Join us as we reflect on Months 4+5 of Going Wide and look at the progress made, the challenges encountered along the way, and discuss solutions to the obstacles we faced this past month.

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 054: Going Wide Progress Report #4: April+May 2021

Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 53 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Crystal Hunt.

Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani and we are here 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.

Crystal Hunt: In this episode, we are going to be taking a look at the last couple of months, since we had a little bit of a podcast break talking about our progress on our going wide adventure. And also telling you a little bit about the challenges that we’ve encountered and hopefully sharing some solutions as well in case you are coming up against all of the same issues that we have been. But first Michele, I feel like you’ve got a bunch of news.

It’s been a couple of months. What’s new in your world?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: I feel like both of us can talk for three or four episodes. And yeah, one of the biggest news from my side, at least, I’m settling in Italy. It’s official. Now I am in the country. I was able to reach the motherland. So I’m just basically settling in and dealing with bureaucracy finding a new apartment, which I actually—I did a few hours ago.

I signed my new rent, which is good. Something less that I have to think about. So I’m basically just settling in. I’m sure you have a similar story to mine. I’m also reading a lot, actually. I’ve been reading a lot on the book on the marketing side. I’ve read all of the books from the Author Unleashed by Robert J. Ryan, the books about the copyrights, about sales copy about Amazon ads. It’s a great series composed by four books. A fifth one is coming very interesting, highly recommended. I’m also reading another book. This one is about selling wide and it’s called Get Your Book Selling Wide by Monica Leonelle.

And it is very interesting. There are a lot of things that I’d never found anywhere. So I recommend you to check it out if you’re interested in the wide adventure. And I’m also reading The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. And this is not a book marketing book. It’s just something more on the style of writing.

You do know that I am trying to write in English, my second language, and I do find books like this one to be helpful. And finally, I have been using what little hours I add left to getting ready to release two box sets for my mythological fantasy series in Italian and in English so now I’m into the exciting process of organizing promo sites, the dates, scheduling newsletter releases, and basically making sure that all the pieces are set and I’m set up for success for an early June release of the box set in English. And I’m sure Crystal that also you have amazing news from your side. I want to hear them all.

Crystal Hunt: Well, we, we moved, so that was a big one. And I tried my hand at kitchen refinishing. It’s been a while since I worked with my family, but I grew up doing that. So I dusted off my outfits and I, with my daughter, we refinished the kitchen and we’re working through some bathroom renovations and basically just completely reset my life in the physical space, in the mental space, in the emotional space.

That was the big shift from old life to new life. So that was great. And a really good opportunity anytime there’s a giant change like that is a good opportunity to break some old habits and make some new habits and do a little bit of behavior changing. So I did what I’m calling a wellness reset as well.

So I’ve reading books like Burnout: The secret to unlocking the stress cycle by Emily and Emilia Nagoski, they’re sisters. So I read that one, I’ve been reading Flow, which is an older book by a really established researcher on flow, joy, concentration, that kind of thing, whose last name is Csikszentmihalyi, but it’s like really long and hard to spell.

So just check the show notes for that one. And we’ll put some links to those books in there, and those are the topics of our next two just one thing, episodes in the creative academy for writers as well. So if you haven’t joined us yet, come on over, join the party. You can come and chat about those books and we’ll talk about the concepts from the book. So you don’t even have to have read the books. You can just come and chat about those two concepts, which I feel like are very related to things that we are tackling as authors. 

My other excitement in the world of getting healthy was that I got an Oculus VR or an Oculus quest two, which is a virtual reality headset.

And I got some exercise apps and stuff that go in that. So I can now exercise in really beautiful vacation spots all around the world that are totally gorgeous natural locations. And it feels like getting out of the house and traveling, which I have to say is quite amazing at this current moment.

And I can just push a button and be anywhere in the world, basically that I want to be. So that has been a really good time. And I’m working out much more than I used to, which means I’m sore like all the time, but that was part of my get healthy focus was to move my body and I enabled to be sitting at my desk and not sitting at the desk all the time, so that my back and my shoulders and my neck and all of those things are still functional for many stories to come so that I can keep on writing.

And I got vaccinated as well. So that is pretty excited. Yay. For shot over one more to go. And all of those things have really contributed to yeah a health reset, which has been, on the book side of things, the last of my existing books, by the time you’re hearing this will have come out of KDP Select finally, so we have the about 48 hours before this airs, the last one comes out, which means I can actually go ahead and hit that publish button and all the things which I have been waiting for, because of course the last thing to come out was the box set, which has all of the minute terrible blending.

And also Silver Bells has been chosen for a Hello Books feature this week. And so that’s a new, one of the new promo sites that was put together by the team at the self publishing show. And I am gonna take it for a spin and that will be exciting. I’ll report back next episode, on how that went since it should have run by the time we are recording that episode and I also have everything pretty much redesigned and rebooted for the podcast website, by the time you’re hearing this. So if you have not yet in the last couple of days, come and check out the strategicauthorpreneurpodcast.com website, because we have a shiny new look and we have some great new resources for you.

And lots of fun things are there to be found. So come on over and check it out. And now what you’ve all been waiting for. Drum roll the progress report, where we actually tell you specifically what we got up to with our different hats on and dive into the interesting part. I think, which is, where did we get stuck?

