Welcome back to the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. In the first episode of the second season we reflect upon what happened in our writing lives in 2020, and give you a clear view of what our objectives are for 2021.
Last year was a challenging year in many ways, but also one ripe with opportunities. Michele talks about his 12X20 challenge and how it influenced his long term publication schedule, while Crystal reports data from on both her fiction and non-fiction. We get some hints about her future writing and business plans and we get a sneak peek into what 2021 has in store for her.
Resources we mentioned in this episode
Complete Episode Transcripts
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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 042: Tales from 2020 Data, Going Wide and Targets for 2021
Introduction
Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 42 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Crystal Hunt.
Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani and as always, we are here to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career.
Crystal Hunt: If you If find this show helpful, you can help us keep the episodes coming by clicking the by us a coffee button on the website, or in the show notes, your contributions help us cover our operating expenses and keep this podcast ads free. So new season, new segments. We actually have listeners now, which we are super excited about, and that means that we can add a segment for listener questions. Now, because we’re just telling you about this now we don’t have any questions from you yet, but what we need you to do is think about: What questions would you like to ask us? What are you struggling with in your author growth for your business? What is it that you’re finding really challenging? What are you desperate to find a really good resource to help you figure out? Please think of your best questions and email us ay crystal@strategicauthorpreneur.com.
The email is also in the show notes, so you can find it there and send us your questions. We will answer them on the show and we would love to include your name if you want or not. If you don’t just make sure you include that information in the question you send to us.
In this episode, we’re going to look at progress made in 2020. We’re going to lay down some specific goals and focus areas for 2021 and talk about what kind of metrics we’re tracking and how. We’ll also share some exciting new resources you can use to help rock your author business in 2021. But before we dive into that, we’re going to talk about what exciting things have been going on in our author world. So, Michele, what is news for you?
What’s new since the last show?
Michele Amitrani: So it’s been a few weeks since the last time that we spoke, some things happen. One of the most important is that I recharge a bit and I did do some planning for this 2021. And I’m now on the process of preparing the publication of one of my novellas, mythological fantasy novella in Italian, and I’m also planning on rewriting another novella this time in English.
And it has been a couple of weeks of just sitting down and trying to figure out really what’s the plan for 2021. And just because I want to say that I’m very excited to be back here with you Crystal and with all the listeners, we made it to the second season of the podcast. So I think it’s important there are some things that we’re gonna speak about in this episode and there is going to be a look back actually at our 2020 in numbers, but also on the things that we learned. And I also been doing some planning for something that is not really related to my writing, but it’s more related on my YouTube channel, which in the past year has grown a bit.
So I am trying to see if I can use anything at all to up a bit my game on the video side of things. So I’m really trying to see if I can use that as a way to monetize some of my content. And that’s been very exciting, but also it is another part, another mechanism then I need to insert in my author business.
So it’s making things a bit more challenging, but again, at the same time, it’s something new and it’s something that I’m really looking forward to dive into. And what have you been up to Crystal in this past four to five, four to six, four to five weeks?
Crystal Hunt: I also took advantage of a bit of a break.
So I did a bit of settling in around the house and sorting out some things and generally just catching up on life stuff and had a really lovely, quiet holiday, lots of reading, lots of Netflix, lots of tasty things to eat and drink, which was really fun. And in the background of all that and in the foreground of all that, depending on which week it was, Eileen Cook and I finished our Full-Time Author book.
So we did the last of the polishing on that and got it all ready to launch. And in fact it is live today. So it is, it’s my birthday, actually. And for my birthday, I got the start of a second season of a podcast and a new book, which is a pretty excellent birthday if I do say so myself. So I have been enjoying the sort of excitement building up as that one was getting ready to come out and you can now buy it on Amazon. Ebook is live today. The wide stores are going to have it live on the 28th of January. And softcover and hardcover should both be available now in all of the places. So ideally you can grab maybe actually a print, one of this particular book, as it is quite a hefty sort of a reference Bible of all things career related to help you level up your author career.
So after most of the year working on that. We are very excited to have that one out there in the world and live. So that is the big news from me.
Looking back on 2020 and creative goals
So today we’re going to dig in a little bit to talking about some stats, looking back a little bit on last year. And it’s interesting to just see what was it that we were tracking and how did it go? And for each thing, we’re going to look at also some goals for 2021, but there’s a lot of information held in an author business and we wear a lot of different hats.
We thought it would be easiest to break this out into three different areas and talk about each one a little bit separately. So we’re going to talk about the creator area or wearing our creator hats. So that’s the writing and editing side of things. And we’re also going to talk about what it is like when we wear our manager hats.
So we’re going to reflect on things like income and expenses, our publishing processes and tasks. And we’re going to talk about some business goals as well. And then the third hat we wear is a marketer hat, which is basically your marketing and promotion manager. So we’re going to dig in a little bit to what kind of marketing things we did.
