Join us as we reflect on Months 6+7 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.

Finding the podcast helpful? You can buy us a coffee to help keep us ads free and independent -> https://www.buymeacoffee.com/SAPPODCAST

Resources we mentioned in this episode

• In Death Series by J.D. Robb
• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
• Indistractible by Nir Eyal
• The Creative Academy for Writers

Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 058: Going Wide Progress Report #5: June+July 2021

Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 58 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: Since we’ve moved to a bi-weekly format for the podcast, so every two weeks, we’ve also shifted to an every two months progress report just to keep things interesting and give you lots of meaty episodes in between. And today is one of those. So we’re going to be digging into the challenges and triumphs of the past couple of months in the various areas of our creator businesses.

But first, what have we been up to these past couple weeks? How’s Italy?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: Italy is hot, but we are surviving. You can see it. I have one of my new best friends. A lovely hair conditioning device working very well. It is Japanese. So that’s another reason to be very happy about. Regarding the weeks I have to tell you they’ve been very busy the last 14 days.

I’ve been releasing a couple of paperbacks, the paperback version of my historical fantasy collection for my mythological fantasy, both in Italian and in English. It was a first for me. I never bundled the collection of stories into one paperback. So I’m excited to see how it goes. I also started some Amazon ads on the Italian one.

I’m going to talk a bit more about that when we get into the nitty-gritty of the report. And then I also managed to get one of my Kindle Unlimited … Well KDP Select title off Kindle Unlimited, so now this book is no longer available as an exclusive on Amazon and it’s available wide and actually I’ve turned it into a permafree.

So this is a series starter of a nonfiction series in Italian. And it’s been permafree for three days now. So I don’t really know how he’s gonna do, but as we are reporting our journey of going wide, I’m just saying that now there’s one less title my Michele Amitrani in KDP Select and it is out in the wide, so that’s a win for me.

I’m also working on a new historical fiction, a permafree in English and in Italian, and this is supposed to be an introduction to my mythological fantasy series. And this should hit the virtual shelves late September, early October. It’s currently been read by my first beta reader and I’m waiting for feedback.

And I’m also working at l… what actually I finished working on my mythological fantasy book number four, which is Scion of Gaia which has been edited by my editor. Edited by my editor. Very smart Michele. And I’ve got the cover in English and the Italian. It is slated for a September release in English and October release in Italian.

I just need to translate the darn thing. Also working on a bigger, top secret project for 2022. I’m trying to at least attempting to plot this one and see how it goes. I have no idea how it’s going to go, you know, by my past experience that every attempt I did on to plotting anything resolved in basically just painting the next story. But I’m trying, I’m trying to get better at that. You know, that’s Crystal and I’m sure also the people listening to us, they have been known my struggle to try to level up on that side of things. And now enough of me bubbling what have happened in your lovely writerly world, Crystal Hunt? 

Crystal Hunt: Well, in the last couple of weeks, we did our kind of last sprint on renovation stuff in our house. So I’ve been working way and we are moments away from being finished with that. So we will have all the bits of our house fully functioning and no more anything interruption. So I am looking forward to kind of resettling into the space and be moving into what is the new normal daily routine? There’s no, like knock on wood, there’s no other anticipated kind of big changes on the horizon. So after what has really been a couple of years of pretty supreme disruptions in our personal world we get to actually settle in into a regular kind of daily life.

So I’m really excited about that. And as part of the process, I’m cleaning up and finishing all kinds of old things. And so our Create with Co-authors book is on the home stretch. So we are doing our internal edit section. So normally each of us drafts our own part, Donna, Eileen and I, and then we compile them all together and then each of us goes through them all again, to make sure that we’ve, you know, corrected whatever we can do and do our copy edits and smooth out the voice and all that stuff from piece to piece. And that’s before it goes to final editing, which is with usually with Amanda. So that is happening in September. So we’re just getting everything ready for that.

Reading-wise, I have been reading In Death Series by J.D. Robb, which has 63 books. So it is, that is a commitment, it’s kind of like committing to, you know, watch all of Grey’s Anatomy or something like that. But I’ve been avoiding TV and streaming and Netflix and all of those things and just reading again, since I’ve kind of rediscovered my reading and that has been really good.

It’s a really interesting series. I’ll talk a little bit more about that and why I picked that one and what I’m kind of dissecting it for when we get into the creator reflection stuff. But that’s what I’ve been reading on the fiction side. And I’ve also been reading Indistractible by Nir Eyal and Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport which I do pretty much every summer around this time.

And I do a bit of a reset. So we’ll dig into that a little bit more in a minute as well. For those of you who are interested in focusing on focus. The ‘just one thing’ session in the Creative Academy that I did last night actually is now live. There’s a recording up for any Creative Academy members.

And we were talking about in Indistractible by Nir Eyal. Yeah and looking at how we can become more indistractible in our own writing worlds and the challenges that are brought from that. So if you are interested in that, there is a recording of the session and you can come and check it out in the Creative Academy for Writers.