What was hard? Where did we have to overcome something in an interesting fashion that might be of use to you in your own adventures? So Michele, over to our progress reports. We go and let’s talk about what our creator hat and talk about what April and May were like in terms of your creator self.

How did that go? 

Creator hat updates and goals

Michele Amitrani: It did go in an interesting way. April and May were both challenging in their own ways. Somehow they conflicted with my creator self. On April I had to deal with some hospital stuff. So for a week or week and a half, I was out. Not because I was sick, but because someone close to me was sick, so I needed to take care of her.

And of course May, I used it for flying from one continent to the other. So that let’s say that didn’t exactly help on the creator side. But there’s a big but. You know, by now that if I can write for 40 hours per month, which is not a lot, but if I can write 40 hours, I’m happy. And I was able to write for 41 hours on April and 56 on the May, even though considering these two things. Again, it’s not a lot and I’m not like super proud of that.

I already told you that professional writers write the 40 hours a week. So I’m nowhere near that. But if I can, if possible, not fall below 40 hours, I’m happy. So that was something on the creator side. 

Crystal Hunt: I’m going to pause right there, because I think it’s important. I don’t know where you get the idea that professional writers have to write 40 hours a week because I actually don’t know any professional writers except no, I don’t know any, I don’t think who actually write 40 hours a week.

I am not convinced that is actually a realistic target. It’s a great target, but I think to be careful about not considering yourself a professional writer because you’re not hitting that because yeah, I know a lot of professional writers and nobody I know writes eight hours a day. I have heard that Nora Roberts might, but she’s the only person that I can think of.

Otherwise most people, two to three to four hours a day is really the most they spend writing. So I don’t know. I’d be curious. Maybe we need to do a survey and find out how many hours a day people are writing. But I think just don’t discount the amount of stuff that you’ve been putting in there because even 10 hours a week of writing is a fair chunk.

So it’s good to have goals, but I think for anybody who’s listening, it’s really important to point out like you don’t have to use that as a bar of being a professional writer, because I think that’s a little bit dangerous. It’s too easy to fail or not feel like you’re hitting that. And then just discount your experience. So I think for everyone that’s going to vary and I consider you a professional writer, and I know stuff. So I feel like opinion will have to matter a certain amount in that mix. All right. Sorry for interrupting but I felt like that was really important to put out there because I don’t want, I don’t want myself, I don’t want anyone else feeling bad.

I don’t write 40 hours a week. But I’m definitely a professional writer, like that’s, I think that’s a bar we have to be careful with that. You can, if that helps you to set that for yourself. Great. But I don’t think feeling like a failure because you’re not hitting that is something that we really need to perpetuate as a thing.

 Michele Amitrani: I think you underline something important. Two things. One is that I am constantly unhappy with what I do. And this is something that completely is not related to listeners or other people. This is something that I do for myself. By this point I like to challenge myself. I proved it more than once in the past few years.

But I totally agree with what Crystal said. She’s right in the fact that the other thing that I don’t do a lot is celebrating wins. So if I write 41 hours and my objective was 40, I will say I could have written 45 or 50. So thank you for stepping in. I think it’s important. At no point you guys compare my experience with yours, but again, this is what I like to do to motivate myself.

And because I re-listen to these episodes, I am the one editing them. So in a way it helps me in a weird way letting myself know that I can do better, but totally agree with what Crustal said. And also we shouldn’t measure ourselves with others. When I said those 40 hours per week. It just because a person that works usually if they are a full-time worker, they’ve worked for 35, 40, 45 hours per week.

So it’s something that I translated to writing. Probably shouldn’t be done. But again, I’m hard on myself. This is something that I’ve been doing for a long time, but that being said, I am happy that I was able to at least write that amount of hours. So 41 hours on April and 56. And I’m happy because there was something that I was able to achieve with this around $100 of writing in these two months, which was finally the rewriting of the sixth story.

Now I’ve been writing this story for four times. This is by far, one of the most difficult stories that I’ve written for the, both the 12 by 20 challenge and 2021 I don’t know exactly why is it. Probably is because the last of these six, so maybe is some kind of mental blockage, but the fact is that I rewrote this stories four times.

I never did something like this for any other of the stories, but the good thing for my creator side is that I’m finally able to say that I’m happy with this fourth version of the story. So the first draft of this is done, I’m now completing the second and tomorrow I’m going to give this story to my first beta for reading.

And then I decided not to touch it. I’m going to rewrite it based on feedback, but I’m not going to rewrite it a fifth time because this is a recipe for craziness. So this is going to be the last form, the last shape of the six stories and whatever is going to be is going to be. I feel like I, I don’t want to bother you with the amount of uh, you know, what I’m going to tell you exactly how long at this point I’ve used to write the story later on though, because it’s one of the parts of my manager things, but just so you know, this is what happened to my creator side.

I completely, we wrote the six mythological novella and tomorrow I’m going to give it to my first better. And finally, I came up with the title for the first, the second box set and the maxi box that I’m planning to release, which will contain all the six stories. And Crystal, again, I have to tip my hat? Do you say that? Because she helped me a lot in deciding titles that believe me, they were not easy to find.