They work, did they not work? How did we feel about that? And then set some marketing leveling up goals for 2021 as well. So we’ll tackle each of those three areas a little bit separately just to keep it all straight and not be quite so overwhelming with the numbers. And we’ll see what we have here. So Michele, let’s start with you, your look back for 2020 wearing your creator hat.
How did that go?
Michele Amitrani: I think there is something to be said about 2020 for me. It finishes with the zero. And I considered 2020, my year number zero for my publishing business in the English word. And I’m going to tell you why I am considering this my year zero, the first year my baseline year, if you will.
I still have statistics that I’m going to share with you from 2019 but what I’m hinting here is more of an attitude that is more of a pro. Many times we hinted at the book by Steven Pressfield, The War of Art. And I do think this was a year in which I tended more from the artistic side of things to the pro side of things.
So I’m just using this 2020 and I want to let you know, and also the listener know that this for me is the first year where I really started to see this as a business and started acting as a business owner. But the first point we’re going to talk about is the creator, and then I’m going to bounce a few because I want, and I’m curious about your creator year.
And I also would like you to remind that to the listener what kind of year it is for you is this year number three is this your baseline now? It’s not! Big, a big spoiler. But I’m sure that the listeners will be interested in knowing which kind of year, which kind of part of the publishing process are you at. But regarding me creator wise, 2020 was a huge year because of a challenge that I undergo at the beginning and that means January, 2020. In January, I decided to pledge to my followers to write and publish to my newsletter subscribers, at least one story per month. I had no idea whatsoever if I was going to make it. And hence why I decided to make this challenge real in the sense that there was a penality every single time I did not achieve my goal, which was again, to publish a story every month I will have to pay $100 to a charity that my followers suggested.
I did accomplish the challenge. That means that I wrote 12, actually bit more stories in 2020. But the importance of this for me as a creator is that allowed me to have something at the end of 2020 that I could use in a number of ways.
Now some of the stories that I wrote in 2020 have been already rewritten, professionally edited and given to a designer saw that I now have new covers, and these are now products that I’m selling both in Italy and in the US market and in all the other markets. I have been using this challenge, which this objective of publishing books for money wasn’t clear in January, it’s something that became clear later on. I would say around October, September, October, when I realized I already have a number of books, naming novellas, that we’ll actually use as products.
So I decided to push a bit more on November and December and those last two months where the months when I decided to actually publish some of my novels.
So under a creator point of view, this is huge for me because I have never published three books (it was three books that I successfully published in 2020 November and December). I never published three books in a year before. The closest thing that I did was to publish two books. And that was between 2016 and 17, and those were Italian books.
So again, under the creator point of view, it’s a first new thing that happened to me. It, wasn’t easy to pull that off, but it is important for you guys to know that under the creator point of view, that was very important to me to write these stories, to see what exactly I could do with them and if I could leverage them, the answer is yes, I’m using those, some of those stories as a product, and actually I’m using another one of these stories, actually, there’s two of these stories as newsletter cookies meaning price or something free that people can get if they subscribe to my newsletter.
And again, this was not part of the plan. In January 2020, I had no idea I would use these books as assets. And look at this, even using the word assets to refer to one of my books, which is great as strategic authorpreneurs, because these are resources that we can use to increase our visibility and also some of the money in our pocket.
The second feature as a creator on this 2020 was that I wrote about a 135,000 words of fiction in English and 20,000 words of fiction in Italian. Again, this is something I was not able to achieve before, neither in the US market or in the dial-in market. And this is something great because again, I consider this to be my first year for many things, but it’s also the first year that I basically shut up and I did the work as much as I could regarding writing and publishing things. The third thing that happened was that I published, as I was saying, a couple of mythological fantasy novellas on the English market and one mythological fantasy novella in the Italian market.
This in the specifics is the three products that I was referring to at the beginning. And I’m going to talk a bit more when we are going to talk about the marketer side of things, what I’m going to do with these books and what are the books I’m planning on attaching to these first three.
And lastly the fourth point is that is not related to my writing. It’s more related to visibility. And in particular to my YouTube channel. As a creator, I was able to pull off 52 lives on my YouTube channel one every single week in 2020. And that helped me reach the around 1000 subscribers at this point.
I’m not yet there, but that’s one of the reason why I was starting really carefully considering if there is any way I can start leveraging that channel because when you start adding four digit number on that side of things I think it makes sense for you to see if you can leverage that alternative channel and again, for full disclosure my YouTube channel is an Italian and it’s not for fiction, but it’s for a non-fiction. In this YouTube channel I basically share resources for Italians on self publishing, writing and book marketing. So these four are what I look back and see in 2020, as a creator. And there are four goals that I have under this point of view, the creator side of things.
The first goal that I have for 2021 is to rewrite, edit and create a new covers for two mythological fantasy novellas that I wrote in 2020. So I’m going to do something similar of what I did in 2020, but on a bigger scale with more books. I also need to translate these two novellas from English into Italian, because it’s going to be part of my strategy that is going to be divided in two separate market the Italian in one and the English speaking market.