Okay. So now let’s dig into the meat of things. We’re gonna switch over and put our creator hats on and talk about how June and July went as far as our creator selves are concerned. Michele, let’s talk about that. 

Creator hat updates and goals

Michele Amitrani: Okay, Crystal, these have been some couple of very interesting months on the creator side. Just to give a bit of a context: the objective that I add for the previous couple of months were to start planning a nonfiction book on Amazon Ads for Italians. I was able to do that. This book is written and slated for late August release. With the follow up book on mailing list building coming up in fall 2021.

So this was the first of the two things that I needed to do. And the second one was to publish the paperback version of the Italian mythological box set and in English. And I also did that. So those were my core objectives. I was able to do that, but just barely. I published paperback one and paperback English like… two days before the end of the month.

So that was a close call, and it was interesting to see doing all those things in like 72 hours time. Just an hint. Don’t do it because it’s not very fun. It’s interesting. You can tell an interesting story, but probably is not going to help you stress-wise. Then creator-wise. That’s something to be very happy about.

You know, by now, that if I write an average of 40 hours per month, I am happy… I’m kind happy, I’m never really happy, you know, that there is always something more to do. And as of now, as of all the reports that we made, my best month for March, 2021 with the 66 hours of writing on that month.

The good news is that I was able to beat that number and I was able to write for 77 hours in June and 65 hours in July. But guess what? I’m pissed that that 77 could have been 100, but it wasn’t. So that’s where I’m at now. No. I’m happy that I was able to write that much, especially because as me and Crystal mentioned, we’ve been moving houses in the past two months, three months and a half.

So I think it’s pretty good that I was able to write at all. Crystal saw me, basically building the house in this past couple of months. So that definitely took a chunk of my time out of the writing. So the fact that as a creator, I was able to defend with teeth and nails those hours make me proud.

I was also talking about the project, the non-fiction projects. So on the creator side, I do believe that’s important to mention. I did not write nonfiction books in a long time. The last time I published anything on that front was 2015. So we’re talking about six years and I was quite happy that I could actually write a couple of books, short books, like 25,000 words, the first one and 20,000 words, the second one. Pretty quickly. In a month and a half. And I was actually mentioning to Crystal. I was saying: Crystal! it’s way easier to write nonfiction than fiction. I don’t have to just bang my head on the wall every single hour, just the flow, you know, the words tend to get by easy, especially if it’s a subject that you know, or it’s a subject that you are experienced about.

And one of these nonfiction books is going to be about Amazon Ads. And I basically use that platform for the past year and a half daily. So I’m not an expert on it, but I definitely know more than when I didn’t know the difference between an impression and click through rate. So I can say something about that subject in a way that hopefully it’s going to be helpful for my Italian authors peer.

So this non-fiction effort has been interesting. I already got three to four people getting back on the beta version of the Amazon Ads book. They pointed out some weaknesses, but overall people seem to like it and these are my, these are peer authors. They’re making sales, I mean… this is people that are doing this on a daily basis.

They are professional self published writers. So hopefully this is giving me some good insight on when I’m going to rewrite the book before publishing it that the end of August to try to make a better product for the readers. And lastly, for my creator side I’ve wrote… so this is something strange. It doesn’t usually happen. But I, wrote kind of effortlessly a novella in like 10 days. From July 18th to July 28th in something like 20, 22 hours, which is unheard of. And, you know, I keep track of every single minute that I spent on every single story. This was really it’s a first time. It never happened that I was able to write a novella in 10 days.

Which is actually a novella that I like. And so far, just a couple of people read it. One of these is my wife, so maybe she’s biased. I’m not sure, but she loved it. So that too is going to go to a round of beta readers actually I have the first actual better, either reading it. Now I’m going to get it back by the 8th of August.

And this is going to be important for my creator side because this story is going to be the first one that is not going to be like a paid product, but it’s actually, in my strategy in the thing designed that I’m seeing it as of now, it’s going to be the first permafree wide book, mythological fantasy book.

Which is going to be used as an introduction to my other mythological fantasy stories. And I have no idea how it’s going to go. Probably I’m going to talk about this with Crystal in other venues, we have, we’re going to have to be very strategic about this because I really want to use this story as best as I can.

And I also want to translate it in Italian. Because I’m a person that clearly is not busy enough, so it needs to translate another 15,000 words story in another language. So reflecting on challenges and strategies for my creator self, I just want to say that what really bothered me a lot is that I cannot immediately know which of the projects that I’m working on will make more sense to me in the long run.

I know, I can’t predict the future! That’s too bad. And this forces me to work on several projects. I mentioned five different ones at the same time. Hoping that one of them would pay off in time and effort in the future. So I’m working now on five different things: two nonfiction books in Italian, two fiction books in English, and one fiction book in Italian. Which one will pay off? Which one would pay for itself the faster? Which will a “waste of time”?

I don’t know. I need to try and see and experiment before knowing where to concentrate my resources. And this makes the discovery phase exciting, since I can work on several things, but at the same time it’s very depleting. I am really stretched. Not to the point that I can’t control it, but I clearly am stretched and this makes the discovery phase exciting, but it’s taking a tool. We talked about kicking bowls, different kinds of bowls and as of now I’m stuck with five of them. It’s still manageable again but I cannot wait for the end of December so that I can finally have some data. I can see it. I can assess, I can look into what worked and what didn’t.

