[White Hat Journey] $0 to $5,000 per month selling books?

Hey blackhatters,

Hope you're all doing well.

I'm making this new journey thread because my last journey evolved beyond the scope of the thread title. That one was focused on email marketing, whereas this one will cover my journey publishing / selling books.

This journey will be 100% white hat. I think there's more valuable in doing things white hat in IM/business. Not to discount the blackhatters, I started off doing BH things. I've just personally found that offering value and doing things clean pays off $$$.

What am I doing?
Selling books that I own (100% on Amazon right now). I didn't write them, I hire others to ghostwrite them for me.

What have I done so far?
Email subscribers: 3,778

Total royalties: $791.35



Feb: $13.41
Mar: $19.31
Apr: $98.44
May: $328.39
Jun: $142.30
July MTD: $189.51

Spent about $4,500 in expenses to get here. Mostly writing costs + some advertisng tests (self-education) to learn how people buy in this industry and what does/doesn't work.



Now I have good systems setup for creating, publishing and advertising my books. Everything is more efficient, streamlined and I track all my numbers.

I've found that when starting any business, you just have to start moving and accept you'll make mistakes (throw shit at the wall and see what sticks). After that, you've hopefully learned something and can do it better the next time. I think there's a lot of people on BHW that aren't getting results because they're stuck reading and not moving (this used to be me).

What I'm Doing Right Now
I'm in the middle of launching a new book. Here's the stats so far:

Includes FB ad clicks + my email newsletter clicks + newsletter swap clicks.

Spend: $73.38
Revenue (royalties): $52.60
Profit: $(20.78)



**The two highlighted ad sets are the ones currently running for this launch.

I'm 3 days into the 7 day launch. I've budgeted $400 for FB ads. The results are good so far. I'm happy paying $0.59¢ per sale. I've been testing creatives + descriptions to find the best converting combos and updating my book listing to improve CR%.

My goal is to push rank in Amazon's algos so I'm willing to get slightly negative/breakeven on the launch. Going slightly negative on the launch should make me more profit long term in extra sales & visibility provided by the algo on this series + future series.

That's all for now.

Great execution mate. You're off to a good start! This will be an interesting journey.

By chance, you willing to share how you came up with the idea?

I guess they are fiction books. What is the genre?

Why are you running FB ads instead of Amazon ads? Is it because you're building a fanbase through a Facebook page for your brand?

So far I consider it a huge waste. Good luck anyways.

It is always good to focus on whitehat for long term business. It is good to see you doing that.

good luck on your journey

You are doing something very unique . I have not seen this type of journey here.

Naughtyfatkid said:

Great execution mate. You're off to a good start! This will be an interesting journey.

By chance, you willing to share how you came up with the idea?

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I saw others publishing books and making money. It looked cool and I wanted to figure it out.

Pavan Teja 1 said:

I guess they are fiction books. What is the genre?

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Yep, fiction sells well.

I'm doing mine in romance. It's a very competitive, but massive niche. Although ANY ficition genre also has plenty of money in it. Mystery, thriller, suspense, sci-fi, comics, etc.

M4XW3LL said:

Why are you running FB ads instead of Amazon ads? Is it because you're building a fanbase through a Facebook page for your brand?

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I'm great at FB ads. Ran a lot of them, and books sell well on FB. This is my first sizeable launch so I'm training my Facebook skills for book-style ads. In the future I'm going to run Amazon ads, likely even for this series since those aren't as time dependent and are more evergreen.

crnack said:

So far I consider it a huge waste. Good luck anyways.

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I could see how you'd think that! However, I believe the long-term value of these early books will pay off:

1) These were an investment in long-term assets for my business, as well as my understanding of the business and learning its systems.

2) Just due to the nature of the game (advertising), you lose money in exchange for building a customer base. As I get out more books, the my customer's LTV increases and advertising becomes more affordable, especially as it gets more expensive (which it will in the future). Adverting the early books was therefore more expensive for me (less potential revenue per customer).

However, I think you should watch what happens with this book launch. I've paid to acquire all these customers/readers at a loss so far, but this product launch will likely be the breakeven point for me.

This product has 4x more profit in it for me (better product), the customers cost less to acquire (the audience I build previously + relative profit:ad costs).

AND I'm wiling to go breakeven / slightly negative on this launch just to get more customers. Mine isn't a profit strategy, it's a growth strategy.

I reap more profits in the long term due to faster customer base growth + more product revenue from more books. I'm very confident that I can make profit on these books in the long term.

achiever2011 said:

You are doing something very unique . I have not seen this type of journey here.

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Thank you! I didn't seem anyone else doing something like this, so I'm glad you're enjoying it!

I'm also curious, what do you think it unique about?

I do wish the "My Journeys" had a different level of quality to it. It seems many are trying different "methods" but aren't really building a robust business. I think once you get it right and move past a method into building a business it gets more interesting (and profitable).

Here's an update to the launch:

Stats

Overall revenue for the launch. Spend is FB.

For the specific book I'm launching:

I list both because whenever you launch a new book there's a noticeable increase in sales for other books, especially in the same series.

This just a natural result of the nature of selling books in a series. So, while my book launch profit is $(65.43), overall I'm still profitable $90 because of the bump in sales across other books as a result of the visibility I generate.

I'm going to keep pushing for 3 more days to give it momentum and then I'll move into non-launch (backlist) ads to sustain visibility and keep the cash coming in off the tail of this launch.

Investing in another book. After this book my cash flow will be greater and closer towards self-sustainability without extra funding from me.

Hey mate. I have a book published on amazon in 2017. Just dropped it there and never promoted. Its a Romance fiction with amazing title and cover page. You could include that in your bucket XD What say?

How many page your books have? How you make the ads (images, descriptions)?

Interesting journey. I will follow this and wish you the best of luck.

I see you are building for the future. Where do you see the project in 1-5 years?

Banik_Babe said:

Hey mate. I have a book published on amazon in 2017. Just dropped it there and never promoted. Its a Romance fiction with amazing title and cover page. You could include that in your bucket XD What say?

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PMed you.

Mathz said:

How many page your books have? How you make the ads (images, descriptions)?

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Depends. My first 3 books had ~100 pages each. My 4th book has ~200 pages.

I write the descriptions myself. Images are the cover by itself or cover + stock images.

Zbigniew said:

Interesting journey. I will follow this and wish you the best of luck.

I see you are building for the future. Where do you see the project in 1-5 years?

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Thank you! In 1-5 years, I'm not quite sure, but with my skills in advertising, very profitable!

Quick journey update:

It's been 30+ days since launch. Still going strong on my new book.

Stats for newest release:


Stats for total set:


Most of the revenue has been during this launch. Here's the revenue for the last 90 days.


Amazon has most of that money still, since they pay royalties on NET60. Cash flow has become an issue despite having a 50% profit margin on the advertising.

In the mean time for cash to invest in more books + ads (and pay bills ), I'm going to start trying to get clients for my one-man army marketing agency.

This current book business has me in a cash crunch! It's profitable for me but it's taking a bit more cash than I anticipated.

I need some mfin' cash flow! Check out my journey getting clients to see how that's going.

Til' next time, peace.

Not bad. Good job.