And that means that my main goal and the creator umbrella in 2021 is to publish six products. By six products in the specific, I need to at least publish four mythological fantasy novellas and two box sets, one book set in Italian and one book set in English. That means that by the end of 2021, I have to have at least three Italian books, mythological fantasy, plus a box set.
And in the English market, I need to have four mythological fantasy novellas plus a box set. If I can do anything more than that, I’m going to be very happy. But this is the very specific of my goals for 2020 under the writing side of things. And I also have something that I called a power goal.
I don’t know if that makes any sense, but I liked the name and I like how it feels Crystal, like my power goal and this power goal is to write and publish a novel, which means anything that is 40,000 words or more because all of these products that I’ve been talking about are novellas so far.
So they are shorter works are easier to write some would argue, and it will be amazing if I could achieve at the end of 2021, not only the publication and the writing and the publication of these six products, but also the writing and the publishing and of course the marketing of this first mythological fantasy novel.
So these are my looking back at 2020, and also my goals for 2021. And now Crystal, it is your turn to let us know what you have in store under the creator side of things in 2021. And also your look back in 2020.
Crystal Hunt: I’ve been working with towards being a full-time author for the third time. I guess I started publishing in 2007 and I was really focused on children’s books for the first seven or so years.
So I think my first 25 titles maybe that were published were kids’ books. And some of those were indie published. Some were written for an educational publisher. Some are under my name. Some are not, there’s quite a range of things out there. And I have, yeah, I guess I’ve been in the industry since 2007, but after the children’s book sort of era, I switched over to doing non-fiction for writers and building up that side of things, as well as doing some consulting and author services stuff, and then have been also building my romance writing on the side.
So there’s really three separate distinct careers and in each of them, I have gone full-time in a different way. Sometimes the business model was really all about writing. Sometimes it was about providing additional services. Sometimes it’s also teaching on the side. So when I look back at 2020 and what my creator self created in 2020 it’s a really interesting mix of things. On the fiction side, I’ve been getting ready for a reboot of my Rivers End fiction stuff. And after testing out rapid release and doing a bunch of stuff in 2018, I released a whole bunch of books, got some really great momentum and then realize that there’s no way I can maintain that pace of releasing and also be writing and also be managing and teaching and doing all of the things that come with all the other parts of my author business.
And so I hit pause on that and I have spent the last year and a half really just writing stuff that I’m not releasing, I’m just holding it and sitting on it, which is really difficult. I have to say. On the fiction side. I had no, no new books come out last year, but I did manage to write about 120,000 words.
And so there are a variety of stories that are partially or fully complete, just getting their ready to be released into the world, but probably not until a little bit later in 2021. So last year was all about creating. So in fiction, 120,000 words, which is great. I wrote just over 150,000 words of nonfiction as well.
That was content for our Creative Academy guides for writers. And you’re seeing a lot of the result of that work in the Full Time Author book. But I was also working on several of the other titles simultaneously that are coming out this year. As I was writing chunks of things and preparing bits of knowledge, I would put them into whichever book they made sense for.
So there’s a book on selling more books, a book on writing more books, and also a strategic indie author book that will be my focus for my ones that I’m writing on my own. And there’s also a collaborative book with Eileen Cook on settings and another collaborative book on collaborative writing projects and publishing models that I’m co-writing with the whole team from the creative Academy, so Donna Barker and Eileen Cook as well.
In preparation for those books what I did last year was I prepped and taught over 31 masterclasses and workshops and did 50 plus sort of office hour sessions as well, where I was answering questions and teaching people various skills around various topics in writing and publishing and really gathering questions that needed to be answered in the books that are coming out and brainstorming all of the things that needed to be included and outlining those, getting all the information collected up so that now this year, my focus is on writing like the wind as I turn all of those packages of information into actual books that are ready to be consumed by all of you, hopefully.
And the final creator thing was that we did manage to produce podcast episodes every week in 2020, starting from March 30th. We actually started recording earlier that year and we were recording every week, even before we started releasing so that we had enough episodes to see things and get them going at the start.
So we did actually stick to our production schedule and we managed to have episodes all the way up to 41. So 41 hour long, roughly podcast episodes in the mix as well. So considering all the other things that were going on in 2020, that felt like a pretty great year on the creation side, and I am pretty excited to be reporting all of those things. Now, given how well all of that went and given that I have been working for the last two years towards going full time in a different way where I was not so focused on teaching, but doing a lot more of book production and spending a lot more of my day in the actual creative part. So I’m trying to make my creator hat a lot bigger and get to wear it every single day. So I’ve been reducing a lot of my volunteer commitments.
I’ve been decluttering my schedule and also reducing a lot of my teaching time and conference speaking and traveling and things like that. So that has all been cut back for 2021. And I am doing what I’m calling my just one year experiment to put the joy back in the writing part, because after however many years it’s been being in the business, it’s nice to do a little bit of a reboot and make sure that I can remember that I love doing this and it’s fun and the fiction is a playground space for me, and I really love it.