And this is the most important thing of all I can take a decision for next year, 2022. The next few months are going to be crucial in understanding which direction my business will take in 2022 and forward. So that’s what I assessed Crystal of my creator self. Again, it was very exciting. It humbled me in some ways, but at the same time, it made me aware that as a business owner, I need to manage myself better, and also reminds me that I have to wait for data before killing projects off. I need to just wait and see which one is going to work and which one doesn’t work, and then sit down and assess. And Crystal what happened in your magic word of writing and storytelling? 

Crystal Hunt: Well, I have been working on finding the magic in the storytelling world and writing.

So one of the things I’ve been doing in my creator hat is trying to sort of reestablish a personal relationship with being a writer that is not defined by interacting with other people. So I have been publishing for a long time, like 20 years, I guess now in various genres and formats. And it changes your relationship with writing when you know, you have an audience and you know, the thing that you’re writing is going out to people and you have people giving you feedback and leaving reviews and sending messages and replying to newsletters and all of those things and it, it stops being just about the writing and the fun of stories and it really does become about interacting, but in making the decision to sit on what I’m writing, it means I don’t have those interactions right now in the same way.

So in my fiction world, I am really focused on kind of getting about a year ahead in my release schedule. Which means not releasing anything, which means not really having a lot that I’m interacting with my readers about. Right? I’m not sending out regular newsletters at the moment. Everything’s kind of paused while we do this big reboot, re-issue and get the new books ready to be released so that everything can continue on a nice, smooth release pattern and give me enough of a buffer that I’m not scrambling to write to deadlines and things like that, and can still be consistent and strategic in my roll out. So that has been a fascinating process to really get back in touch with writing itself as an activity and not as a means to an end in publishing.

And one of the things that I’ve been doing to help with that is actually exploring something new on the side as well, because that sense of discovery, once you settle into a world that you’re writing and you get to know it really well, and you get to know your genre really well. And you know, there isn’t that same newness.

You can, you can do a lot with new characters and new plot lines, and that fun of discovery within a book is always there. But I am definitely a person who likes to have multiple fronts where I’m learning and pushing the boundaries and figuring out new stuff and I need, I need a high learning curve to stay engaged with things.

And so having that another avenue in the fiction side where I can just play has been really interesting. So I have been exploring cozy mysteries as a place to be and just doing a little bit of experimental writing and figuring out what point of view am I going to be comfortable in, who are going to be these characters?

The concept I’m working with is a linear series, as opposed to… a lot of my Rivers End stuff is woven really tightly, like a tapestry. And it has all these overlapping timelines and I have to track a ton of stuff because characters interact with each other across multiple books. And it’s very tightly woven, but I’ve been looking at the idea of a series that you can dip in and out of in a different way.

And that’s why I’ve been reading the JD Robb In Death series is because it’s a linear series, it has currently 63 books. Nora Roberts has put out two a year, I think, for the last 30 years and very consistently it’s impressive. And so just kind of analyzing that for how do the characters grow and change over each book and across multiple books and, you know, how do all those pieces fit together and how do you do it in a way that keeps readers fully engaged and gives you enough newness in each book that you haven’t dumped all your backstory and book 1, 2, 3, and then you’ve got no secrets to reveal going forward that, you know, I think she does a really good job of holding on to pieces of information. So exploring that has been really fun.

I think the biggest challenge is when you shift into full-time writing and with a focus on the fiction, you’ve taken the fun part and made it the work part. And so that is a very different approach to it. And I’ve been kind of getting around that by focusing on the non-fiction, but we don’t…it’s not always my turn with the nonfiction book, right!

Because we’re, co-writing things, we pass it around to each other and then we might have a month or whatever, when we’re waiting for other people to do their bits on it. And you know, it goes through editing. And so I am moving forward to other nonfiction books, but I don’t necessarily always have one of those on the go in the writing phase.

Sometimes it’s in the publishing or marketing phase and so that finding that balance between work and play and bringing that playfulness into the workspace has been definitely something that I’ve been looking at. And the other challenge is really getting into a flow state and staying there. So I think over this past year and a half with all of our connections, being virtual with people, I think the dependence on text messaging and our communication apps and …you know, I have been off all of social media, but because I wasn’t actually seeing people in real life, I went back to being on Instagram and sort of some of those old patterns that I had completely erased crept back in and I have been doing a bit of a digital cleanse now, but you know, things have been reopening here we can see people and seeing people in person I found out I don’t want to know all the little bits and pieces of what we could talk about in person. If we got to go for coffee, that I don’t want to already know all those, because I’ve seen them on social media. I want to discover them when that person tells me about them and, you know, give us something to talk about basically.

