‘Progress’ is a power word that makes the journey worth taking. In this episode we share our first ever monthly progress report, and underline the three areas where we focused our efforts: creation of content, managing of resources and the marketing of books.

There were wins and setbacks along the way, and a lot of lessons learned. We also share what our objectives for the next month are and how we’re planning to achieve them.

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Complete Episode Transcripts

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 045: Going Wide Progress Report #1: January 2021

Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 45 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Crystal Hunt.

Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani and we are here as always to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career.

If you find this show helpful, you can help us keep the episodes coming by clicking to the buy us a coffee button on the website and the show notes. Your contribution helps us cover our operating expenses and keeps this podcast ads free.

Crystal Hunt: In this episode, we’re talking about our first month of being wide. So we’re going to share some wins. We’re going to share some things we found a little bit challenging, and we’re also going to share some good old statistics because every month we’re going to do a progress report episode to let you know how things went and it is time for our progress report on January. But first, is there any exciting news you want to share things you’ve been up to this past week?

Michele Amitrani: First Crystal, that I’m really excited for this episode. Since we were planning the second series we were big on the transparent kind of thing. So today the listeners are really going to get a deep dive on how was our first month in the wide.

And there are a couple of things though that I will mention now. This past week I was able to finally, after one month and a half in the making to soft launch the second mythological fantasy in Italian that I would have been preparing for, it seems like almost forever.

I didn’t want to use that word, but it was a long process. It did help the fact that I really published a Soul of Stone in Italian so I got the steps. So that was helpful. That helped me build the system in place, but this story was almost double the size of Soul of Stone, so it took me double the time to translate it, to do the marketing, to organize the review crew. So it was in a way more complex. So I’m very happy that now is out there. I’m going to promote it too with my social media and the newsletter in the next week or so, but that is done. It’s another project that is in the past books. Still, I would have to do marketing and stuff, but it’s in the past.

And I’ve being studying Amazon ads. I’m I don’t want to say too much about that, but I bought a couple of books I went to a couple of recorded workshops. And boy, did I learn stuff?

But with this tense note, I’m going to leave Crystal for her news. What did the happen in the world of a Crystal Hunt?

Crystal Hunt: For anyone who has being paying attention, you may have noticed we did not have a podcast episode come out last week. And that is all my fault because I ended up buying a new home instead of recording our podcast. I was spending some quality time with the home inspector during our normal recording time.

So apologies for the missed episode, but on the good side, I will have a shiny new loft office to come home to in a couple of months. So I’m really excited about that. And for the first time, I think ever, Jared and I are each going to have our own office to work from home. So that was very exciting. He gets a door on his office. He is thrilled. I get the loft, which means I get some stairs to climb every day. So I’m going to build into my daily routine a little bit more activity and it’s bigger than our current place. So I will be getting a lot more steps. Our current place it’s about 12 steps from the bedroom to my office, which is not very many steps to get in a day.

So I’m keen to see the healthy upsides of the larger space and also a bit more light and an excellent view to inspiring me to be writing all of the fun things. So I’m really looking forward to making that transition. And it’s also very motivating to make sure I hit my next book deadline because the next book goes to the editor the same day that we get our new place.

So that is an excellent motivator for me. And we’ll talk a little bit about timelines and things like that when we talk about the creator side of things. But the other exciting thing that happened is we are well into the writing of Create with co-authors and Donna and Eileen and I have been working away like the mad things we are to get everything ready.

And we also released a survey. So we’re asking a ton of questions for anyone who has been co-authoring books with other people. We sent the survey out in a whole ton of places. So the Wide for the Win Facebook group was generous enough to let us share there. Thank you, Erin, for giving us permission for that, and we also shared on all kinds of organizations all over Canada, some international different genre organizations, so that we can collect up a nice range of information to go into that. So we’re asking people: How are they working together? What kind of systems are they using? How do they do the process of making the book and all kinds of different things?

Watch for Create with co-authors. That one should be coming out probably about the end of may and we’ll see how the editing process shapes up, but soon, sooner, rather than later, which is very exciting. And now it is time for our very first monthly progress report. We’ve thought about this a little bit and we’re thinking that we’re going to do it section by section. So in our business planning stuff, we talk about wearing different hats. So we talk about the creator hat and the manager hat and the marketer hat. And so we’re actually going to break down our discussion into those three different areas so that we don’t throw everything at you at once.

And we’ll talk a little bit about, how things went in that area, what were we trying to achieve and how did it go and what was stopping us? And we’ll share some stats and details where we can as well. So Michele, how did your first month being wide for the win or attempting to be wide for the wind, go? Tell us all about it.

Michele Amitrani: So there are like, I have a lot of things to say. And I can just say I wanted to be as much as possible able to give you a big picture of what happened to me. Since day one of this new season, we were very committed to you guys to give you as much information as possible on our journey.

Me and Crystal we are at a different stage of our authorpreneur journey, but we also thought that was going to be a feature that was interesting because you’re going to see this guy that is at this point, and then you have the other, this other person that is at a different point of her career, but both of them are very motivated both of them have a very specific goal for the future.

We decided at the very beginning, when we did our baseline report for 2020, so the past year. that we were going to decide and speak using this jargon: creator, we were going to use it as a creator of content, meaning writer in this case, a manager and also marketers. So we’re going to address these three levels.

So before doing that though, I think at least for my case was important to let you know what were my objectives for the month of January 2021. So I had a couple of core objectives, but when I was doing the list I actually found out that I was working at nine different things. Which is not good, and I’m gonna tell you at the end why it’s not, it’s one of the minus on this report, but I wanted to let you know exactly what I’ve been working on.

What were my core January objectives? The first one was to rewrite a new end to one of my novella. I have been prepping a couple of novellas to use as a reader magnet for my Italian newsletter, and this proved to be a task that was a way bigger than I expected. And I’m going to explain you why in the creator side of things.