So I want to be able to devote an appropriate amount of time to that. So in 2021, my goals for my creator self are having daily writing time. So 2,500 plus words a day is the actual target that I set for myself. It could be fiction. It could be non-fiction, there’s no rules around that.
Whichever book is the current priority is the one that I’m working on. And also, I am hoping to hit 500,000 words this year. So we’ll see how that works. I managed, 270,000, whatever it was last year and I wasn’t full-time writing. So I’m hoping that given the freeing up of the extra time and all of the preparation that was done, that should be realistic and achievable.
I am hoping to write five more non-fiction books this year actually several of them are collaboratively written, so I’m not responsible for the whole word count, but that is a big goal for me, for the Creative Academy guide series, to have five more titles that are complete by the end of the year.
And my third primary goal for 2021 is to finish eight different fiction stories, a mix of full length and novellas most of which are partially complete already as I have been working on them through this past year, but I’ve got to finish them up, wrap them up. There’s a lot of shared timelines. So I was writing several books simultaneously, which is a really interesting way to do it. Great for fleshing out the world, but it does make it hard to get to completion when you’ve got a whole bunch of things on the go at once. So we’re going to practice consecutively, focusing on just one thing at a time and then finish, finish all the way through this year.
There you go. So those are the creator goals that we’ve set for ourselves and, you want to dive into the manager goals as well? I think you covered some of your manager stuff in terms of the publishing, which I left all of my publishing stuff in the manager side as well, but…
Manager goals
Michele Amitrani: Yeah, it’s just because for me the writing it’s very much connected to that side of the things.
I think it’s not that much important if it’s on that side or the other important distance, we get it done, but yeah, I totally agree with you on the manager’s side. So we’re now reflecting a bit more on, let’s say the income and the expenses for 2020. And also all the manager tasks but also I would say administrative stuff in 2020 and the goals that we are going to have in 2021.
So just a very broad look that I wanted to give you. Looking back at 2020 I wanted to give you a few, data and some numbers about my fiction so that I kind of glance and give you an eagle’s view on what were my sales percentage wise. So in 2020 the most of my sale came from KDP and that’s also because me and Crystal decided to go wide at the end of 2020, it’s a decision that we took after several months actually of discussing the subject for I would say four months. Yeah. It’s been almost a year.
And because there are some things like page reads and additional visibility on the Kindle store that it’s really difficult to give up. But I think it’s just important to underline that the decision that we made to both of us go wide, at least I’m going to do this experiment with my mythological fantasy for 2021 is to see if really we can try to increase those numbers in the other stores. There are platforms like Google Play. We are, in my case, I used draft two digital but I also use Kobo. If the number on this platform can somehow compensate the loss that we’re going to have because we are not going to have of course page read and the additional visibility on the Kindle store.
That’s just for you to keep in mind, we are wide authors and we’re going to stay that way at least for 2021, and we’re going to let you know how that goes. That being said these statistics and I’m going to tell you, come from my KDP account. So I did not use even if I generate some sales on November and December on the other stores, those sales were not significant.
So I decided to leave them out because they were not really important. So this number on Amazon, so KDP. Most of my sales came from eBooks. So it’s 58.7% of my sales came from eBooks 35% come from page reads. And I should add not from the English world, but from the Italian world, since I have four books, series science fiction series that I wrote a few years ago.
And then 6.3% of the total income generated from KDP comes from the selling of paperbacks. 58% eBooks, 35% page reads and our own 6% of my total income derived from paperbacks. And I think this is significant as a starting point to discuss what I want to do with this numbers. Because that page reads, my object objective now, of course, since I’m wide is to try and do something different is to try to still generate page reads on the science fiction series, which I’m going to keep as an exclusive on Amazon. But I want to also generate sales on the other stores. My first objective under that point of view is to try and see if I can add next time I’m going to have this annual report with you guys, a fourth statistic, which is basically how much I sold from the wide stores.
And hopefully I would’ve been able to give you also a glance on my Google Play, draft to digital Kobo, Apple store, or that kind of stuff. There are another couple of things that I think are interesting for people that are listening. Compared to 2019, which I consider my baseline year in the English world.
So this is my year zero. I said 2020. 2019 was my, a minus one because I needed a baseline to give you guys some data. So compared to 2019, my income derived from my author business increased four times, but, there is a very big but, my ad spend also increase significantly. And more in specific in 2019, I just started experimenting with Facebook ads and I spent around $100.
Which is a very small sum. I decided to level up that game in 2020 and in this year I spent around $1,000 on ads, not on Facebook though. I completely shifted my focus and I decided not to use Facebook, but to concentrate on Amazon ads. And the reason why I did that was first because I tried the platform Facebook and I saw some results but not really the results that I really wanted to see, even though just with $100, it’s not a lot, and you can’t see a lot of things.