Very, very difficult, but hopefully I’m going to be helpful when people are going to search for that particular kind of sub genre of fantasy on Amazon and the other stores. And just for closing for my creator, Crystal spoke about how important it is for us to let you know the challenges.

One of the challenge … I am too hard on myself probably. That’s something that Crystal had already underline. The other one is something that I made a few months ago, but that is becoming clearly an issue, I think. Which is the challenge of being at this moment as an English writer as an Italian writing in English as a second language, the fact that I am 100% a discovery writer at this point, and I have not set up a clear writing plan. And this challenge shows. When I told you that I rebuild the story four times. I believe, I honestly believe that if I add a system in place, I’m not saying that I need to be a 100% outliner, but I’m saying if I know a bit what kind of scene I’m going to write tomorrow, it might be helpful instead of just coming with something at that day and then banging my head on the wall 1000 times, if I can’t.

And I assure you, it happened, many times. I had to revive four times and now I’m going to tell you how long it took. So this all endeavour amounted to 150 hours of writing. For this story, which is going to turn to be around 20,000 words, which is completely, I think unacceptable, maybe Crystal is going to say something, but I know people that can read the novel in 150 hours.

This is because I think my English is not good enough. It’s not good enough, yet. Let’s use this phrasing. And it’s because it’s my second language and it’s making my life a bit harder. Although I like writing a lot. I like a lot writing in English and I’m not sure exactly why, but I do writing in English more than Italian, if it’s possible.

Super-weird don’t ask me why, but I’m still convinced that first and foremost, I need to develop a more planning-based-approach to to cut my time, spending, writing, and rewriting. And with that being said, I’ll pass the ball to you Crystal. 

Crystal Hunt: Yeah. That is an interesting challenge for sure.

And I’ve done the same thing where I’ve gone heavier on the plotting side multiple times. I am also a discovery writer. I can only plot the very high level points of something. And then I have to just find it out as I write it for all of the details because otherwise I think I just get bored with it.

If I already know what’s going to happen and I know every detail about it, I feel like I’ve already done it. And then I don’t want to write the book. And that is one of the main challenges that I come up against with fiction constantly because I need to plan a certain amount. And I love planning. I love that part. And so I’m, happy to get sucked into that forever more, but it’s not good. It doesn’t get me where I need to go, because it doesn’t get the words on the page. So for me, I’ve been working on finding a balance of that, and I’m writing a new lead magnet for my series. So the book that introduces River’s End and all the characters and the different kind of lines of the other books is currently, it’s a seasonal title, which is not great the rest of the year.

It’s great over the one month when Christmas is, but it’s not good the rest of the time. So I’ve been really working towards writing this. I had to figure out how am I going to tie everything together? It’s a prequwl for the whole series. How’s that going to work in the timeline and how does it pull all the bits and pieces together?

That is what I’ve been writing on the fiction side of things. I, my goal is actually to spend three hours a day writing and the rest of the day is set aside to wear the other hats. Because if I have, let’s say in an eight hour work day, I have about seven functional hours because I am going to take a lunch break because I’m trying to be good about balance.

Then I can spend three of those writing with my creator hat on and a couple with my manager, hat and a couple with the marketer hat. At her hat and that’s what it takes to keep on top of everything at the moment. Anyway, so that has been my approach and what I’m shooting for. Definitely it was challenging with complete disintegration of physical space to stay on top of that in any kind of regular schedule over the last couple of months.

So I was just taking the time opportunistically where I could. So I spent a couple of weekends completely immersed in writing. That was actually really fun. I haven’t done that for a while and it was a really interesting reset. I gave myself all of April off of writing and anything related to writing so that I would have a whole month just to focus on packing, moving, unpacking, changing 6 million addresses just dealing with the whole resetting of a life.

And then in May has been getting back into the… I’m going to say regular routine in quotations because the new routine doesn’t look anything like my old routines and I have different responsibilities and I completely changed my schedule, even, we’re recording this early in the morning in my time and late for Michele because we’ve got the time difference now.

And so the, all of our regular patterns have been shifted in a number of areas, which as I said, is a great time to reset things and what I… Having given myself that time off, I was super excited to come back and write again at the end of that time. And so I was jumping on little spaces of time, wherever they were available and actually making progress on that book, which is really exciting.

So that is, I think the biggest challenge that I was facing with the fiction was really… and really with any of it cause this rolls into the non-fiction as well. We’re just finishing up the Create with Co-Authors book draft and we’re in the revision process for that and the kind of collaborative rewriting stage.

And it’s the same issue is figuring out how… to how to structure a day in the way that’s going to work the best for you when you actually have space and freedom to choose, because I’ve always had a very schedule-driven schedule, which was determined by outside client projects or my teaching commitments and, almost every week I was presenting at something and I declared this was my just one year to focus on creative projects. And so I have declined all of those teaching opportunities and paused everything basically other than the Creative Academy, which I just do once a week to actually teach something.