The second thing that was attached to that was the translation of one of these novella from English into Italian. Also these proved to be more difficult than I expected. The third core objective was the publication of the second mythological fantasy novella, which I mentioned at the beginning of this episode. That’s done, now it’s out in the word, so I don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Now that’s where the problem comes. Because one of my core objective was trying to really work to the genesis of the idea for a newer book. And I spoke about this as one of my core objective, which is writing my first longer book instead of novella or novelette. Something that is 40,000 words or more.

And this January I failed on this objective. And again, I’m going to tell you a bit more when I’m going to speak about the creator. Because I was so much spread out again, I’m going to address this a bit more, but I wanted to give you the tense beginning now. The other thing that I decided to do on January was creating a non-fiction cookie, book for my Italian newsletter, which is a very short guide on how to self-publish a professional product. This one came out of the blue and it required a couple of weeks, which I could have dedicated to write the English book that was more than 40,000 words.

And finally I have enrolled in the third book sweep giveaway. One of my core objective for 2021 was to create a bigger newsletter for my English following. So I did that and the result were very good.

I actually started a new automation, so I’m trying to see how that is going. This is just the context. I did not go in any particular kind of things, but you can clearly see where I’m going, which is” I was spread too thin. Very spread. So let’s talk about creator. So this has been, and I’m going to use one of the vocabulary that we used in the past, a very much of a transformation rather than generation kind of month for me.

Because I had to deal with a bunch of admin work, which I’m going to talk about in the manager part. My writing output was below expectation. Every month, if I can write at least 40 hours I consider myself happy, but on January, 2021, I was only able to write 27 hours. Writing in English, of course. I’m referring to English fiction.

Approximately I was able to translate for 17 hours on January. And when I speak about translation, I’m referring to that novella project. So 27 and 17, I do feel these were my core objective, I did not use the best of my judgment to put those hours in.

And again, the reason was because I was spread too thin, that I decided out of the blue to write a non-fiction smaller guide in Italian about self-publishing and that required a week and a half of my time. Why did I do that? It’s because probably I wanted to try how it was to write non fiction after around three years that I wasn’t doing it. The last time I wrote a nonfiction in Italian and I released the book was around three years ago and I just wanted to try something a bit different. I found it easier to write nonfiction than fiction.

So maybe I was I was just transported by the easiness So I got destructed I wrote not only in fiction, but I also wrote stuff that was not supposed to be there because I don’t really add any urgency to build my nonfiction Italian newsletter at this point. But that being said, now this guide is out and beta readers are reading it.

This was, for me Crystal, a big eye opener on the creator side of things, because it really showed me that I get excited over projects very easily and then I forced myself into finishing them. But as we were saying, if you have that amount of energy per day you can’t possibly do four or five different things if you’ve got the energy to do two or three. So I did not met my expectation from writing. Again, 27 hours instead of 40 and a translation… like I don’t have a baseline. This is the first time that I’m keeping hours of translation so I don’t know if 17 hours is a lot or if it’s not a lot, I’m going probably to have a bit more data at the end of this year. But definitely those two objective were a bit neglected for my desire of chasing something that I can’t really define. I don’t want to say anything else over the creator side of things just finishing with the reflection that I have on this point and the challenge and strategies that I think it’s important both for me, but also for people that maybe have the same problem that I have, which is getting excited over several projects.

So I did manage to write every single day, even if it was 15 or 30 minutes. But with a very low output since I focused into the nonfiction staff. Admin, which I’m going to talk about in the manager tab, and publishing and marketing. And it’s not very easy to switch, at least for me, from transformation to creation of content.

That was the big lesson for me that I learned in January and do you have any lesson that you learned or everything went well for you Crystal?

Crystal Hunt: There’s always lessons to be learned nothing ever goes quite how we plan.

There were there were a few really exciting things that happened though. This was my first months after my transition, back to being a full-time author again, then I’ve really scaled back my speaking engagements and a lot of my teaching time and a lot of the other authorly stuff that I was doing. My goal for this year is to really focus on getting new books out and I spent a lot of time writing last year and I wasn’t really releasing much. So they really is the idea of being my creator hat firmly on my head for as many hours as possible this year is the goal. And to that end, I have saved a lot of royalties from last year and budgeted them towards hiring help so that I can still manage the things and market the things the way that I need to, but I don’t have to do all of it myself.

So that has been a really interesting shift. This was the first month and I have three different helpers right now. So that it really makes a difference in terms of what I can accomplish. So when I start rattling things off, I am being very transparent, I am not responsible for a hundred percent of the things that are happening, I’m only responsible for facilitating they’re happening and there are various assistance and qualified helpers in different roles, which we’ll talk a little bit about as I go through each of the sections, cause there’s kind of one in each section.

So my creator goals, I had two for this month. My original intention for January was to finish writing Strategic Indie Author and really get that book put together, that was my non-fiction goal. My fiction goal was to write a free newsletter cookie, a new newsletter cookie called Home that is going to go out to my Rivers End crew in the fiction world. And yeah, that was challenging. We got totally excited about Create With Co-Authors and that one is not supposed to be on the schedule until May it’s coming out.

So I wasn’t supposed to start writing that until late February, actually early March. And yeah, that completely flipped the schedule. I did still manage to write a ton of words in Strategic Indie Author, but I also wrote some in Create With Co-Authors. And given that I spent 61 hours editing the Full-Time Author book right before it had to come out I did not manage to switch gears in my brain into fiction. I was so firmly in non-fiction and when you intermingle the buying a home process in everything, I was super disrupted.

