Finally, a write-up that appears in the first week of the month.

In January, I spent most of my time writing and launching the first book of the year. This is a short book, not like Quantum Physics for Beginners. And it’s aimed at selling around a specific holiday in February. And it’s not Valentine’s Day. Can’t say much more about it. But it’s definitely an experiment that, so far, is going quite well.

I kept freelancing, but not more than 2 days per week. Will I look for other freelancing opportunities? Let’s say not in the next couple of months.

Data Freelance

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Data Internships

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xTopics

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Soccrbets

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Freelancing

Roughly working 60 hours per month, or around 2 days per week.

Publishing

I kept spending on ads for the Quantum Physics book in January too, but with a reduced budget. Around the beginning of January I managed to reach was around 52k, which corresponds to 4 or 5 sales per day. And I also managed to keep the best-selling badge in a few categories for the e-book version. I think keeping the price of the e-book very low contributed to getting the badge, which is definitely helping the sales of the paperback too. I also pushed up the price a couple of times, and now I am not far from my competitors price tag, but there is still margin to go higher. At least I was slightly profitable on the book this month, or around break-even. To push sales, I need to market the book outside of Amazon ads. Which means TikTok.

For the second book I learnt from my mistakes and I published the e-book first, got more reviews than my direct competitor and then published the second book. The sales started slowly, but now they are picking up, and I have reached a healthy 100k BSR. The peak of the sales should happen next week. Let’s see how much I can sell. So far I have sold 20 copies, of which 10 paperback. I need to get to 50 paperback copies to break even and from there it will be all profit.

The cashflow

Time to look at how much money I lost this month (without freelancing).

Again in the red. This time is not as awful as last month, but still. My plan is to keep publishing one book each month, and there will be costs associated with it. So to make this work, I need to improve the profitability of the books I already published over time. Eventually I hope to publish a huge book, that will be selling 1000 copies per month, but until then, I have got to keep the costs low. For the next book, I plan to design the cover myself. I don’t think I can do it for every single book I publish. Other costs are difficult to keep low, so I will probably slightly increase the price of the books to balance the sheets.