And so I have a completely different schedule and that freedom where you can do anything is both awesome and terrifying. Take a little while to figure out what actually works for you because it works. So I spent the whole month of May experimenting with different shapes of the day to see, I have certain elements, I really want to work in like a walk somewhere outside in nature. We live by a couple of parks and a beautiful river and there’s options to go outside and explore that I really want to be cooking healthy food. And I want to, my husband’s working from home as well, so we try to have lunch together. If we can just a little break and I want to be exercising, something that I can do every day, thus, the VR headset, because even when it’s pouring rain or too hot or whatever, there’s still the option to work out. And the writing of course, and the business stuff and everything else to blend it all together in a way that works and to do that in a way that works for my schedule, but also almost every project I have is collaborative in some way.

So the podcast is a team project. The… even my fiction writing because I have an author’s assistant  a team project. And so is all of our creative academy stuff is even bigger teams. And so balancing what works for each of us, but also what works for everybody and just finding that middle ground has been really what I’ve been working on and it’s challenging, but also fun.

I think that has been yeah, that has been on the creator side, actually really interesting to test out different times of day for writing and different order of activities and where the writing comes in with all the other things to get me the best results. And yeah, so I, I have discovered the morning is better for sure, after I’ve exercised and had some breakfast and a shower and whatnot, and then just go straight into the writing is the perfect mix. Not at a specific time because I promised myself I wasn’t setting alarms in the morning. And other than on podcast day there, there’s just a nice flow to that. And so now this month, the focus is just on setting that in, like basically getting it to the point where in my body, those habits are strung together.

That it is, we do this, then we do this, then we do this. Then we do this. So that it’s an automatic kind of transition to get where I need to go. So there you go. That is my creator report. So super excited to be back writing and for the writing to be fun, that was a major success for sure. Now how about manager hat Michele, if you put your manager hat on or what is it that you are recognizing from the last couple months. Was what you did, but also, what was your biggest challenge that you ran up against?

Manager hat updates and goals

Michele Amitrani: I’m so excited because I have a brand new tool that I want to share with you. It’s nothing super fancy and it’s a Google spreadsheet. But it was made my by my wife who knows way more than I do about formulas and that kind of stuff. It’s basically like Crystal. And this spreadsheet is that helping me optimizing the whole wide experience for my mythological fantasy series.

So we basically created this file that we can update so that we can keep track of every single sale of the mythological fantasy books in each different market, in each different languages. So Italian and in English. And in all different formats. So ebook, paperback when they will be, audiobook potentially.

So it’s like a huge spreadsheet with different pages that really helps me to understand how this wide adventure with this series is going. And this on the manager side, I think is going to help me a lot to understand what’s working or what’s not working. And before the way I did it, it was a bit too complicated and I wasn’t really seeing any trend, but I can now see that there is a difference in the way I gather the data, which is one of the most important things that we said in this podcast many times, if you don’t have the data use or know exactly what’s going on, and how it’s going, and if you have to fix something that’s the most important thing. It’s an eye-opener and it’s telling me a lot. And I’m thinking decision based on these new tools of mine. I also tweaked a bit, my automation sequence for both my fiction and nonfiction newsletter. And I can see a slight increase in my engagement and a higher open rate because of this. And it also created a very personalized automation for the Italian folks that are coming through my permafree, which are, I was able to publish a month and a half ago.

And I also got the fifth cover of my mythological series now, in English, I’m waiting for the Italian version and then I would just need the the commission, the very last cover, and then I will have the whole package for the six, and then I will be able to do the box set for the second three and then all the six.

So I’m super excited of that. Crystal knows every single time I get the new cover from my designer. She’s one of the first… actually, she’s the first person after my wife to know, I basically bother her and say CRYSTAL, in capital letters, this is a new cover what do you think? And yeah, so that’s part of the excitement, for our authors, when we get to see the cover of our books every single time, it has been an experience for me and I love to share that with her. 

So that’s the other thing that I was able to do on the manager side. I also was able to publish on pre-order both mythological box sets in Italian and in English. So that part of the admin stuff is done. I don’t have to think about that. The Italian one is scheduled to be released the 25th of June.

So that’s something again, I don’t have to think about. And I find that it’s, at least for me, maybe it doesn’t work for everybody, but for me, knowing that I have the pre-order set it frees my hands, it gives me more time. And if you never tried it, I recommend you to at least try in a one book because I tried it with my Muse of Avalon, my novella, and I was like, this is so much better. 

So I applied it to my box set. And then I’m not sure I am sure I’m not going back now. I am going to set the pre-order of the pre-order because Crystal, we know that pre-orders are also more vulnerable. If we are wide, we saw that happening more than once. And finally on my manager side of things, I have submitted my box set in English on BookSirens, to try and see if I can garner some reviews before the official launch of this book set, that will happen on the beginning of June. So that’s what I’ve been doing on my manager side of things. What about you Crystal? 

Crystal Hunt: Well, My manager’s side was also very related to pre-orders and so with our whole going wide adventure, both in the fiction and nonfiction, it shifts to the rhythm of publication.

We’ll say, in terms of when you scale, then how you manage all the various tasks at different times. The way that flow works is very different. When you’re dealing with wide with multiple platforms and also dealing with pre-orders, which you can set up quite far in advance and in fact, you should, because a lot of the marketing opportunities come when you’ve got several months in advance of your release to, chat with the folks at the various platforms and get your book included in some new release promos and things like that. And that doesn’t happen overnight and they need advanced notice to see that you’re getting pre-order sales and all of that stuff.