So instead of being really down on myself I did that for a few minutes, but, instead of wallowing there I decided just to embrace the flow basically, and life handed us an early opportunity to get the place that we wanted to get and I needed to just embrace that as setting my future self up to have an office to go to. So that is exciting. Now the good news is even though I only wrote about half of the days that I intended to write. I actually exceeded my predicted capacity or word count because I do pretty well under pressure and I was very conservative in my estimate of how many words per day I could write with the number of hours I had available. So I had estimated that I’d be able to do about 42,000 words and I actually did almost 46,000 words, which is a lot it’s content that I already knew, I had the outlines all written for all the chapters, I just was filling in sections of knowledge in each of those two nonfiction books, as I was working my way through things. And every time I had a break, I just switched back to that and I filled in another couple of paragraphs.

So that actually worked really well and I was able to switch in and out pretty consistently.

For anybody out there who’s wondering how I know that. So precisely is because I’m using the Strategic Authorpreneur Business Plan, which has a tab for tracking your words and it has a tab to help you calculate your capacity and it has tabs for literally everything we’re going to talk about today. So if you haven’t yet downloaded that you can get it for free.

We’re sharing it on our website. So if you go to strategicauthorpreneur.com and you go to today’s episode 45, you’ll be able to download that from a link and you can custom create your own tracking system from the template that’s provided and you can fill in all your own details. And it’s just really helpful way to see exactly how you’re doing and compare your predictions to the realities of things and how all of that is shaking out.

So overall, I think it was a solid month. It’s definitely not entirely how I pictured it, but I think the lessons there really doing the most important thing first, which for me, was the writing. So it was getting up. I focused on that on every day that I could and on the days that I couldn’t, I was a little bit gentle with myself and said: that’s okay.

As long as I’m overall hitting the targets and not every day is going to look the same. So we’re going to follow the flow. The other thing that that works well is my assistant has been working on… my author system, has been working on finishing the documentation and the series Bible for the first 10 of the Rivers End romances.

So she’s entering all of the details into the series bible about characters and location, basically everything that’s been published and is written in stone as it were, or in audio, which we don’t want to change. So all of those things are just about finished, but they’re still being entered. My fiction world was making progress in the background even while I was distracted with the nonfiction.

So overall I think that experiment, and I haven’t been tracking my words that I’ve been writing for quite some time. It’s been probably a year since I was doing that, but it was very motivating. I was showing up, I did some writing sprints with the Creative Academy folks. So I was showing up to some 7:30, 8:30, 9:30 AM sprint times, depending on the day. And also I have another group of a writer friends called the whiskey chicks, and we had our own little like sprint times as well at other points in the week.

So that really helped to have those two different groups of people in two different formats. One’s on zoom. And one is just a discord server where you just post a message when you’re starting a sprint and if anybody else wants to play along, they can.

That was a really nice way to balance those two kinds of energy and to have options throughout the week where I always knew there was somebody around who could, we can cheer each other on or keep each other company. So having help is really important to stay focused and stay motivated, which is all good.

Now it sounds like you had a lot of manager stuff going on Michele this month as well. How did all that shake out for you?

Michele Amitrani: Yeah. And actually I was trying to limit myself at the very beginning, because I knew that there was a lot to talk about on the manager stuff. Think of manager also as admin, which is another of the roles that authorpreneurs need to have.

So the most important thing that I’m happy that it’s is the publication of Bringer of Fire in Italian. So that’s wide, and that’s on Amazon, Kobo and the other stores. And I also prepared everything related to the marketing and the soft launch.

So this was challenging for me for a couple of reasons. The first reason as I said is because it was a slightly different product from the previous one. The first one Soul of Stone in Italian was a very short novella. This one was same genre, same expectations, but double the size. So it felt more a bit like a real book.

Even though we’re not classifying here. It’s short reading, but it’s still a book. We still have characters that we really get attached and all that kind of stuff. But what I’m trying to say here is that even 15,000 words more make the whole process completely different. And I didn’t know this.

Because up to this point, as you guys know, I did publish Soul of Stone and Bringer of Fire in English, but I wrote those. I didn’t have to translate them. So every single time from now on, as a manager, as an admin, as whatever you want to call me, I have to translate the story and this story has 5,000 words more, it requires at least 10 hours of translation. If it has 10,000 words more. It’s not 20, it’s more like 25 or 30. It’s like compounding and it might be a problem of stories or characters, but it just takes way more time than usual. So if I have a 40,000 words book I’m expecting today, three to four times as much as a novella, like a Bringer of Fire.

So I need to be aware of this, especially because I decided that I’m going to do this for six times since I wrote six different novellas. This is point number one: publication of Bringer of Fire taught me a lot as a manager Also as the admin goes and I can clearly see how much work is involved in publishing that lovely book in four different platforms now, because I have Amazon, GooglePlay, D2D and Kobo, so it’s four different venues. It adds up. t takes time at the very beginning D2D was new to get published in that platform took me maybe 30 minutes for a book. Now I was able to get that time to 12 minutes to 10 minutes, but it’s still time.

That’s what I’m saying and time is money here. I’m a bit jealous of Crystal that has actually an aggregator that distributes stuff in most of the platforms available over there. And if you forgot to watch the episode about distributor and going wider we did make one and I think it was very helpful, so go check it.

But again, this is the proof that what we said is definitely true. So you can see me it’s not super fun spending one hour in publishing in all these venues, but again, I don’t have the resources. So at this point I need to make do with what I have. I am not complaining. I’m very happy that I’m learning this so that I can tell you guys. It’s true. It takes more time.

The other thing is as a manager, I requested the editing for Muse of Avalon in English, which is the third mythological fantasy novella that I will be publishing in March 2021, because on February, I’ve published Bringer of Fire in Italian. And so I’m trying to do, if I can one novella each and every month. The next step is the editing of Muse of Avalon which I’m happy to announce that a few days ago, my editor went back to me and she gave me the final edited version of Muse of Avalon. That means that now I have to prepare all the marketing material and I have to make sure that this book is prepped and up to be released because as a marker I’m going to tell you afterward something related to this because I decided to do something slightly different than compared to Soul of Stone and Bringer of Fire.