So I’ve been, purging my creative time and creative space of distractions and using the two books I mentioned earlier Indistractible and Digital Minimalism to do that. And that has… It’s very challenging. There’s a lot of resistance. To removing those avenues and kind of forcing yourself to reengage with the world while also protecting those boundaries. In our Creative Academy 12 weeks year retreat, we did about a month ago, I think it was in July, and we talked a lot about re-entry and protecting our creative time. And I think Michele, you mentioned that you were so proud of being able to kind of protect and put up barriers around your creative time and space while moving and doing all this other stuff.

And I think that as we deal with re re-entry and whatever the new normal looks like and things like that, it is, it is a challenge that creators face, because a lot of us actually found there were advantages to not being able to go out and not having the world come into your creative space meant that you didn’t have to put those barriers up.

The barriers were already in place, but now we have to do it ourselves and it takes a lot more energy and it’s freaking exhausting. So renegotiating all of that to make sure that you keep your creative time protected is super challenging. And that I think has been the biggest thing as we’ve been over the last couple of months, negotiating, you know, family coming to visit and events starting to happen again and having to decide on all those friends.

Do I go, do I not? How do I keep not just my time, but my energy in tact? When, you know, to create things, as we talked about in a previous episode generation versus transformation, generating new stuff, takes a lot of energy and it takes a lot of focus and being able to really dedicate everything you have to that at least for the time allotted to it.

And that, that has been the biggest challenge over the last couple of months. I would say I have the time I have the physical space I’m in my new office. It’s finally, everything is functional, which is fantastic. So now we just get to deal with this stuff that is mostly, you know, in your own head, your own body, the energy side of things and the distraction side of things.

So that has been a very good exercise and I’ve been slowly instituting different strategies, kind of one new thing a week. My favourites so far, if anyone out there is experiencing similar things, I put a ‘do not disturb’ that goes on my phone from 9:00 AM until noon every day. And I have been leaving my phone on …. Actually in the loft now. So I leave my phone on the landing on the way up whenever I can. And then I’m not even tempted by it. It’s in a completely different space and that is also very helpful. So that’s one of the strategies. And then I did a huge unsubscribed to all the digital newsletters and things like that and made sure that all notifications are turned off on my desktop so that when I’m writing I’m not, there’s nothing to be distracted by, so that just removes the environmental stuff. And then it only leaves you to tackle your internal mental stuff and that’s all on you. So, you know, you’re not letting other people and their incoming information pull you off course which just leaves you with less than you have to deal with yourself. 

So there you go. There’s a couple things to try that are pretty low, low effort, low impact. It just takes a couple of minutes to set up and then it happens all on its own and it helps you get a little closer. Okay. So Michele, you touched a bit on the manager side of things in terms of like trying to decide what business projects to focus on or which, which of the creative things would bear fruit in the financial sense or career wise. What other sort of challenges did you come across or what have you been working on, on the manager side?

Manager hat updates and goals

Michele Amitrani: So I’ve been trying to do some cleaning first because I felt a bit cluttered. Even though it’s not… Well it is directly related to my writing. You now know, I’ve my working space finally I have like an artificial official wall that I’ve created. I have my table, which can be moved up and down.

So I write most… I don’t know if I ever told you, but I mostly write standing, I don’t write a lot, just sitting. Sometimes I have to, because after one hour of standing it’s not fun anymore, but I like a lot writing while I’m standing. So I’ve been managing-wise also managing the space around me.

And I found that to be very helpful. Also like knowing that that’s your place, that’s where you go to work. So your brain is wired. Here I’m not allowed to play or to do other things that are not related to my works. I spoke about cleaning. I also did some mailing list cleaning, actually. 

I reached out to the SendFox folks, which is my mailing list service provider. And I waited for a while to see how many not actively meaningly subscriber I had. And then I did a cleaning of people that were not interacting for more than six months actually. So I now feel a bit better on that side.

I feel that my mailing list is a bit more tight with people that are interested in hearing what I’m doing. And I also been having a back and forth from my designer. And I was able to get the number four of my mythological fantasy cover done both in English and in Italian.

I was mentioning that in my update. And I also asked the designer to create the cover for the second book boxset, which I planned to release in early 2022. So I’m already kind of thinking in the future and I’m actually thinking already of wrapping up this project that as you know, has been trying and seeing what the number of novella interlinked in a location and time, which is an ancient Greek mythological would could do.

So this for me is my kind of getting ready to wrapping up that project, sit down and see how the project did all over the scale. The last thing that I need to ask my is to make the cover for the box set, which will contain all the mythological fantasy. So it’s like a maxi cover that will contain out for dozen novellas.

So that’s the very last thing that I need to do. I’m not planning on commissioning any other covers on the series for now. My mind is already on, one writer once called it the future of the future. So I’m thinking of that, wrapping up this project and seeing what I can do in the next year. Also on the manager side, I was able to publish on pre-order the non-fiction book  on Amazon Ads. You know, by now that I love pre-orders when I can set them.

They just are awesome in making sure that I have a less admin work to do and that I don’t have to do it in the last couple of days before hitting the publishing button. So I just love pre-orders, especially on the wide front, because as you know, if I got some sales on the pre-order stores like Kobo or Apple, they actually count more on the sales ranking.