But I just wanted to try Amazon ads because I realized that it’s better for me to familiarize with different source, potential source of traffic to my book page. And that is why I decided to spend some time and money and really diving into the Amazon ads. Now I started Amazon ads on March 2020, around the 23rd of March, if I’m not mistaken.
So I didn’t use them for the whole year but slowly steadily. I started seeing some result. The first two months I was losing money. Then I started breaking even, and then I will say from around May, June, I started actually covering the expanded expenditures of the first couple of months. And then I started seeing a return.
Just to be precise. The Amazon ads, I focused them primarily on my science fiction series, which is four books and which is also an exclusive on a KDP select. Reader of Kindle Unlimited can read it for free. If they download it, then I get some revenue if they read the pages. The only reason why I was able to not only break even but also actually make some money out of Amazon ads. It’s because I got a lot of page reads. So I mentioned before 35% of actually my income deriving from KDP, came from page reads and that’s an eye opener for me because it really tells me that those page reads, they basically paid for my Amazon ads.
So that’s very significant and very important. I am going to use Amazon ads also in 2021. And I’m going to try to do it a bit more strategically. I’ve been following a couple of people that gave me some very good suggestion and at the moment I’m speaking now, I also started a new series of Amazon ads on my mythological fantasy collection of novellas in Italy their results so far are still inconclusive. it’s been just a month and a half that I started that. Then with the science fiction series, I at least needed three or four months of data to make those ads break even and then profitable. So I’m now on a loss, but not too much and I’m learning really a lot.
And I’m really all being that in Italy now I have just one mythological fantasy. So I’m running ads on just one product. In three weeks time, I will have the second product and then a month and a half from there, the third product, and then the box sets. So I’m really hoping to have enough data by that time to promote the box set like a rockstar with the, with all the data that I got from the previous months. All of these to say that, although my income increased four times compared to the 2019, because of the spending in the Amazon ads my actual profit actually just doubled and that’s before taxes.
So I think that’s very interesting to get a vision of what happened to me on the manager side. I also have some goals that I want to share with you. Most of the things are also related to my marketing which we’re going to discuss later on, but just so you know, I’m going to really focus a lot on newsletter and on Amazon ads.
And I really want to keep tracks on three metrics. The first one is number of subscribers and this is because I really started working hard on building my newsletter on the Italian front and in the English front. And I want to keep at it and I want to keep adding more and more quality subscribers.
The second metric that I’m going to look at is net profit. And I’m going to try to see and check this on a monthly basis and then on a yearly basis. And the third metric that I’m going to really look a keen eye on that and this one is going to be daily, I’m going to really focus on Amazon ads return on investments, and I’m going to really look at my ACOS and my cost per click and the sales that I’m going to generate and the sell through.
So return on investment is going to be huge in this 2021. And I now want to ask Crystal, what’s going to be huge on the manager’s side for you?
Crystal Hunt: The data from 2020 tells some interesting stories and I’ve broken it into two different sections. We’ll talk a little bit about fiction and then a little bit about nonfiction because they are very different. For the fiction side of things that accounted for about 25% of my income from royalties this year. And the non-fiction actually was about 75%. I would have actually thought that there would be even more difference because I didn’t release a single book in non-fiction this year. Not a single new product came out and nothing happened, but because I have a lot of seasonal titles and I had a certain amount of base sales every month, there was just a stable income line and then there was a boost for the holiday period, which is what usually happens.
And in fiction, 60% of my sales were eBooks. Page reads were 35% and audio books were 5%. And that was really interesting to see. Because the page reads were only 35% I decided I was willing to gamble with going wide. That was one of the numbers that was driving that decision was, I know people have written romance who have 80%, even 90% of their income is from page reads. But because I write shorter I don’t make very much from a single novella if people are just reading it in KU, so that doesn’t add up very quickly. So that’s partly why those percentages are much lower as well, but I really wanted to try going wide and I want the books to be in libraries and I want everybody to be able to access them.
So that information about the percentage breakdown was really helpful. I don’t have any paperbacks right now. I actually pulled them all in 2020. To revamp, redo, rebrand, recover everything. And they’re all coming out again in the first quarter of 2021. So we’re totally overhauling everything and doing a bit of a level up at the moment.
And so there’s no paperback data. It’ll be interesting to report on that in our monthly progress reports and let you know how it’s going as we get them set up.
On the nonfiction side, which accounted for about 75% of my income, 58.4% were paperback sales, which was super surprising. I did not realize how many people order paper books for the non-fiction.
I should know that my bookshelf behind me is covered in non-fiction books, in paper format. That’s I should have expected that, but for whatever reason, I didn’t, it was quite a surprise. And page reads for non-fiction were 1.4%. That is not a lot at all even though we were in KU the entire year, last year, and our eBooks accounted for about 40.2%.