The third thing that I wanted to say to you guys about the manager tab is that I set up a new tracking system for books that I’m selling on Amazon Italy. That’s my biggest market and it’s the one that is providing the most of my royalties and that is actually paying the bills of all the expenditures that I came through this February.

Let me elaborate just a bit more about this. So 90 to 95% of my royalties now come from page leads, paperbacks, any ebooks sold on Amazon? I’m trying to change that. Really hard because I’m wide now. I don’t want this to be… It’s too big, 90 to 95%. So I’m working on that. In the meantime, I need to be realistic and I need to build a system that allows me to see at the glance, at least 90% of my sales, which are on Amazon.

We have built, and the Crystal helped me a lot, a spreadsheet, which is a completely unknown world to me that is basically telling me every single month, how much I’m making from my science fiction series Omnilogos in Italian and my mythological fantasy series. Boy. Oh boy. If it’s helping. A lot, because I can see now at a glance, how many books I sold, page reads not only of the science fiction, but also of the mythological fantasy.

And this is helping me making some strategic decision about the ads. Which again, I’m going to talk about in the next tab and it’s very important because I have a budget now. I have to be very careful what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. So I took a couple of decision not to make some ads now because I’m saving up money.

So this new tracking system it’s very helpful. It helps me being a better manager. I’m looking into making this bigger as I build up more sales from my wide distribution channel. I don’t really have a lot of them, so I’m not implementing it just yet. I’m looking forward to do it, but come back to me in a few months because I’m really working toward that.

And the last point of my manager tab is, and I’m very happy to announce this because I’ve commissioned two new covers for my fairytale series, which is basically, really the one thing that I’m focusing a lot now to build a double reader magnet. I want this to be an entry point to my Italian newsletter and if it goes well, I want to translate this on my American, US Canadian side.

I don’t know how it’s going to go, but the news is that I’m using for the first time another service, which is Fiverr. I got to know actually an Italian cover designer. So I’m very excited. I’m using way too many cover designer these days.

I’m going to let you know, I go. It’s new, and it’s budget friendly, but at the same time, I need them to be professional. So I’m balancing things up. So that’s the last point that I wanted to make on my manager tab. As you can see, I’ve been really working toward the spreading my forces and my strength into building this routine of the publishing stuff, at least one thing a month and also to being able to keep track of the data. That’s why the tracking system was so important for me. What happened to your manager hat this month, Crystal?

Crystal Hunt: My manager, how was very tall this month, there was a lot of managering to be done for certain.

It is that time of year. January is all about the tax prep and financial year end, and the, I am the lucky one who manages that for three different companies between our various publishing enterprises and such. So I got to spend some quality time with, we use QuickBooks for a couple of the businesses and spreadsheets for another.

And I got to take a deep dive into our finances and review all of the spending and all of the royalty pallets and all of the things and make sure everybody got paid and all of those boxes were checked. So it was pretty heavy on the business management side. But what revealed to us through all of that accounting was that we actually had a bit of a budget to do some fun, new things, and it prompted us to put together a formal business plan for our Creative Academy guides, because I did that for my fiction, but we hadn’t yet done it for non-fiction. And we usually make that correspond with the beginning of the new fiscal year and decide what we’re going to tackle that year and we had some exciting developments.

We had an email from somebody asking about foreign rights for one of our books. So we are inquiring via agents into that process. And we also have taken the leap and we are diving into audio books for our Creative Academy guides for writers. So I got to set up our Findaway Voices account and set up the first four books for recording. So that is super exciting. I cannot wait. We’re just waiting for the casting to happen. So we have a bunch of auditions coming our way in the next few days. And at the end of February, I’ll be able to tell you all about how that process is going. And while you’ll be able to hear all about who we picked and who knows how far we’ll get by then that’s four whole weeks away.

The other thing we were working on was actually publishing and launching the Full-Time Author book, which is a gigantic beast of a book for the record is 500 pages, which is almost double the size of a lot of our other guides, but it is, well, your career is a big deal. It’s a big thing. We had a lot to say, and we wanted you to have everything in one place.

So that book is now live on Amazon. We did that January 18th, and January 28th, it went live everywhere else. Interesting tidbit to note on Amazon, when you’re uploading your book to KDP, you can upload it like 72 hours before your live date. On wide channels you need to upload it a couple of weeks before your live date.

So if you are calendaring out, when you’re going to have things ready, if you’re using an aggregator, I’m going through Publish Drive for those, then you need to have a couple of weeks for all of that information to get out and to make sure that the right files have been distributed to all of those places and put into place before your launch date.

So for us, it just means that we need to do some careful math and make sure that we have a couple extra weeks of lead time. We had built all of our publication and launch processes around just dealing with one platform. And so this month we had to rework every single system we had in place. And we had to layer over top, all of the other steps required to launch on all the other platforms as well.

And the review process is different. So we’ll talk about that on the marketing side a little bit. So our arc team management all had to change all that kind of stuff. So there was a lot of that sort of reflection and evolution stuff to be happening. And also a lot of checklists all over the place. So that was exciting.

We set up some new tracking systems to help us through that because we’ve found there so many more steps when we added those new platforms that we just, we’re a little bit all over the place. And we’ll because there’s a whole team of us that we need to all be on the same page and need to be clear who’s doing what and by when. And so we’re designing some new checklists and some new internal communication processes to help us through the launching of those books. We are going to have a new book probably every two months for this whole year in that nonfiction series between all of us who are contributing in the books we’re writing together.

So we really want to perfect that and have it be a really seamless thing that we can just say, okay, it’s launch month that means we start this checklist and we work our way through these a hundred steps or however many there are in this particular order and each task has someone’s face beside it. We use Asana for our task management, so we can assign someone’s face to the task and that means that person is responsible, which is very handy.