So I love doing those. I’ve also been trying in this couple of months to participate to as many Kobo and Draft2Digital promotions. I kept you updated on the couple of promotion on May and April, this couple of months, didn’t go as glamorous, I have to say as the past a couple of months, but I did got some sales from that from that venue. So I’m very grateful. 

And this is one of the good things of being wide, not having to depend on just one source of royalties, but actually having other things going for you. And again these have been a couple of busy months, both on the creator side, and on the manager side. When we will talk about the market you’ll see that I didn’t scratch the surface of what I’ve trying to do in this couple of months, but again because I have more projects going on, that means that my admin stuff (read manager) and marketer stuff, inflated accordingly. So I had to be very strategic on what I was doing. And actually you can’t see this, but Crystal can. I’ve been using this for my to do list. And this seems weird, but I’ve been using this because, so I don’t have enough space to do too many things. And I’m forced to just do the most important things. 

Crystal Hunt: And ‘this’ is a little sticky note just so folks who are like, what is ‘this’? Too much mystery suspense. 

Michele Amitrani: I was trying to create an open loop.

Yeah. It’s, it’s a very, very small sticky notes. Anyways, I can do maximum something like six or seven things. I can’t do more. Crystal is able to take a block notes and do pages of those things. I’m just not there yet. I can’t do those things, but I can focus on four to six different things per day.

So this is what Michele Amitrani has been up to on the manager’s side and now I’m dying to know what Crystal Hunt has been up on the managers side of things. 

Crystal Hunt: It has been an interesting couple months for sure on the manager side of stuff. We have been in a streamline update and level up mode on the business side of things.

So all of our… and I have three different publishing companies, technically we have our Creative Academy guides publishing company that is a separate entity. And then I have the romance publishing stuff and then also I still have some of my kids’ books and things and in circulation and various places.

So we went through all of the titles in all of the places and checked, you know, do they have the correct covers? Do they… which some of them don’t. A lot of the audio books are super slow to update on various channels. And so there’s things like that. Some of them, we found duplicate listings for some of the books.

And so we’re chasing down administratively, like where is this duplicate listing coming from? And making sure things are turned off where they need to be turned off. And part of the going wide process is updating and re-releasing all of the books. A lot of them have updated covers. There’s updated front and back matter.

We’ve, you know, we’ve been working on a new website for my fiction stuff, which is going to been unleashed upon the world in the fall, along with all of this other stuff we’ve been working on. So that is all been going very well. There’s been a lot of really structural business management stuff like getting registered for GST, which is a thing that the Canadian government has and, you know, setting up all of the bookkeeping systems required to track everything so moving into QuickBooks a little more formalized for some of our stuff, and just making sure that all of that business stuff is being properly processed and documented and taken care of so that we are doing that. And part of my role in the partnership is handling that for the partnership and so making sure that I’m doing the same updated stuff for all three businesses and making sure that that is all running as it should. And part of that is making sure all of our contracts are filed and kept in copies in a safe deposit box as well as our virtual online stuff and working with intellectual property lawyers to make sure that our wills and estates packages all set up properly and takes care of copyright being past where it needs to be passed and setting up you know, an, an IP executor so somebody who, when it comes to wills and estates, who can actually do stuff with the books after they are passed to our daughter and well, you know, what is she going to do with them? Or what would my husband do with them if something happened to me?

So there’s been a lot of, of learning about all of that stuff and finding the right professionals. Making sure that we have the right legal professionals who know about copyright and entertainment law, because it’s not a very common thing, actually. You can’t… I mean, you can just walk into any lawyer’s office and say, okay, I need help, you know, putting together my, my will documentation. And when they ask you for a list of assets, you say, oh, these 47 book titles. And they’re like, okay, but it doesn’t mean they know what that means or that they know what questions to ask or what to have you be clear about in your documentation. So just making sure that all of that is properly in place and that we’re fully caught up on all of the legal stuff that goes along with being responsible adults, which has been, it’s been a really good, it does make you touch base with every part of your business and in doing some financial analysis and some evaluations of the worth of different things is an interesting exercise to do and it really does make it very clear, which parts of the business are profitable and which ones are maybe fun, but not necessarily the moneymakers.

And, you know, if you had to choose what to focus on, which things would it be? It’s an interesting exercise and some of it is looking back over time. You know, your weekly revenues might not be that high on a product, but when you look at it over the last 10 or 15 years, you realize that’s made you many tens of thousands of dollars over time, but it just, it all adds up very slowly.

And if you think of the value of it, over the next, you know, 80 or a 100 years, it does just keep generating. So all of these small revenue streams that come together do make a very nice stable, consistent business over time. So that it’s very satisfying and it is very easy as business people do lose track of what we’ve built and, you know, we’re always focused on what’s the next thing, what’s our latest new release, you know, what are our current numbers, but if we don’t reflect back on how far we’ve come and what we’ve actually managed to accomplish over time, you don’t really have a sense of the scale of growth of the business and kind of the evolution of things, so the value of that has definitely been high.