So for our fiction, the challenge is that I found the best traction that I get is when the pre-order for the next book in the series is already live when this one gets published, because then people can click at the back when it says, grab the next book and they will, which is great. And that works even better if you have the first chapter as a sneak peek in the back of that book, to draw people into the story and get them all interested in what’s going to happen, which is fantastic, except that I promised myself, I wasn’t going to set a whole bunch of deadlines and I was going to follow the energy on the writing and make sure that I was, doing whichever story I was most excited about in the moment and the whole get the joy of project is to keep the freedom. I am much faster of a writer actually, when I don’t have those deadlines. And I find that the whole process goes much more smoothly when I can work on whatever I’m fired up to work on. And so that’s challenging because those things are in direct opposition to each other is you must have pre-order dates, but also you must follow the flow.

And my solution to that seemingly conflicting challenge was that only set something up on pre-order once the book was written. And so the first draft at least had to be done the editing. I can always predict roughly how long that will take. And that’s a very steady part of the process. And I can schedule that. The actual writing, I cannot schedule in the same way, because sometimes the words just flow and it is so quick and seemingly painless and other times it’s like we say, like pulling teeth, it’s not painless and it’s not quick. Being able to adapt to that requires that I basically pre-write the books that, that both of those titles then have to be ready. So I need to be writing at least two books ahead of what I’m releasing and that’s what I’ve been working towards.

So I have been writing and not releasing for a while because I also have multiple series, which means that’s a little bit challenging. So I will, I think probably have about six books written before I start releasing again, because I am wanting to be at least one book ahead on each series as I’m rolling things out.

So that is the solution that I found. The true biggest challenge is that I am not a patient person. And as soon as the book is done, I really want to share it with everybody. So it’s really hard to just sit off. But I am forcing myself to be patient because overall, the only way to get ahead of that cycle is just to stay paused and get ahead of that cycle.

And I know that it will be the right thing in the long-term and it will build in some buffer so that my release schedules could be consistent, even if something happens because it’s life does. And we know that because we’ve experienced it. So it’s better to, I think, have that bit of a buffer for myself, just to know that things can still keep coming out on schedule and that if something happens, I’m not going to miss an entire release window.

And that will feel really good. So that has been that has been my plan and my challenge and we are doing it. So far it’s working, which really the current part is just write a bunch of stuff and don’t let people see it yet. Oh, yes, that is, that’s the biggest challenge. And that is what I have been working on my manager side of things.

And of course, as we do this taking the time when I am just writing on things and sitting on them and not releasing to revamp all of those checklists for publication and working out a new process with my author assistant and she’s documenting everything that we do, because when it’s me, there’s a certain amount that I remember in a certain amount that I have written down.

But when you’re teaching somebody, you have to externalize some of your processes in ways that you don’t when you’re the primary on the project. And that has been really good just to be building that reference guide basically of how we do each thing. And as we do that, we’ve been examining, okay, is there a better way to do this and is this going to work in the new reality, which is being wide and dealing with stuff out of KDP Select and really trying to build in a way to optimize for each of those platforms along the way.

So that has been really interesting. We’ve been reading, we read Wide fo the Win and Killing it on Kobo. And basically we read a lot of Mark Leslie Lefebvre books and we will hopefully be talking to him soon on the podcast, which would be exciting, but we have really just been picked guide book for wide for ourselves, from all of those other resources and then reconfiguring the management processes in the business to match that wide approach.

All right. Marketing hats firmly upon our heads Michele. 

Marketing hat updates and goals

Michele Amitrani: Let’s do this. So three things for my marketer, one related to Amazon ads, second one on Kobo and the other one on my permafree. Amazon ads I am noticing that I’m having more of them than I expected when I started. I thought that dealing with two or three would be challenging for me, but actually, and I think this is going to be interesting for the listeners too, once you manage to understand what’s the system and you know where to find stuff in the dashboard and which are the key metrics that matter for you, it’s not that hard to manage even half a dozen or a dozen or more of them. So I’m noticing this. I’m noticing that as I grow familiar with the platform and the dashboard of the Amazon ads, I take less time actually to check them now at this moment is 10 minutes per day.

Although many people even recommend it to check it every week. I’m doing it everyday because I’m still learning the platform. And I find that the more time I spend there, the more I know where things are, but even 10 minutes per day, it’s not a lot, but it’s really helping me understanding things that I did not see.

At the beginning of my adventure with Amazon ads now a year ago exactly. A year ago, I started on the Italian front. I did not know what to look for. I had no idea where to go. So now it’s I guess it’s like driving the car the first few times. Like it’s very weird and it’s strange and parking it’s not easy, but when you drove that car every day for maybe half an hour per day for a year, you’re way better at parking. 

So I think the relationship between parking and Amazon ads ends here, but a long story short, it is helpful for you to having that set of some skills and using them. And then now at this moment I have seven or eight different Amazon running behinds.

