Introduction
I am back after a two-month break! During Q4, I always focus most of my energy on creating new books and trying various advertising strategies to give them a good chance of selling. As we approach Christmas, I hope you’re all seeing an increase in royalties. Q4 is, of course, the best time for most Self-Publishers. So, let’s dive into my November income report and the strategies that have worked for me.
November Income Report
I was a bit worried about how the Amazon printing price increases would affect my royalties for Q4. My royalties after the price increase were similar to last year’s, so I wasn’t expecting to break any personal bests this year. However, I’m pleasantly surprised that I managed to hit over $7,000. For comparison, my royalties for last November were $7,425, with a similar ad spend.
Book Portfolio and Strategy
Most people are shocked at the number of books I have. I want to remind you that a large portion of these were created in my first year of publishing and aren’t up to my current standard. Therefore, I have unpublished around half of these books. Remember, you don’t need a massive number of books to achieve good royalties. For example, a member of my advertising blueprint course has 160 books published and earned over $7,000 for November!
In November, I created roughly 20 new books, including planners, logbooks, and simple lined journals. I’ve realized that even basic books can sell during Q4. Surprisingly, a few of these journals have been my best sellers this quarter.
Insights on Book Types
For a book to start selling well immediately is uncommon, especially for a simple lined journal. This Q4, I’ve seen success with journals, but I maintain that lined journals, being easy to make, are highly popular among Self-Publishers. This has led to a flooded market, making it challenging to earn significantly from them. Therefore, I recommend continuing to create a variety of book types.
Top 10 Best-Selling Books
The royalties from my top 10 best-selling books brought in over half of my total royalties. This highlights that a smaller number of high-quality books can be more profitable. These top 10 books are a mix of activity books, planners, and logbooks. The new journals didn’t make it into the top 10 for November, but they will appear in the December report. I think you will be surprised at the amount that have brought in!
Hardcover Sales and Price Adjustments
My hardcover sales were disappointing at only $459. The printing increases have impacted these books the most, leading to necessary price raises.
Last November, my hardcover royalties were closer to $700, showing the effect of these changes.
Q4 Strategy
This is my fifth Amazon KDP Q4. I have learned how to effectively squeeze every drop out of it. I have had to make slight adjustments This year though, because I have a full time job. I normally save up most of my annual leave for October November time so that I can give most of my time to Amazon KDP. However, this year, I use most of my leave to focus on creating my Amazon advertising course. This meant that I had less time than I normally would and I’ve had to work on KDP around my shifts.
What tends to happen every q4 is I completely burned myself out by working way too hard. I always give myself a silly number of books to create. I also create a plus concept for most of them. And I have around 150 advertising campaigns to monitor and optimise when q4 is finished each year.
I am mentally exhausted and I do not wish to look at any advertising campaigns or even think about creating another book. This year, I wanted to avoid putting this unnecessary pressure on myself, especially as I knew I would have even less time due to work commitments.
So I had a little team talk with myself and decided that whatever I get done will be enough. And I won’t make any sacrifices to my personal life. Last q4, I created around 60 books. And this q4, I will have created nearly 40, that is quite a big drop in the number of books that I have created.
As I have mentioned previously, I like to use the leverage of Amazon advertising to my advantage. From my experience, it is more beneficial to dedicate more time to advertising each book, rather than solely publishing lots of books and not advertising them. So I really applied that strategy, this q4 and invested heavily, I tried testing out a lot of different ad strategies to the new books, including my launch strategy, and other various campaign types. For this reason, my ad spend was a whopping 2500 for November, that is the same as last November.
The high ad spend is part of my plan. My ad spend was high, because I like to run a lot of new campaigns and see what ones work and what don’t. I’m not afraid to invest money in testing out new campaigns, I then make sure I discard the ad campaigns that don’t perform well and keep the ones that do in order that I can capitalise on the increased volume of shoppers in December. Running ads to my books helps them get sales and pushes them higher up the Amazon rankings. The goal is that they will get as close as possible to page one for a number of search terms, then I benefit from not only ad sales, but organic sales, too.
I know that this strategy works because I’ve been doing this for years. December is going to plan as I’ve already surpassed the number of royalties I got for the whole of November, and we still have a lot of days left to earn more.
You may be thinking that spending $2,500 on ads in one month is crazy, and not something that you will ever do, but I would like to remind you that these are only profits that I’ve reinvested back into my business. I have slowly increased my ad spend over the last four years as my profits have grown. In the first three months of advertising, I probably only spent about $100 in total.
I just want to make that point in case some of you are thinking that you need to invest a similar amount of money immediately in order to be successful, because you don’t. You will get to this stage over a period of time like I have, and everything is relative.
As I mentioned, in my advertising course, I would happily spend $10,000 per month on ads, if my campaigns were consistently at breakeven or less, and it didn’t require too much of my time. Hopefully, one day I will get to that level.
Another part of my strategy was to cut down the number of marketplaces I advertise on, So, I focused on the UK and the USA. I stopped all campaigns for Canada, Germany and Australia. Last year, I had way too many campaigns to keep under control, which added to a lot of my stress.
So,cutting down the number of campaigns was a good call. The last part of my strategy was to outsource some of the a plus content for the new books. Yes, I can do it myself but there are others that can do it faster than me and it will be better quality too.
I still did a lot of A plus content myself, but for the books that I thought were really good, I chose to outsource those to give them the best chance of succeeding. That is the strategy that I’ve used so far this q4.
Conclusion and Look Ahead
Now, let me show you my total expenses for November.
The only expenses that have changed this month are the amount I have paid for advertising and I also paid a few people to design some A plus content for me.
After I take away my expenses from my royalties, I am left with $4,654.
I’m very happy with the November results especially as I was expecting a lot less than last year due to the increases in printing. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel so that you don’t miss December’s income report.
Will I beat my personal bests of $14,189 in one month? we will see!
I hope that the royalties continue to roll in for you.
Have a fantastic Christmas for those that celebrate it and happy new year to you all…
take care