It is fiddly. It is tedious. I have spent, I don’t even want to talk about how many hours reading, like tax law on the CRA website stuff. It is not maybe the most glamorous of aspects of the business, but I really love feeling confident that I know we’re doing it correctly and that, you know, everything is in order and that what we have is built on a really strong foundation.

So that kind of frees up the creator side of me to be able to create anything I want and not worry about where does it go? What happens to it? You know, will it all be wasted if something happened to me next week, you know, I don’t have to worry about all of that. So that has been really handy. And of course I have my daughter working with me as an author assistant.

And so I’ve been teaching her about all the aspects of these things so that she does know what to do and stuff if something happens to me my husband of course, worked in the industry for years and with our other publishing companies so he’s familiar enough for things, but it is also very comforting to know that somebody else knows enough about my business to be able to find things know where stuff’s kept, know how it’s organized and have a sense of how to do stuff with it. So that is a really great feeling to have a bit of a, kind of a backup plan there. 

Marketing Michele you, you, what kind of marketing stuff are you up to the last couple of months and how’s that going?

Marketing hat updates and goals

Michele Amitrani:  So I could have put the first point in order in the manager too, but I decided to put it on the marketer because I just decided to give it a more, slightly different perspective. And I’m talking about newsletter here. I’ve been trying to be more consistent in the way I’m publishing newsletters.

Which means I’ve been trying to do it regularly. So once per month. Now the problem with me is that I have three newsletters in two languages. So that means that I have to publish three newsletters every month. So up to this moment, I dreaded the idea and I didn’t do it very well. But on June and July, I’ve been trying to be consistent.

So I’ve been publishing… I have a nonfiction newsletter in Italian a fiction newsletter in Italian and a fiction newsletter in English. It’s even complicated for me to remember what kind of newsletter do I have? So, but I’ve been tried to be consistent and I have to say it takes time to write a newsletter that has value to the reader and I believe in trying to provide value as much as I can. On average took me from the writing to the editing and to the publishing and making all the artwork or images to make it look a bit more nice, anywhere between a one hour and a half and two hours. So it’s like around six hours per month, but I think … You know, it’s time well invested in trying to nurture your audience and making people interested and excited on what’s going on on your life. It also is helpful for your voice as an author, I think I suck at writing newsletters and I think I need to basically make people feel a bit more of who I am. I do that more naturally on the Italian front, it’s way more difficult on the English front, because I don’t know how to write conversationally in English. Maybe that’s why I can write a bit better in ancient ways. But it’s, I’m not like a, a buddy kind of conversation kind of person. So. That’s why I’m writing newsletters. So this is the bottom line, and I want to make this a priority, hence why I’m saying this as the first order of the day as a marketer, because I do believe that the newsletter, even as time progresses is going to be one of the most important tools in our authorpreneur arsenal. And I’ve been lacking on that side. I’ve been trying to build the numbers, but quality wise, if I asked myself, have you really tried to nurture these people? Have your tried to make a connection drive to them, make them interested in you? What’s in it for them? What’s in it for them? Why would they buy your books? Why would they be interested in your author life? If you don’t at least take the opportunity to write them at least once a month. So I’ve been trying to be more consistent on that on the newsletter side. The other thing that is very important for an authorpreneur, I do believe is promotion.

On the advertisement side of things. So I also started my first ever series of Amazon advertising for my mythological collection in Italian. And it’s less than a week in, so far I haven’t got enough result but I’m spending more than a I have anticipated, which is good and bad at the same time.

Because I’m yes, getting a lot of impression and clicks, but I’m watching daily to make sure that my click through rate stays good and I’m ready to kill with fire non-performing keywords before they touch my money. It had happened before, and I am trying to be a bit more savvy on this regard. I have been reading a lot on Amazon Ads.

As I was mentioning, I’ve been doing this for a year and a half I do not have any excuses to be lacking. I want to see what happens. I know that Italians buy a lot of paperbacks still and I believe even more than eBooks even after the pandemic. So I want to see if I can tap into this market.

I don’t know if the kind of stuff that I write is actually going to be interesting for people to buy in the paperback form, but I need to give it a shot. And then I did this with my Omnilogos series for the Ebook side and that went pretty well. Well, so for the first month I’m going to be happy if I break even. That is what happened with the Omnilogos serious. The second months I lost money and from the third month on, I actually started seeing some revenue. So I have no idea how it’s going to go, but I’m willing to try and test and see how it goes. I also I was mentioning about the nonfiction series starter permafree so I’ve been doing that it’s going to be a nonfiction series of three books. The first one is going to be a permafree and I’m going to talk about my experience as a self published author. The second one is going to be paid product on Amazon Ads and the third one is going to be on a mailing list building.

Now, the reason why I took this choice of making the first book of the series permafree is double fold. The first one is because I’ve never did something like this before: a wide, nonfiction series started for free. And I want to see if it drives any traffic to book two and three. And since it’s the first time, I do not have any data to really speak for one side of things or the other.