On the fiction side of things, my books are all coming out of KU one at a time they’re coming out of KDP select, which means I can then publish them wide and I was super excited to start setting that up in January and then I had this revelation that, because my box set is on a different three months on a different 90 day timeline than some of my other books and it had just renewed. I missed the date to pull it. And so I have to wait three more months until it comes out of KU before I can publish the individual titles wide because you can’t have stuff, both wide and in KU at the same time and if the individual books are in the collection your hands are kinda tied. So that was an interesting lesson and I would just advise anybody who is not a hundred percent sure if they’re going to pull something or what date they’re going to pull it from KDP Select and make sure you go in and turn off the automatic renewal feature.

Otherwise, you can get surprised. Like I got surprised and then you can delay your plans for three months, like I just did. So there you go. That was a hard lesson to learn. Oops. And I will blame it on the distraction of buying myself a new office and then figuring out where to put all the furniture instead of looking at KDP dates.

All right. On that note, shall we switch over to wearing our marketer hats and talking a little bit about what kind of activities we got up to on that front? What did your marketing self do Michele to scale up your book sales this month?

Michele Amitrani: Okay. So Crystal, this is the moment that we were waiting for. Marketer. I am very weak on this point. I will say I’m the weakest, I don’t consider myself a writer that had arrived, I don’t consider myself to be a good admin kind of manager, but I am decent on this regards. Marketer? Not very much. And as it has been said that are we are writers. If there are some spreadsheets that can be done, we learn how to do that, but then it comes ads, then it comes marketing and then we freeze and we say, okay, that’s not what I bargained for. Bye! Not the case for us because we are all authorpreneurs.

So we need to learn how to do also this side of things. I have updated view at the very beginning telling you that I was really working hard on to up my Amazon ads game. And this is the section where I want to tell you a bit more about that. I have seriously started diving into this thing in January 2021.

And so in order to do this, I’ve bought and finished in a matter of days two books. One by Deb Potter Amazon Ads for Authors 2021, the second one by Ryan Robertson Amazon Ads Unlished. I also watched a couple of workshops, the first one from the same lovely Deb, about Amazon ads and another one actually from Mark Dawson.

Kindlepreneur gave a link to one of these webinars or masterclass for free, I just finished it. And it was very helpful. What I’m trying to say is that I’m really allocating long hours to this because I need to figure out how this works. Why am I deciding to do it now? Two reasons. The first one is because I’m seeing the results, especially in the market that I’m more active, which is the Italian.

Being on Amazon ads Italy right now, it’s like being on Amazon ads in the US in 2016. This platform it’s incredibly new. We started having this less than a year ago, I think, or a year ago. Brand new. There is, don’t tell it to anybody, but basically nobody. So I want to be that person that really studies and try to have an advantage that is earned over other people.

So starting from this month, I am going to up my game on this. My budget is still going to be relatively small compared to, big names, but I’m going to turn the heat a bit more, but I’m going to do it strategically learning what I’ve learned and never using money that I don’t have.

So all this money that I’m going to use have been set aside for the last seven, eight months, actually. So I’ve got the numbers. I know how much I can play with it. Amazon ads was just a part of my marketer plan. The second thing that I did after trying to up my Amazon game was participating to one BookSweep giveaway, which is basically that platform that gives the possibility to readers to find your books through giveaways.

This is the third time that I used the service. It’s really good for the amount of work that you have to do, which is basically nothing. You just have to go to the website and enroll, and of course you have to pay for the service, but I’m keeping a keep a keen eye on the engagement and the open rate level.

And this is because of something that I already mentioned at the baseline report we did at the beginning of January, 2021, which is: it’s very important for me to yes, grow the English newsletter, but grow it in a way that is not just going away from me where like I have 10,000 people and 2% of them open the emails.

That’s not good. So I’m trying to be very specific and how am I doing it this by spending a lot of time on creating automation and making sure that this traffic, which is relatively cold, gets to know my content. And we created a new automation in the past few weeks brand new, with more clickable things and more things that I was offering.

And I can tell you now that I can really see the results compared to the previous two BookSweeps the amount of open rate and click rate, it’s click rate it’s doubled if not tripled. So I’m seeing a very interesting trend over there. And I will let you know how it goes but Amazon ads and newsletter, I told you from day one was going to be my priority for the whole 2021.

And I really used January to prove it. Will see how it goes in the months to come. The other thing that I’m doing as a marketer, I’m preparing a marketing material for Bringer of Fire in Italian, because although it’s already out, most of the people that knows me don’t know it because just the soft launch and the review crew was sent to the page.

Now I’m going to let other people know, and of course I need graphic to make that happen. So I used a couple of hours to create some of that content. The other thing that I did as a marketer was, and this is actually one very big that’s going to play out a lot in the very long-term plan for 2021. I am trying to leverage the small novellas in order to then box set them and having six of them, hopefully to have a couple of box set. In order to make this fly, it will be easier for me if I can make one of these novellas for free as an entry point to my mythological collection.

But we’ve discussed about that and we need solid reviews to make that happen. So I’ve been using the last four weeks to actively pursuing reviews for the first book in this collection of mythological fantasies that I can then later use as an entry point to the box set, which is going to be a paid product. Not easy.

I’ve been using my arc team, I’ve been using a BookSirens. I been using a people that read my books and there on my newsletter. And my objective is to hopefully get to at least two digit number by the end of this week. Let’s see if it goes as I want. Now we are in the US market at least, at nine reviews.

So I need another one in the next few days. Again, I’m really working a lot on that regard. Entry-point to make it the strongest possible so that can be a good way to get to know my mythological logical fantasy box set. So Amazon ads, BookSweep, give away to up my new set, a Bringer of Fire marketing material, and then actively pursuing reviews for the first novella of my mythological fantasy.

Those were the four main things I have been working on in January. What are your main things as a marketer Crystal? What have you been up to under that regard?

Crystal Hunt: On the fiction side, I set a goal because I want to dive into BookBub ads this year. And also with being wide, the pre-orders are going to matter a lot more on other channels as well.