So when we looked at that as a collective our team with the Creative Academy, we decided that we were going to go wide for our non-fiction as well. We’ve been pulling everything out of Kindle Unlimited as the term’s expired. And so for the last three months or so, we’ve been removing books as their KDP terms were up and setting them up to be wide in the new year.
It’ll be really interesting to see how those numbers shift as the books are available on more platforms I’m using published drive to go wide so that I only have to manage things in one place. So I will be just focused on direct to Amazon and then published drive for all of the other platforms. And that’s a little easier for me to manage and I’m excited to see how that works.
It wasn’t a big year for expenses on the fiction side, because I didn’t publish any books. So that means no editing fees. I wasn’t paying for covers. I wasn’t paying for layout help. I wasn’t paying for any of that stuff. And that means this year is going to be very expensive because I was stockpiling all the words last year.
And this year is going to be pretty much every month there’s going to be a book come out. So that is going to be noticeable on the pocket book. So I have been stockpiling every bit of royalties that came in and putting them aside to cover the costs of this year’s leap into all the publishing things.
And on the nonfiction side, we had some serious ads action, which I will talk about when we get to the marketer phase of things. But in this context it’s relevant because we went from spending nothing on advertising to spending a good four-figure chunk on ads each month. So that has definitely scaled and has definitely contributed to the ongoing income and outflow of cash as well.
For 2021, my goals are pretty aggressive on the manager side. And partly I can do that because I also have been saving up to be able to hire an author assistant. So I have somebody who’s working with me 20 hours a week this year, and their focus is on the marketing and helping me publish side.
So preparing the actual layouts of the books and getting everything ready to upload and all of that. So it’s going to be my first foray into really having help with all of the publishing and marketing stuff. I’ve had bits of help over the last year or two on kind of a contract basis, but this is a very stable arrangement and I’m really excited to have that assistance and let me stay a little bit more in the creator side. I don’t want to take my creator hat off so much because I find it hard to switch back and forth from business brain to writer, brain, especially with the fiction. It’s very challenging. I am really looking forward to seeing how that goes. My goals include going from four figures a month to five figures a month by the end of 2021.
So that is a, an aggressive and exciting income goal. And I am also going to launch a book each month this year, whether fiction or non-fiction, they alternate and rotate, but it is going to be fun to see what that does to the numbers with each new thing that comes out. And it has been two years of prepping for this on the finances side and also on the practical side.
So I’m excited to see how that all shakes out. I would also like to level up my audio book revenue to, to be at least 10, even 15% of my income. And part of the plan for that is to actually add four more audio books into the mix. And at least two of those will be non-fiction because we do not yet have any, we have hardcovers soft covers and eBooks, but we don’t have audio books yet for our non-fiction.
So I do really want to experiment with that this year and also to level up my fiction revenues by adding paperbacks on the other formats back into the mix, all with their shiny new covers and everything else, all updated. So that is the plan for my manager self for 2021, which looks a little scary all there in black and white on the page, but is actually fairly achievable.
And I am excited to dig into that. Now marketing, let’s talk about marketing and promotion. How did that go in 2020 for you Michele and what are you going to focus on in 2021?
Marketing goals
Michele Amitrani: That went in a way I did not expect, this just to build up tension. Looking back at 2020 there were two major things that I did.
One of these I already mentioned which was starting focusing on the Amazon ads which again, I started in March and I don’t have the kind of resources that Crystal has. So I couldn’t put as much resources there, but it was nice to see and keeping that for now it’s been nine months or more, eight months, nine months to see that slowly increasing.
So on that side I got from basically zero impression to over 2 million impressions. And that’s something that I can use as a baseline to build up in 2021. That was something that started the visibility process because before, since my Italian n books were published years ago, the last one was published in 2017, that was really a way for me to use my marketing arsenal to start giving those books a new life. These again are books that didn’t see really any major sale in the last two to three years. And I was able to make for example, the book set, especially to increase its visibility and this very book hit one of the best seller charts, multiple times, thanks to the Amazon ads and hopefully also thankful to the presentation that I gave it its cover, and the blurb and all this kind of stuff.
But it was a good school for me to learn how to work with Amazon ads. Which kind of metrics are important for me to see and to check and to keep track on. Crystal helped me a bit. Actually let me rephrase that. Crystal helped a lot on that side of things. So she helped me also create a spreadsheet, which let’s just say I very weak at where I can constantly keep track of the key metrics.
And those have been an eye opener for me. Because I can really see months, for months how many page reads did I got? How much did I got because I had that particular number of page reads? How many books did I sell? Of which one of them? Book number three? Four? One? Two? The box set? Those things in the long run not only when it’s time for us to sit down and speak to you about the look back, but also when we sit down and really build our strategy, are important things, and I was not aware of them, or I used my own knowledge, which was very poor and I tried to figure out what could be the best way for me to keep track of data.