And I didn’t take much of my time or my attention. I know where to go. If there is a keyword say spending money, I know how to cut it out to recognize it, how to sort stuff out. I’m nowhere an expert AMS, but I’m understanding a bit more of the system. So overall I’m satisfied with the results.

I’m not burned out on checking this Amazon ads and I’m experiencing with this platform on the pre-orders, which is something I never did in the past, I’ve promised you the, on the past author check-in and the report that I will tell you how my pre-order for the novella in Italian Italian went and I didn’t break the bank.

Like I didn’t do anything major, but I was able to leverage like six pre-orders for this novella, which helped me a bit with visibility and helped me a bit with the building you also bought before for the book was actually live and in a market like the Italian one, like six copie siI’s not a lot, but it’s way more than an ecosystem like amazon.com where six copies is completely nothing. So it did help me a bit with visibility. And I’m seeing these more with the box set because at the time of this recording, I also am experiencing with Amazon ads on the box set of the Italian, sorry, on the Italian box set for the mythological fantasy.

And I’m seeing better results on data like click-through rate downloading, overall visibility. And I think this is because the difference between a novella and a box set, they can see that it’s a book set. It’s more enticing for the readers. So click through rate it’s way better than a normal novella.

And although I’m seeing different results, I can honestly say that even though, even if I break even the visibility that is generating these Amazon ads for pre-orders the box sets, there’s already been in the hot new release a couple of times, I think it’s going to play out for the few euros that I am  investing in this new venture.

Will I do a pre-order Amazon ads for novella in the future? No, will I do it for a book set probably aI will, because the results are clearly different and people clearly like a book set, which is a bargain more than a single book. So this is what has been happening on my Amazon ads side of things.

Kobo. On my marketer’s side I am happy to let you know that as of now I have been able to participate in nine promos. In all of them, each of them, I sold something. Now, not a lot of books, but even if it’s two, three, five books for me, it’s a lot because on Kobo, people are paying the price, which is 2.99 for them novella, and they’re not discounted and people are happy to buy them and I’m, they happy that they we’re happy. We’re both happy. And promotion is a way for people to get to know your books. So I encourage you if you are wide to try them. The staff that works are human beings. They are not algorithm.

We already discussed this in the future. So I don’t think it costs anything for you to apply on a promotion that of course makes sense for the genre that you are publishing. But I am seeing some results that I’m thankful that I activated that promotion tab on my Kobo writing life dashboard.

So again, this is something, if you did not activate it so far, I encourage you to try it and I encourage you to check the promotion dashboards so that you can see they change it. I think every couple of weeks, every three weeks. I encourage you to double check that page. And finally, on the marketer side of things I am getting finally the first data coming in after publishing the first permafree Italian short story. If you remember in the last report that we did, I was about to release these permafrees and actually did release it on April 11.

And as of now a month and a half later, I’ve got around 650 downloads across all the stores. Of course, the majority is on Amazon, second Kobo, and third one is on Google Play for number of download. And it’s not a lot, compared to, if you ask Crystal when she runs, like you will see a four digit number.

I don’t know if, I don’t want to say stupid things. 650, it’s a beginning considering that it’s a very short story. So not a lot, but considering the small size of the Italian market, I’m not complaining really I’m happy. And when we’ll get to talk about the height of the month and we always do that way, and the I’m going to tell you why I’m happy of those around 600 downloads, but Crystal should that about revenue society.

Should they talk about height of the month? I think I should lend you the word for the market bits things. What do you think?

Crystal Hunt: Yes. I will dive into marketing and then we can talk about highlights and dollars to close things out as we do and make some commitments for next month of course, so you can all hold us accountable to those. So the thing that my marketer self came up against this month was the same for both fiction and nonfiction again, which is interesting. There’ve been a lot of parallels through this last couple of what we’re dealing with in both. And that was, once you get all your accounts set up and all these places, and you’re uploading books into all these places, you need to actually optimize for each platform.

And once you get set up, you realize that, and you do all the reading of the Wide for the Win stuff, and you hang out in the Facebook group with Erin and her crew, it’s really interesting how different actually optimization is on each of those platforms and the things that you can or can’t do in terms of some have author pages, some don’t some really heavily favor reviews. Some don’t some you need download code, some have special promos that they organize. There really is a very different process for each of those platforms. And so figuring out how do we take advantage of the opportunities that are offered on each of those platforms?

And then how do we do that repeatedly? And then how do we do that for each book repeatedly on each platform? And you can see how this, if you seen this on a page, it’s exponentially more stuff to track and it’s more opportunities to miss out on is how it was feeling. I was feeling really I like to do everything in the optimal fashion and feeling like, okay, we’re taking advantage of two of a 50 possible things to do here.

We’re not nailing this. We need to up our game. And I had to switch my brain around so that it’s not: what are we missing out on? But, can we just focus on optimizing something each week? So picking a platform to focus on for a certain month and then optimizing whatever we do have on that, whether it has series pages or an author page or whatever features we could take advantage of setting all that up properly, and then putting into rotation.

It’s some kind of schedule during marketing time. Okay. Maybe every Monday we check, what are the new promos that Kobo has? Maybe, maybe that is every second week we do that and maybe the alternating weeks, one of them is for Google. And one is for checking, publish drive to see what promos are offered for all the other platforms through publish drive for that month and just getting into a rotation.

