writing-related stuff. I can tell you how many books I sold in Australia last April (2, as it happens), or pages read in India in December (760), or words written last November (68K - wow, productive month). But the most helpful numbers are the ones on the graph that shows my revenue month by month. It doesn't go up every month, but each time it does, it's a bit higher than the previous high point, and I can see the upward trend right there in front of me.

This has been a fascinating thread. Thanks for recording your efforts and your thoughts in such wonderful detail.


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## TheLemontree (Sep 12, 2015)

Thanks Nick! 

Sent from my GT-S7390 using Tapatalk


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## EC Sheedy (Feb 24, 2011)

Really appreciate this thread, Nick. I think you've done amazingly well, and I've learned so much from your efforts and sharing. 

Thank you!

(And good luck in March!)


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## MattGodbey (Jul 8, 2016)

Yes, a fascinating thread. And so educational for a newb like me. Thanks for putting your info out there, and I especially enjoy the "extra" Topic of the Day section. I've learned as much from that as from your numbers.

M.


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## MQ (Jan 5, 2011)

MattGodbey said:


> Yes, a fascinating thread. And so educational for a newb like me. Thanks for putting your info out there, *and I especially enjoy the "extra" Topic of the Day section. I've learned as much from that as from your numbers.
> *
> M.


^this


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

First, thanks to all those who followed along. I hope you found this thread useful. Also, if you posted and I didn't respond directly, fear not: I read your words and appreciated that you took the time to read this/follow whatever the hell it was I did during February.

Anyway, Internet challenges almost always succeed, which gives the false impression that you're the only one in the world not totally killing it. Guess what: you're not alone. Thus, while I didn't hit the target, I think the lessons are much more valuable, because they turn a lot of common "wisdom" on its head.

As Mark Twain (probably did not) say, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Misattributions aside, that aphorism still contains far more than a kernel of truth. We all know goals and setting big marks for ourselves is the way to success. Except when it's not.

To those who offered to help with the launch, thanks - I didn't forget, but I obviously didn't get Shadow Flare done in time. So I appreciate the offer, but poor habits stymied my ability to accept your kindness.

Anyway we have this week's post: The Art of Turning Failure Into Opportunity
And we also have the complete recap: 28 Days to 10K: A (Not Quite) 5-Figure Blueprint.

The recap distills the key lessons from this thread + the weekly posts, as well as has all the final #s. I reread the posts + the guides (most of them, anyway; apparently I wrote almost 30,000 words here). So for those who don't want to wade through my ramblings (or do so again), that's a succinct breakdown of what happened, what went wrong, what went well, and what my ultimate conclusions are.

Hint: it's about making your own blueprint.

Scroll down the blueprint for the takeaways - the #s are at the top.

Fun stats:

Total new fiction words: 42,606
Guides/recaps: 11,113
KBoards thread: 18,466
Lightning Blade: ~23,000
Tentative, just for fun total: 95,195
Weekly goals: 5/11
Deadlines: 4/8
*Total Revenue: $6567*
Amazon: $5864 (assuming page reads @ 0.0045)
D2D: $495
Google: $51
Paperbacks/Createspace: $58
Affiliate: $99
*Total costs: $2674*
Promo: $1734
Covers: $460
Proofreading: $250
Vellum + MacInCloud: $230
*Net: $3893*

Nick


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## CassieL (Aug 29, 2013)

Great wrap-up post.  And definitely agree with the point about too many pen names splitting focus.  That would be my own personal struggle.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

And the final post (it was an inspired day): Comparing My Two (Failed) Earnings Challenges: A Strategy Breakdown

Covers most of the same ground as The Art of Turning Failure Into Opportunity and 28 Days to 10K: A (Not Quite) 5-Figure Blueprint (the comprehensive recap).

But yeah, there it is. Cheers again to all those who followed along and offered their support/comments throughout. Been fun. Signing off now to get Shadow Flare done (like a zombie, it still lingers in the shadows, unfinished).

Nick


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## writerc (Apr 15, 2016)

MattGodbey said:


> Yes, a fascinating thread. And so educational for a newb like me. Thanks for putting your info out there, and I especially enjoy the "extra" Topic of the Day section. I've learned as much from that as from your numbers.
> 
> me too


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## Writer&#039;s Block (Oct 29, 2014)

Thanks for letting us come along on the ride, really inspiring.


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Can I just say that I love your sense of humour.   Thank you for that, as much as all the rest. {Going off to put more sandwiches in my novels...}


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## T E Scott Writer (Jul 27, 2016)

Thanks for the thread, it's been a fun watch. Just shows how much easier itis to write forum posts than to do the writing we're actually supposed to be doing. 

Like I'm doing right now


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## PiscaPress (Jun 13, 2014)

Thanks for sharing. It helps us all!


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## Chris Dietzel (Apr 2, 2013)

A writing acquaintance of mine referred me to this thread. Very glad he did, I learned a lot. Thank you very much for taking the time to share all of your experiences. Needless to say I'll be doing a lot of things differently because of what I read in here.


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## Guy Riessen (Mar 27, 2016)

Why was the cost so high here:
Vellum + MacInCloud: $230

did you purchase Vellum and aren't amortizing it (in other words are you applying the full cost of Vellum to this one challenge)? Or did you re-do the layout so many times that your MacInCloud costs were that high (at $1/hour that seems like a lot of hours)? Are you using Vellum on the pay-per-title plan (and isn't that still just a "per-title" cost not a per attempt cost)?

Anyway, thanks a lot for sharing all this great information! And especially all the encouraging words for us newbs


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