Again, I will keep you informed. The problem with what I’m writing is I don’t think a lot of Italians are interested in the subject of Amazon Ads. The platform is new. There aren’t a lot of people bidding and I can see it day by day, the beads are just so low that I can see it’s me and other 12 people, maybe. So I don’t know maybe it’s just… and by the way, it’s the first book in Italian on the subject in Italian on Amazon Ads. I checked it twice. So, I don’t know. It’s probably going to be… how do you say? A hole in the water or something like that? It’s not going to be anything like a relevant, but at least I will be able to say I was the first and nobody bought it.  So the last thing I’m creating… that’s another thing that I’m trying to do to drive traffic to the nonfiction series. I’m creating a dedicated series of Amazon Ads tutorials, and webinars on my YouTube channel to drive interest and traffic on my upcoming Amazon Ads book. Again, this is something I’ve never done before, but I’m willing to experiment.

Nonfiction is a different beast from fiction, and I feel I need to give people a reason to buy my book first, hence, I’m giving them samples of its content in video format, by answering question and providing suggestions on things that I tried firsthand, there are available in the book and that hopefully are going to provide value. And that was it for my marketer thinks I’m going to leave for the last the revenue sales and the height of the month, Crystal, because I really want to know what happened on your marketer world. 

Crystal Hunt: Well, our nonfiction is really consistent. Our Amazon Ads do what they’re meant to do, and we get a lot of sales, a lot of impressions, everything through that.

So it runs really smoothly. It’s …we don’t really want to mess with that. So we’ve done a little bit of tweaking. The summer’s always a tiny bit lower than the rest of the year when it comes to the non-fiction. I think people are out in their gardens and they’re on vacation with their family. Now that they’re allowed to do that a little bit and there’s, you know, there’s always a little dip, but definitely things are still flowing. So if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. So we’re not going to mess with that, but we are working on right now is layering in some other things on top of that. So a couple other sales streams, we found AppSumo has a new marketplace option where you can actually put your software, your products, whatever in there and nonfiction books, both topics that are nonfiction books are about are actually a decent fit for that audience. So we… it is a process. We had to create all the promotional materials and all that kind of stuff, and set up the sales pages for the store and do all those things. So it was a pretty big undertaking to get all of that kind of tweaked for that audience, but it is providing a regular monthly sales stream now. So we’re seeing just, just it’s one more place where we have revenue coming in consistently every month for the same products that we already had created and because we’re wide, we can put them in multiple other places.

So it’s not a book selling platform. It is a software selling platform primarily, but eBooks count so we did some really creative stuff because the way that they are downloaded is through a BookFunnel code. And we had to produce quite a lot of those. And we worked with BookFunnel, thank you to the folks at book funnel who helped us set up that process.

It wasn’t something they had encountered before, and it wasn’t something that AppSumo had encountered before. So we blended all of those pieces and now it is working the teams quite well. So that is something that we will watch over the next few months and as we work through our optimization on each platform, that will be one of the platforms that we optimize as well.

And we are looking at adding in some other types of paid advertising in the fall as we roll out our new co-author book, we’ll look at doing some stuff with BookBub and whatever else seems like a good bet at the time. I think the BookBub is our next thing we’re going to tackle both through paid ads and see what else works out there so that we’ve been prepping for that, making sure that we do all our homework on our BookBub profiles and getting everything in order for that. And on the fiction side, I only did one promo for the last couple of months, which was on ‘hello books’, which is the new kind of promotion platform through the Self-Publishing folks. So Mark Dawson and crew have set that up and it is very affordable, It was $15 US. So like, you know, whatever, 18.20 Canadian. And I did get about 600 downloads over the 24 hour period around the promo. So it, it did a nice little boost. For downloads sales were up for a few days after that as well and we’ll see kind of what else happens as a result of that over time. And, and that was with, it was a holiday book I put in, it’s a book that’s been free for like, I don’t know, 2014. It’s been free for seven years, right? This is not a new product… and half a million people have downloaded or whatever already.

So it’s not a shiny new thing, but definitely still saw some action and some new people getting their hands on it. So I would say worth it. And it’ll be interesting to see how they roll it out. The one challenge that I found is normally doing things as part of a stacked promo built over time would be my preference.

I tend to do a focused promo run and there wasn’t the option to apply for specific days at the time that I signed up. But I signed up like right when it opened for requests. So I don’t know if that is something they are looking at or have changed yet. But yeah, not being able to say, like, this is the range I’m hoping for it makes it a bit more challenging to include in a larger kind of campaign. So we’ll see if they shift that or may have already shifted. So sorry if I’m giving you out of date information. It’s worth a check though. So it’s called hello books on that is definitely worth a peak if you are looking to add to your promo sites. Now we always do a little bit of a summary for you at the end of our check in here.

And just, what was the biggest challenge that you’ve faced in the past couple of months? And then what is your biggest win and another little quick rundown where we do a breakdown of what percentages of revenues are coming from different places. And so Michele, what have you got?

Biggest wins and challenges

Michele Amitrani: So the biggest challenge for sure has been me not being able to know all the answers immediately.