But in order to get into a rotation, you need a list of the things you’re going to check and you need some kind of something to make sure once you did and which ones you haven’t. So we have been setting up in Asana, a bit of a checklist for that, and working with Stephanie, who is our magical assistant for our non-fiction books.

To make sure that we set up something that we can track. So we’re using Asana to do that. And then she can assign homework to each of the author partners so that Donna and Eileen and I are following up. And if she says, okay I’ve checked on Google and you need a better author bio on there or whatever, then we go do whatever homework she has assigned to optimize things. And we’re just trying to pick one platform a month to really focus on so that we aren’t getting completely overwhelmed. And I’m doing the same thing with my fiction, which is, when a new book is added on this platform, these are the things we do when we set up a new author profile on this platform, these are the things we do. And then that way, as well mean information comes up we just add it into the mix. If somebody shares something on the wide for the wind group that says, oh, did you know on this platform, you can do this to help get eyeballs on your books, then we can go do that. So really working through those tasks as we build the checklist is what we’ve been working on for each of those platforms.

It’s not fast, but it’s nice to see the growing list of things that are checked off, that we have accomplished. Just picking something to chip away at, which actually segues really nicely into the summary of what my biggest challenge was over the past two months was prioritization. I have not ever had quite this much time to dedicate to my writing business.

I’ve always been managing other businesses at the same time and all kinds of other stuff that was in startup mode and required an insane amount of energy. And now that I have all the time, I want to do everything at once. And that is really challenging. And the other challenging piece is that when you’re rebooting something where we’re republishing all the books, we’re updating all the metadata inside the books, I’ve updated my newsletter onboarding process, we have a new website to launch. Literally every piece is new again and so that means, how do you roll that out? And you’re doing it. If you change just one thing, let’s say my new onboarding sequence is ready to roll. Okay, great. But it links out to books with new covers, which if I implement those, the metadata is changed everything is all braided together. So it was pretty head wrecking actually to sit down and try to decide like what order can we roll out these updates? And what we actually figured out was essentially everything ready at the same time, because everything is linked to something else, which is good. It means we’ve done our job properly.

Every book has a preview of the next book and the cover of that book inside of it and a buy now link which as we go wide has to be switched to a universal book link, not the Amazon links. So every part of everything that we have is integrated, which makes for a really fabulous, like flawless reader experience.

And all of that is one thing, but when you’re in the redo and reboot phase means that it’s like the way that I write things where multiple pieces have to be ready to all roll out together. And so that has been my biggest challenge was unbreading the strands and figuring out what order to approach things so that we could finish anything at any given time.

The book layout needs the URL for the signup page in it, back of the metadata and the preview needs that new cover in it and whatever else. So we finally did figure out what order made the most sense and have been doing all of that stuff simultaneously. But simultaneously in the sense that we’re working on it all during the same month, not simultaneously that each day I’m trying to tackle all of those things.

So I have my bullet journal. I’ve gone back to paper. I write the one thing that’s … at that week. This past week was the rebooting, the strategic authorpreneur website focus. And so all of our primary energy has been directed to revamping that website and then, okay, we’re good to roll that out.

And then for the fiction stuff, it’s okay, this week is website. Next week is newsletter or whatever, but we’re not gonna change the formation until every piece of it is ready to roll in his life. And then everything gets the go button on basically the same day, which is going to be slightly terrifying, but also exciting at the same time.

So there you go. That has been definitely the biggest challenge is just, yeah. Unpicking the parts and giving myself permission to prioritize just one thing at a time, even though it feels like I should have enough time to do everything because I have more time than before, it’s still a finite amount of focus and a finite amount of energy to apply to those things in the time that’s available.

So yeah, all of that for sure. And the biggest win is that burnout, I feel like I’ve banished the burnout. That’s my biggest celebration for this month is giving myself a little bit of time off getting physically active again. And my big win was that I actually felt excited to work on my book, which I have not felt that like waking up on a Saturday morning and you can’t wait to get to your computer and start writing.

I haven’t had that for quite some time. So I am very relieved and happy that is back because I feel like that is the basis of everything I do and if it’s not fun, I don’t want that to come through in the stories, which is why I wasn’t working on fiction for a little while was because I always enjoy non-fiction writing, but fiction writing is a special kind of magic and I feel like if your heart’s not in it, that comes through in what you’re creating. And I didn’t want to contaminate my world with that. And so I am very stoked and celebrating big time the fact that the me who is a fiction writer, CJ is back in action, which is really awesome.

And I am, yeah, very relieved because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Michele, how about you? What was the biggest challenge that you faced this past couple of months?

Biggest challenges and wins

Michele Amitrani: Wearing and un-wearing the different hats. So we speak a lot about creators, manager slash admin and a marketer. And it’s not easy.

Especially if one of those results to be a bit more difficult than the others. And I think we know which one is it for me at this point. But yeah, I think this is a problem that … a challenge more than a problem, a challenge that each and every authorpreneur needs to face at some point in their author career.

I do believe that even successful authors have this very problem because we are one person and it’s not like we have multiple personalities, we have some strong points and we have some weak sides, so we can offset some of this with professional helper. For example, if we need a cover designer we’re going to have, that’s going to have, if we need help with marketing, we might hire somebody, but the end of the day it’s us, it’s our business.