Crystal helped me a lot in understanding which data was important and how to organize it. That’s the word that I was looking for, organize my data. So that’s the baseline of my marketer things. The second thing that I want to talk to you about is the newsletter, because that’s the second element that I really tried to focus in 2020.
And just to give you a couple of numbers, I did not have a newsletter in, and this is not easy for me to tell you this it’s a major blow and it’s something that I’m not proud of, but since we are very transparent under this point of view, and since we’re using 2020 as a baseline I did that a newsletter for my non-fiction in Italian.
I did not have one for my fiction. So I started from scratch under this point of view and I add that means zero subscribers, exactly zero subscribers. We really like the number zero in 2020. And I build up very slowly from there. At the end of 2020 I just had 40 people in my newsletter, but I’ll tell you what, these 40 people are very engaged because every single one of them is organic.
I actually see, and this is weird, more people answering to me on average, on my emails in a Italy, compared to the English one. And I’m going to tell you why it’s weird when I’m going to tell you the number. So this was a major starting point for me, the building up of my newsletter in the fiction in Italy. And the second newsletter that I’m curating is in English. And I started this newsletter as a fiction author in English. At the beginning of 2020, I had around 75 people. And at the end of 2020, I had around 1100 people. These are not organic subscribers. That’s important for me to underline.
Most of them are what we call non organic. So they were acquired through BookFunnel for example promos also BookSweep. I have noticed that since I had my 12 by 20 challenge, so I was able to give my newsletter, a new story every month, the engagement was high or higher than I think average, but it’s still not the number that one person will have with the 100% organic newsletter.
So this is important for me because I’m going to use these two numbers, newsletter wise, and I’m going to try to increase them, but at the same time to keep an high quality. So in Italy, we don’t have anything like BookFunnel and BookSweap. Let’s say I can’t use those instruments. I need to come up with something a bit more inventing on that side to try to increase that number, 40 people.
Now it’s actually 43 lo and behold, but that’s something that I definitely need to work a bit on because my newsletter is going to be something that I’m going to use every single time there is a new release and that’s going to be the first line of defense when I need to promote one of my books or to attack when I need to promote one of my books.
I also decided to use this 2022 to basically focus on social media. The only thing that it’s really active let’s say is my Italian Facebook page and that’s just because I have noticed that actually drives some sales and I, this is probably through because probably in Italy Facebook is used a bit more than other social media and it is used by the readers of my general a bit more possibly.
I just noticed that the engagement level stronger there. So I’m going to keep using that, but my English Facebook page, I barely used it. But I’m not really concentrating my effort over there. Concentrating them more on my newsletter. And the other thing that I did differently on the marketer side of things is that I read more about marketing, which is huge and we should do that but I didn’t really do a lot in the past.
And just to give you some numbers in 2020, I read over half a dozen books about self publishing, book marketing, and I’m not even counting the writing because of course I read all the books of the Creative Academy, I had the fortune to also to beta-read one of them and this year also it was very important to me because I got to understand several different strategies and tactics that I can later use, that I will be able to use to implement my strategy on my publishing side of things.
My goals for 2021 and this is something I’m trying to keep myself accountable a lot is they’re going to be focused massively on my newsletter, building up my newsletter. My first objective is to at least reach 200 organic subscribers on my Italian fiction newsletter and have at least 1500 engages subscriber on my English newsletter.
And how am I going to do this? I’m going to try and level up my game on the automation side of things, because I’m being very lacking on that side. There is an art on how to engage your subscribers and I need to master that a bit more this year. And the third goal is to keep improving my knowledge on Amazon ads.
I do not have any objective to master any other platform about of ads like BookBub or Facebook for now. I just want to master the newsletter and Amazon ads so that I at least have two ways to drive traffic to my book page when a time will come for me to release a title. So I need to keep improving that ACOS on my Italian books now is way too high, it’s around 90%, and we need to lower that down a bit.
So these three goals along with writing goals that I stated before will keep me accountable this year. And if not, this is recorded, so you can come knock on my door, you can bulge into my house and you can do whatever you want with this Italo-Canadian writer. So that being said, Crystal, now it is your time to let us know what happened when you wear your marketing hat and what are your definitive objective for 2021.
Crystal Hunt: 2020 for my fiction, I did a whole lot of, not much, which is slightly embarrassing to admit, but I did manage to schedule a Free Booksy feature on Silver Bells, which is the first in my MacAllister series during the week before Christmas. And one friend who has a very big following, also sent it out to her list in that same week.
And I’ve just got new covers on those books. So that was shiny and new. And also this year, I am up to almost 500 reviews on Silver Bells actually. And they’re nice high star rating and so I’ve noticed that really helps any free promos I do, between the new cover and the high amount of reviews, it’s lots of social proof, and so the amount of downloads was really good. And so I was able to get, I think there was six or 7,000 downloads inside of about a 24, 48 hour period. And that put me all the way up, really high in the Kindle store, which meant that a lot of people were seeing it over Christmas week and downloading.