As I said, it’s not something that you can actually have, but I’m a greedy person, so I just want everything immediately. So being able to see which project will work or not. And I know that it’s part of the process of learning to I need to get better at that. I already understand it’s a long game publishing in general but sometimes I’m a bit impulsive and I have to remind myself that have already been doing this for almost nine years and I need to build up this business slowly, day-by-day, it’s not something that I can expect to just skyrocket tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. As Crystal said, when we interviewed Mark (Leslie), it might be an happening that your just first book is going to be the Harry Porter of the moment, but he says probable as a unicorn striking you with a lightning bolt in the space. I think that’s what she said last time. So it’s not impossible, but pretty difficult. Regarding my revenue streams, my authorpreneur revenue for the months of June in July 2021 came 66.78% for my fiction royalties and 33.22% from my freelancing. And the height of the month, the most interesting thing. I’m trying to make this funny but it’s been my first double digit paycheck coming from Kobo in July.

It was just like 60 bucks, but it may be happy. It’s a proof that you know, the wide game is strategic game that you need to seed weeks and months and maybe years in advance. But if you told me like, you’re going to get the check from Kobo for 60 bucks, I would say yeah. I mean, it would be nice, but I wouldn’t believe you. And then now I’m happy that I achieved that. And I’m happy that I can report that to you. After all these reports are also to keep you updated on the status of our going wide. So this is a little something for you guys. And just for closing this, my goals for August and September are two.

One is to publish the Amazon Ads book in Italian in both paperback and ebook format and the second goal is to publish my fourth mythological fantasy in September in English. And I have one power goal, which is to try and publish my first mythological novella permafree in English wide. And what have you got for our hight of the month’s, revenue sales, Crystal Hunt? Give us all of it. 

Crystal Hunt: Well, my biggest win was actually the most fun. And this may not sound like a big deal to some people, but I was raised to like, not do anything permanent to infrastructure in your house, because you’re always thinking about resale value and everything else and the hassle of having to like take it off.

But yeah. I decided that as a show of like committing to my writing and really committing to living here in this place for a long period of time and to sort of building the creative environment that I wanted to work in, I actually wallpapered one of the little walls in my office with pages, from my books.

Because I wanted to remind myself that I have enough words and I can use them. And then they become real things and I thought that would be really fun. And so I am not going to lie, I felt sick the whole time I was doing it. I put this glue stuff on the wall and it was just, it was stressful. But I decided that I needed to indicate I’m fully committed and we were doing this thing.

So that was a… that was a big win was really making that commitment external and it’s also really fun just to see that it’s, you know, behind my beanbag chair in my office, and I can look at that anytime I need a reminder or I’m feeling doubtful about whether or not I have the words and it’s not random I pick my favorite scenes and my favorite pages out of like different of the, the novels that I have in print. And that was, was really fun to do. I had a really good time with it. It was a neat kind of creatively inspiring adventure and I look forward to adding pages to it as new books come out. That will be part of the fun.

The biggest challenge was finding flow amidst so much chaos, because we had so many interruptions over the last couple of months where, you know, renovation stuff is fantastic and everything is coming together really well and it’s exciting, but it’s also just a different routine and different timing and whatever else and having our… Well, we got both of our COVID shots in the last two months period as well, one right at the start and one right at the end and it knocked me out for a solid few days, both times. So that was also a shift. And I think just, just the fact that it’s summer and it’s freaking hot. We’ve had temperatures over the last two months most of the time from about 20, 25 to 28, as the lows, up to like 43 was our top. And we’ve been hovering higher than 33. I don’t do well in the heat! If I had a choice, I vacation in places like Ireland, Scotland don’t generally love the hot temperatures. I just kind of melt in and my brain turns to mush. So All those things swirling together, the challenge, the biggest challenge has definitely been focus. 

It’s been an interesting shift on the revenue distribution side, actually our nonfiction stuff accounted for about 35% of revenue for those two months, the writing related stuff and affiliate sales actually, because we tried some interesting different promos and we, we tried some new like sales channels that work in really different ways, that section of things is actually at 55% over that last couple of months period, just because of, of how that worked out. So that’s unusually high, and the fiction revenues are down to about 10% because I’m just about to rerelease everything. So we’ll see how those numbers do in the next two month period.

And as far as big goals for the next two months goes getting our Create with Co-authors book through the publication process and listed and ready for sale is in there. Rereleasing all my romance books in all the formats and going live with the new website and newsletter and all of the new stuff is slated for happening in September.

So that is a massive, massive goal to get all of that stuff live. And that’s the focus. That’s the plan. Right. So we’re always curious how things are going for you when you get our newsletters in your inbox and we’d love for you to just hit reply and tell us how are you doing with things and you know, how are your goals coming along?

What are you working on? We hope you enjoyed today’s show. Remember to hit the subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to the podcast and to visit us as strategicauthorpreneur.com for show notes and links to the books, resources and tools that we mentioned in today’s episode. And feel free to hit the Buy Us a Coffee button, if you find the show helpful. Every contribution helps us keep the shows coming and keep our productions ads free and independent. Until next time happy writing. 

Michele Amitrani: Happy writing everyone.