And I really want to be able to set that up. So for my fiction identity for CJ hunt, I set up a promo through authors XP to grow my BookBub followers. So my goal was a thousand because that’s the point where you can get pre-order notifications sent out to all your followers once you hit that target with BookBub, you have a thousand followers, then they will automatically send that out.

So that’s fantastic. And that’s just a thousand people who are going to hear whenever I have a new book that I launched. So that is great The progress on that so far, I’m halfway. I had about 600 people. I needed 400 more and I’ve got about 200 more since we started that promo. So the progress is going well, I will hang in there another month probably or so until the rest of those come in.

So that should be great. And I had my assistant prep, new promo images for all the books because when I rebooted them and prepped for going wide, I had new covers, I did new covers these ones I actually did myself. I’m very proud. I’ve been spending a lot of time leveling up my Photoshop skills. And then I also work with a designer who can do a little bit more than I can do so when I come up against my limits. It may be that I want to change the color of someone’s hair or eyes or shirt or whatever, or some of the finer manipulations are a little bit beyond my current technical skills. I’m learning, but there’s lots of stuff I don’t know how to do yet and that’s my weekend when I have time project.

So yeah, it’s not gotten a lot of attention in the last little while. Anyway, we rebooted the covers and so we redid using BookBrush. We redid all of the promotional images so that I have them all in a folder ready to go whenever we’re going to do promotions or launches, or I need to send out newsletter stuff.

So those are all ready and waiting, which is great because, as I mentioned earlier, we can’t release them wide yet because of the silly box set mistake that I made, which means that we have a little time to prep all of the things. So to that end, we went through and did an audit of all of the things on the marketing side that need to be updated, refreshed.

New bio, covers need to be swapped out, basically all of that stuff just needs to be gone over from top to bottom. I’m rebooting my newsletter. I moved it to another service. So I’m using SendFox now and so that just is a lot of finicky little details on the marketing side that need to be looked after.

So I made a giant checklist and we’re just going to work our way through updating all of those things over the next month or two, while we wait to be able to release those books all wide into the world. Now all the free ones I can release right away, anything that’s permafree so there will still be books coming out.

We are going to start next month on that, but they won’t all be able to come out. So we’re just going to roll them out one at a time as the dates allow. And on the non-fiction side we have, because there’s three of us writing together. We’re all managing our own writing fiction, as well as the shared nonfiction.

And there’s a lot of books coming out and a lot of stuff to manage and a lot of platforms, and we were not taking advantage of most of the opportunities in terms of promotions available to us. Each wide platform has promos they do each month. If you have a new book, you can submit it to Apple to be featured in certain places.

If you have, let’s say Kobo is running a promotion during the month of February for a certain type of book. If you submit your book, you can get included in those promotions only if you know they’re happening and only if you submit them. And one of the things that I really like about PublishDrive is there is a page inside your account where they collect up for you all of the promotions that are available that month. I think it’s one of the best kept secrets about PublishDrive, actually, which doesn’t need to be a secret because it’s really cool. So that is an awesome feature, which we were not taking advantage of because we were all kicking too many soccer balls down the field.

So as part of our business plan, we decided to allocate a little bit of funds to having a marketing manager who is going to keep us on track and who was going to go and because she also does all our ads management for us, she’s basically going to go audits, whatever platform we’re scaling up ads on and say, okay, if we’re focusing on BookBub ads, you need to level up this profile and you need more followers and you need to do this so that we have homework every week in terms of what we’re going to spend our marketing time on, and that will help make our ads more effective.

It will help keep all of us consistent and on track and make sure that our presence in that arena is polished and professional and we’re on top of all the current things. So I’m really excited about that actually, because it’s a really powerful thing to do those incremental little changes and even something like making sure that there’s a link in your profile to whatever the latest resources or, whatever.

So that’s really exciting. And the other, there’s two actually other exciting developments in the non-fiction marketing world. One is that we’ve been working to beta test with Beacon and Beacon is the tool that we use to deliver the resources to people who sign up for our newsletter list for our non-fiction books.

So if you go to CreativeAcademyForWriters.com/resources, you can put in your email address and you can get all the free resources that go with each of our book titles. Now Beacon is doing this really cool thing where they’re creating a whole resource library that you can get access to. So we volunteered to be test cases to help them figure out that functionality and launch the resource library stuff.

So that has been a really cool to see the backend and we’ve envisioning what would be the most perfect user interface for the website and how that would work and then whenever there’s something we think of that could be made better, we say, Hey Kevin, can you do this? And he hooks us up.

So that has been really fun and really facilitating, streamlining the process of delivering the resources that go with the book. So we’re totally stoked about what that is going to do for newsletter signups, and ease of use for our readers as well, which is really important just that it’s a nice experience.

The third piece is that now that Full-Time Author is live in all of the places and in all of the formats, we have paperback, hardcover, ebook, the audio will join soon, but we set up ads in four different markets for Full-Time Author. So those are live now and running in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia.

So that is also hopefully going to be a nice level up. It takes a little while for those to really kick in and gain some steam. So we found with the other books, six weeks is pretty standard before they get any kind of traction. And at the beginning it took about six months before we really saw big results from those.

So if you’re out there and you’re feeling like I started ads and nothing happened. I don’t know I’m doing it all wrong! It is good to look at your process, but some of this stuff is just not fast. It doesn’t matter how right you do it, it’s going to take time. If you’re feeling frustrated because you haven’t seen results and it’s been a few weeks already. Don’t even worry about that. It takes a lot of volume to figure it out. It takes a lot of eyeballs on things. It takes a lot of clicks and it takes a while for Amazon to learn you as well. So there’s a certain amount of that relationship building that has to happen. The other thing I did, one of my other big goals for this year was to level up on the advertising front.

So we have Amazon ads running now really smoothly for the non-fiction, less smoothly for my fiction. So I’d like to see those level up, but we also want to learn BookBub ads. So I watched the webinar Mark Dawson had a lovely lady from BookBub who came and taught a webinar, but she also is the one who is teaching the course inside the ads for authors course.