And so now I’m seeing the sales of the box sets from all of those free downloads happening. So it was a pretty chill away to do marketing. It really just meant booking a slot in the free promo. I think I paid a hundred dollars total and then used a whole bunch of different free sites as well to supplement that and just did one week big push to get all of that out there.
And see what it could do. So that was the sum total of my marketing efforts on my fiction. I do have some Amazon ads running. I think I spent about $5 a month on the fiction ones. They just haven’t really got there and I haven’t really pushed too hard or thrown a lot of money at the problem. So as so far, they’re just sitting.
So one of my goals for 2021 is actually to level up my Amazon ads game on my fiction and also to explore BookBub features and also BookBub ads for the fiction side of things. In terms of the nonfiction in the beginning of 2020 we weren’t running any ads at all. We put the books out in the fall of 2019.
So they’d been live for a couple of months at this point, and we decided to start Amazon ads running in January. When we first started, we were having an ACOS scores somewhere between 40% up to 120% plus, which is not great, it means you’re spending more than you’re making and we were experimenting with that and trying to narrow down our keywords and figure out which types of ads were working best in which countries, and really narrow that down.
And we did actually manage to do that really effectively. So our ACOS scores are now between 8% and 35%, depending on which countries platform. We also added in ads in Canada, the UK and Australia, and as well as the US. So we have ads running in four countries now on all of our non-fiction books and the series itself.
And that has been really helpful. We managed to go from zero impressions to about 30 million. And a lot of that is in the latter part of the year, once we had figured things out. So it would be really interesting to see in 2021, as we’re starting at a much higher place than we were last year and things are scaling much faster each month than they were last year.
So I’m excited to see what that all shakes out to. Our non-fiction mailing list, we only had about 250 people on our official mailing list when we launched our books in 2019, but that has been growing organically and we have almost 2000 very engaged people. So those are our readers who are part of our community.
They’ve bought passes books they’ve opted in organically. We haven’t done any promos or giveaways to get those people there. So engagement is very high. And when we have a new book people are very excited to hear about it and we have a lot of them clicking through to purchase the new titles and also to act as arc readers for us.
So growing our mailing list and our community was also a way to grow our arc team. So shout out, thank you to all of you who are listening who’ve been playing along as part of our Creative Academy experiments. We love you. We appreciate you. And we are very thankful for the reviews that you leave and the fact that you buy and love and tell people about our books. It makes a huge difference. So we are really looking forward to seeing how that ripples out as we add new books, because we actually only publish one more book in the Creative Academy series in 2020, we delayed the full-time author book to January so that it could have a 2021 publication date just to give it some good mojo.
And we’re excited to see how that all takes off. So goals for 2021 in the non-fiction side, we’re going to level up our mailing list. My personal goal for that is 5,000 people all through organic means of subscribing, which just means selling more books and having more people as members of our community, and hopefully encouraging them to organically sign up.
As well as adding in BookBub ads, that’s something that we would like to, I think, dive into at some point this year and learn those now that we’ve got the Amazon ones fairly on maintenance, we can try and introduce something new. So we’ll see how that goes.
So quick summary, the 2020 goals for me: write 500,000 words with my creator hat, publish 12 new titles and release four new audio books as my manager hats, and also in my marketer hat to focus on growing the mailing list in both fiction and nonfiction as the primary target. And after that to layer in some more ads action. Okay. So that’s my accountability. We’re both going to have pretty ambitious years. I’m not gonna lie.
This is a stunt driver equivalent, not something you would try your first year of indie publishing. If you were just getting started don’t feel bad, don’t feel intimidated. Do not compare yourself to these goals. We have both been working very hard to level ourselves up to this point.
And you will also get there. Just give yourself a little bit of time and play whatever game it is in the publishing world that works for you for your goals, for your schedules. If you are looking for a tool to help you do your planning because I like to make things and as Michele mentioned, spreadsheets are my jam, so I actually created a sort of a monster spreadsheet business plan/business management system, all together in one thing. And you’re in luck because I’m going to give it to all of you for free. So the link is going to come out in our just one thing newsletter, and we will also post it in the show notes and on our website.
So you can grab it from strategicauthorpreneur.com. It’s called the strategic authorpreneur business plan Google sheet, which is a ridiculously long name, but find that and click on it. And there’s a whole video series that actually walks you through how to use each of the tabs and how you fill it in.
And if you want to deep dive into any of those topics, it happens to go perfectly with the full-time author books. So each section in the business plan maps back to a chapter in the full-time author book. So that is an excellent pairing and you are fortunate enough to receive that resource for exactly $0 because you know the right people to hang out with and listen to as part of your author journey.
Michele Amitrani: We really hope you enjoyed today’s show. We were very happy to be back for season two. Remember to hit that subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to the podcast, and also remember to visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com. For show notes, links to resources and for the tools that we love until next week, I wish you happy writing.
Crystal Hunt: Bye. Everybody happy writing and we’ll see you next week.