And we need to be able to deal with it in every single piece, even when it comes to delegate, you are the one that needs to delegate. So you need to choose that person, which one you’re going to choose? It needs to be based on some research which you are going to do. So that’s the challenge for me. I’m still learning how to go from one side to the other.

The only way I go around this problem is by putting the writing very first thing in the morning, which is my kind of sacred time so that I know it gets done. If I can write for two hours after waking up there, I know that my day and go to hell, it can happen anything but I know that those two hours are in the bank and I’m happy with that.

Anything above that, even more happy. So that’s the challenge for me and that’s the way I try to overcome it by writing first thing in the morning. Mostly I write crap, but that’s just the beginning of things. And that’s probably my perfectionist side of things talking. Probably now Crystal is going to jump in and say, no, it’s not a crap, but you guys know me by this time.

As long as I write, I’m going to be fine. So that was my challenge. That was the way I tried to offset it. And the height of the month for me was actually a very small win. But again a win. I spoke with you previously about those 600 and something copies snd they did generated some people interested in reading the following story, which is actually an exclusive story that only people that get into my Italian newsletter can read.

In around one month and a half, I got eight more lovely readers that jumped in organically to my newsletter. And that was nice to see, because this is a newsletter that I started relatively recently and I never got eight organic people in my Italian newsletter in a month and a half. So it’s not a lot but it’s a beginning and hopefully more people will join and hopefully they will be finding value in my stories.

The thing we did not discuss was about, and we usually do this, the revenue wise, I’m going to just say on this month, this is the month of April. I don’t have enough data for May, but I’m going to tell you about April. What happened? My authorpreneur revenue on April, 2021 was 24.88% from my consulting, 35.18% from my fiction royalties and 39.94% from my freelancing.

And now, I want to know if you have something to add on that from Crystal. 

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, it was an interesting shift of percentages this last couple months. Because we had pulled all the books out of KDP Select page reads… but they’re also not wide yet… so for fiction that was a drop for sure.

It was about 5% less in terms of income for April and May from fiction sales. But we tried a few interesting alternative marketing options for our non-fiction books. And so that more than made up the balance and really did skew the percentages in an interesting way. So we’ll see how it all settles out.

But for April and may, 44% of my income was from non-fiction straight up royalties. 45% was from writing related and affiliate stuff. Having included our books for free in some stuff, but then we get a percentage where we get a certain amount if people buy through our link. So that was the additional affiliate income.

So that was 45% actually over that two month period. Which is interesting. So we’ll see, I think this next month is going to be quite different and I expect those percentages, my goal is to have the percentages even out a bit in terms of fiction gain, a little more attraction and hopefully they’re all gaining traction, but I would like the fiction to be a larger percentage of that.

So as I roll things back out, I am curious to see what that will do to the percentages on the books, what happens. And now goals for the next month. What’s our focus area. What you got? What’s your plan, Stan?

Michele Amitrani: So for my goal for June, but also July. I’ve learned some things on Amazon ads  specifically on the Italian platform, because this is what I’ve been studying the past year and a month.

What I would like to do, and that’s the plan after finishing setting the sixth fantasy novella, I would like to actually go back to the nonfiction and start planning a nonfiction book on AMS for Italians. So specifically for people interested in starting out. We Italians got AMS relatively recently.

Again, I was able to start one year and something ago, so it’s something relatively new and not many, very many Italians are using it. So hopefully a book like this might provide value. And the other objective that I have, which is a big one for me, because we’ll be seeing me publishing the first paperback version of at least the mythological fantasy box set.

So it’s going to be a book which contains all the first three stories. And I know Italians like to read in paper, although in the past years or something, a lot of them passed to the ebook for, but still paper is where part of my heart lies.

I still read read a lot of paperbacks and hardcovers. So it is one of my objectives to see if releasing a paperback, does something on my royalties. And we’ll keep you informed if anything interesting happens on that side of things. And what about you, Crystal? What are your goals? 

Crystal Hunt: My primary goal is to settle into that rhythm of creation.

So the writing stuff, getting a little bit more of my time so that our goal is to have the draft edited the create with Co-authors book and have that off to other parties, our beta readers, and on then our actual copy editing and stuff. And then the second goal is to hit publish, or hit green on all of the rivers and reboot stuff that is quietly ready in the background.

So that is going to happen in June. We should be good anytime here, so I will report back next episode and let you know what that felt like and how it went. If there is any excitement, unexpected that we came across in terms of the launch. And then we’ll see how things go. All right. We hope you enjoy today’s show. Remember to hit that subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to the podcast and to visit us as strategicauthorpreneur.com for show notes and links to the resources and tools that we love. Plus you have to satisfy your curiosity because we changed the website and you don’t know what it looks like.

So I think you should come back and see what great free resources we have set up for you as well, because we did add a few goodies to the site. Also feel free to hit that buy us a coffee button. If you find the show helpful, every $5 helps us keep the shows coming and keep our productions ad free

Michele Amitrani: Happy writing everyone. 

Crystal Hunt: Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you soon.