So once you’re in the ads for authors course, there’s a whole bunch of individual modules and one of them is on BookBub and that one has just been completely redone and relaunched and because I bought the ads for authors course years ago I get all the updates. So I am excited to work through that and also Stephanie is our magical advertising manager and her and I both tend to do the courses and then completely geek out together, which is really fun. So we’re gonna talk through our learning from that webinar, which was fascinating, and then do the full course. And we’re looking towards probably March or April before we’re really experimenting with those ads at all.

We’re going to spend the next two months learning and we’re also going to be trying to make sure that we level up everything we can about our book profiles and get the right people following us and make sure that we’re doing all the right things so that when those ads are running, they will actually be as effective as possible.

So definitely excited to dive into those waters. And for now it’s all about the learning. So we’ve been throwing a lot of numbers at you and I think we’ve been throwing a lot of tasks and a lot of different things we’ve been talking about. It’d be interesting to dig in a little bit, to see what numbers did those things actually result in. What kinds of progress are we seeing and how are things breaking down? Michele, what did you find now that you’ve got your system all set up and you’re able to crunch some numbers? What did those numbers tell you?

Michele Amitrani: They told me a lot. At the same time I feel like sometimes they are like an Oracle. They are very obscure because you have to take them with a grain of sand, especially if you’re doing the long game.

And when to explain you why. Since we have spoken of a sharing with transparency or number, I’m very excited to tell you this. I just wanted to share a bit about revenue and sales and my target. So as of January 2021 the quality of my revenue as an authorpreneur comes 100% from my fiction royalties, which is not necessarily good because we want to diversify that. Anything happens to that side of my big business, I am f****d, which we don’t want that to happen. But it’s good that I am at that point and I’m very vulnerable. And I’m more happy than I’m actually wide now. So if something happens to my Amazon and I lose maybe 85, 90% of my sale, I don’t lose 100% of my sales. So I’m more happy than I was in 2020.

I had a ton of expenses on this month because January, and this is basically the beginning of the month, It’s also when the web boss thing is paid and I have two websites. One is international, so it’s in English and Italian. The other one is a website in Italian.

I also have the podcasts in Italian. Like they’re not free. They require some money. So the bill for some of those came in January, I had to pay for Arc services, online courses and for proofreading, because I was, as I was mentioning, I contacted my editor and asked her to approve feed the Muse of Avalon.

At the end of the day after income and expenses my 2021 starts with a minus, specifically with minus $38. So that’s not too bad. It’s a better than what I started with the previous month, which has basically at the 60% less book than I have today.

So in a year I incremented that stuff. And I know that in February I’m going to have less expenses. So I’m really, I’m confident that number is going to be not only green, but in a interesting way. So at this much expenditures I will just want to say that the height of the month for me was to get my first average check from GooglePlay, which amounts to $1 and 57 Canadian. I think it’s something very small, but at the same time we have to celebrate our win Crystal, right?

Crystal Hunt: Yeah! It’s a new revenue stream. It’s a shiny brand new flow into your bank account.

It’s very exciting.

Michele Amitrani: It’s like half of a package of chips and I like chips. So that’s going to pay for those. So $1 and 57 cents from GooglePlay. Thank you very much GooglePlay. Let’s work very hard in order to achieve more. This is one digit number. Focus on two-digit number, then three, then more. This is a baseline.

This is why you a part of our journey, because you get to know the $1 and 57 Canadian that started it all. So that was something that I wanted to share. And if you have some height of the month or something that you want to see revenue wise, Crystal, please do share it now. We want to know.

Crystal Hunt: I got my own whopping check from one source. Medium.com. I like years ago, put up some blog articles and one of them as an experiment, I put behind the paywall as part of their partner program. So you get paid if people read it, it’s the equivalent of KU, but for blogging and I had got a 1.97 US. Though. So that’s 2.25 Canadian or something.

So that was pretty exciting. Yeah, my accountant loves those basically cost more to process than you get, but that’s okay. They will, they all get bigger over time. For me, I did a breakdown of costs and expenses and income and all of the things. And what I discovered was. That actually I need to revise my system.

So this was the first time I was entering everything and the categories are really useful and interesting, but the questions that I wanted to ask the data. We’re not being answered by the way that I had categorized certain things. So what I learned is that I’m going to shift up or overly customize my own budget spreadsheet so that I can really dig into like, how much am I paying for assistance?

Because I have lots of people helping me, but all of those expenses were broken into one thing. So I found it frustrating that I couldn’t see that really granular information of which expenses for administration or help or running of the publishing business was I actually paying for? The other thing I thought would be really helpful is to be able to see, you know what people were working on.

Like I could assign if my assistants, if all three people this time were helping with publication stuff, because it’s a publication month, that’s really different than if they’re helping with website updates or whatever. And so I think that would be useful to know as well and track somehow is which category like writing and editing or publishing or marketing. Which hat basically does that get assigned to?

So I’m thinking about how I could alter my tracking system so that the creator expenses and the manager expenses and the marketer expenses would be broken down. And in a way that lets me know what is my cost versus benefit in each of those areas. And also making sure that I’m investing equally in the different areas of the business.

I think that’s really important to make sure that all of those are getting covered. So that is really helpful to know. And it’s also going to be fun actually, to play with that. I am the geek who likes spreadsheet stuff. I didn’t know anything about spreadsheets, like even a year and a half or two years ago.

I mostly used them like graph paper equivalent. It’s like a word document where you could type things into cells. And I wasn’t very good about making formulas. I would manually calculate things, which led to my husband laughing at me a lot. Cause he works with spreadsheets.

Michele Amitrani: I’m laughing because I am at that stage basically.

Now you have to help me on that regard. So I understand you.

Crystal Hunt: We’re just, we’re passing the knowledge along. So because my husband is very good at that. He has been teaching me a bunch and then I started Googling things. Once you understand the language of spreadsheets a little bit better, than what to Google, because before I didn’t even know what kind of tutorials to look for.

I was like, I don’t know what it’s called. I wanted to do this, but I would look for things and I wouldn’t find any help videos, even though I knew there must be some, but it’s just, you’re looking for not the right language. And so once you break through and you learn a few words and you figure it out, then it starts to get easier over time.

So now I think it’s really cool and I love being able to make something that’s totally customized to my own business and does everything exactly the way I want it to. Again, like I spend a lot of my weekend working on things like this, which maybe gets me in an X mark in the balance category, but a check-mark in the weirdly fun and eventually beneficial category.

So we’re going to call it a draw on that one. We gave you a breakdowns when we did our annual review at the end of 2020, we gave you some breakdowns about percentages of where income was coming from. And so I’m going to do that again for January, because I think my goals are to shift these numbers over the course of this year.

So they’re a little bit more even. For right now, 62% of my income is coming from non-fiction book royalties. 29% is teaching and affiliate income. And 9% is fiction royalties. To be honest, I’m impressed there’s anything in the fiction royalties, because I haven’t put out a book in two years, which is terrible on the fiction side, but that is because for two years I’ve been growing the non-fiction. So now we just need to balance that action out a little bit and try and get those categories a little more even. I’m happy with the teaching and affiliate income it’s right where it needs to be. We just need to redistribute a little bit of that non-fiction income into the fiction side.

And then my three different selves will be nicely balanced and hopefully I will feel very good about that. So after the numbers and the crunching and all the things Michele any reflections or last words of wisdom there?

Michele Amitrani: Yeah. I will say if we can probably close this with my goals for February, and maybe if you have some goals for February, just to give the listeners a glimpse to the future.

I’ve started this saying that on January I basically spread myself thin and I did six things instead of two to three. So I’m trying to be better on February. That is why I’m going to concentrate on three projects. And if I have time on two additional projects. First things that I really want to get done is the final manuscript for both my fairytale reader magnet books. Which is proving to be more complex than I thought but the beautiful thing is that I use January to finish the second book. So the second novella and this is giving me time to now do the translation and all the other parts.

So most of the hours that I spent in January battling with this project, hopefully are going to be just use for packaging it. So I’ve already commissioned the first cover. I need to commission the second but I really need this to be done because this is important for the long term project and objective of gathering organic subscribers on my Italian front. So if I don’t do this, I can’t start the automation. I can’t start letting people know that I have a free book wide because one of these free book is going to be wide and the following is going to be an exclusive newsletter cookie. Everything that is important for me in the Italian front, in the long term starts from this.

So Michele from the future, please listen to me it from the past, concentrate 90% of your strengths in these things. And my power goal for this is really to be able to actually publish the both of them, meaning I would like to have that first novelette out and then two have already prepared the newsletter cookie so that the person that download the book and see, Hey, you want the second one? You can subscribe to my newsletter. Everything needs to be set up. So that’s my first goal. The second goal for February is to put on pre-order Muse of Avalon, the third mythological fantasy novella, as I was saying, and it’s going to be released on the Anglo-Saxon market on March.

So I want to put the pre-order meaning that I have to put the pre-order in February. So meaning that I need to learn a couple of things on how it works on Amazon and wide. I never did the pre-order wide, so I’m very excited that this will be a first for me.

Third important goal is start translating Muse of Avalon into Italian because it’s going to be my April project.

And this is important because if I want to keep up with this one month thing, I need to start translating now, because now I know Crystal, they takes time to translate, way more than expected. So I’m going to factor in two months this time, not one. Now, if everything goes well, I also have this other two power goals, which is: come up with a new automation sequence for the Italian newsletter, and finally the second power goal is to work towards getting those at least two digit reviews to the first mythological fantasy book on amazon.com so that the other long term project of making it as an entry point to the first book set is going to be achievable.

So that’s for me, for my goals for February 2021. Do you have anything similar that you want to share with the listeners Crystal?

Crystal Hunt: I have been very carefully trying to work out only one goal in each area for this month. So my creator goal is to finish writing my words for the Strategic Indie Author book, because that one is due in March to the editor and that’s got to happen.

I booked her time. It’s all very official. It is on multiple calendars and we are committed. February’s creator goal is to finish the first draft and second draft of Strategic Indie Author, which I made a lot of progress this month so I’m feeling really good about that. I just need to keep the momentum going and not get as distracted by the shiny puffy, tailed squirrels that are out there.

So that’s a thing and the manager hat stuff, the goal for manager self is to make sure that I have updated all of my author profiles and this is a two-pronged goal. Cause one of them is going to take me the first couple of weeks and the other one’s going to take me the second couple of weeks.

The other one is to get the casting done for the audio book narrators for the nonfiction books and so that we can move those forward and they can be in production while I’m doing all the other stuff. Those are my focus areas for my manager hat and for my marketer hat my job is to start posting reviews and clean up my BookBub profile so that we can dive into those BookBub ads sooner rather than later.

So all BookBub all the time is my February homework for my marketing self. And that’s it. Those are the goals and, wait impatiently to get our new place so that I can move into my new office, which is going to be amazing. That’s the goal. All right. So if you have questions, you’d like us to answer on the podcast, please make sure that you email them to crystal@strategicauthorpreneur.com and we will make sure we ask and answer them in our next episode.

Michele Amitrani: We really hope you enjoy today’s show. Please remember to hit that subscribe button whenever you’re listening to the podcast and also to visit us at strategic authorpreneur.com for the show notes and links to the resources and tools that we love and that we mentioned today. And also feel free to buy us a coffee if you find the show out for you can find the button on the strategic authorpreneur homepage and also on the specific page of each episode. Until next week. Happy writing.

Crystal Hunt: Thanks for listening everybody. We’ll see you next time.