The Slight Edge Report Year Six

This is my yearly The Slight Edge report. I post such a report every year on the anniversary of reading this awesome book.

The last 12 months were unbelievable. I downsized my day job to a half-time gig. My wife quit her day job. I transformed a very fresh business idea into a solid 4-figure monthly venture. My son joined my church community. I joined a mastermind led by my favorite millionaire. I was in the USA for the first time in my life. I gave my first speaking gig – in English!

I always experience some dizziness when I look back at the last year, but this year was exceptionally crazy. It’s like a dream come true.

Career

I have so many occupations now. I’m still a database administrator, half-time. I’m an author. I’m a life coach. I’m a book marketing consultant. Each of those four occupations provides roughly 25% of our household income.

A lot has happened in the last 12 months in pretty much each of the areas.

 

Downsizing my day job was a huge blessing. My corporate gig was getting on my nerves and I was getting on the nerves of the whole team, starting with my supervisor. In fact, she was the one who initiated the downsizing process and opened the door for me.

Since the last report, my book sold 10,474 Kindle copies and 3,632 paperbacks. This is respectively 23% and 45% progress over the previous year. My free books were downloaded from Amazon almost 5,300 times.

Again, this was with no new releases at all and minimal promotional activity.

Coaching has been going well. I got two new Pay What It’s Worth coaching clients. One of them quit after two months, but he got back to me because he noticed how much he slacked without accountability. I had a whole bunch of new clients on Coach.me who appeared, stayed for a while, achieved their short-term goals and quit.

I also had a couple of unsettling adventures. I got a client with schizophrenia who needed help. That was a tough experience that demonstrated to me how unprepared I was. I can coach healthy, self-motivated adults in the areas I succeeded, but coaching someone who is mentally ill was a totally different story. I was kind of relieved when the Coach.me authorities stepped into and canceled her all coaching contracts.

Then, in April I got this annoying client who was not ready for the kind of coaching I do online. It’s more about accountability and daily actions than about looking for solutions and support. But she avoided every action and felt criticized by me because I insisted on creating the minimal action plan ASAP and implementing it. It lasted for a few weeks and it cost me some emotional turmoil. In the end, I decided to stop accepting new clients on Coach.me at the beginning of May 2018. I have been working steadily with my several paying clients since then and accepted only a couple new ones, including one by accident.

Resurrecting Books

My book advertising service took off like a rocket ship. The beginning was a bit rough, but I got new customers almost every month. The revenue steadily increased. Then, in October 2018 I had an eye-opening call with a marketing expert, implemented his advice in November and got a really good customer in December. “Really good” means that my revenue from AMS service doubled month-to-month.

Figuring out the mysterious secrets of AMS advertising has been a constant struggle and my ads’ performance has been getting worse and worse, but the revenue stayed at the 4-figure level since March, and March was only a slight hiccup, netting almost $900.

An event that really saved this service and my book sales was when Amazon opened the UK market for ads. On 26th of February I figured out how to open an AMS account in the UK and my sales in the UK simply exploded. For example, I sold 241 Kindle copies till the 28th of July and it is always a slow month. I mentioned the decreasing performance of my ads, 240 is not many compared to 840 in March 2018. But without the ads in the UK, I sold only 17 copies in August 2017.

My sales in UK from 21st of Feb till 11th of Mar 2018

I got 5 of my best customers on that market and UK revenues make up about half of the business now.

I’ve served 30+ customers so far, advertised 60+ books and helped other authors earn about $30,000 dollars they wouldn’t have earned without my help. Unfortunately, AMS reporting is quite poor, so I have only a guesstimation of the number of copies we sold: over 10,000 copies.

And this business opened some new venues and provided opportunities for me. I contacted Martin Meadows and offered to run ads for him at no cost. Now we are in regular contact and I already learned priceless advice from him, like how to leverage Book Bub ads for a book launch.

When I was in the USA, a guy from my mastermind community let me stay at his place for no cost. I partly repaid my debt to him by resurrecting his book. It sold only several copies in 2017. Thanks to my ads it sold about 100 copies in the last three months.

By the way, I was the first author who figured out how to get into the UK market with AMS ads in the huge FB group dedicated to Amazon advertising. Thanks to them I knew it was possible because other authors shared stories about their friends who already advertised on that market. So, I only needed to figure out how to do that. Once I did, I shared my discovery with the group, plenty of people replicated the process and one guy documented it for group members.

 

My AMS business grew like it did, because I hired a pack of minions to help me out. My eldest son has helped me since autumn 2016. When my wife finally quit her day job for good, she learned how to download my customer’s daily data snapshots and create Amazon ads. Soon, I needed to teach my second son how to create ads. A few months ago, I even hired my 11-old daughter to download ads’ data for further analysis.

Because he started creating Amazon ads for me and my customers, my son was able to buy himself a new gaming computer.

My role came down to interacting with prospects, getting them on board, creating the first template ad for each new book and creating orders for more ads. Only occasionally did I dabble with anything else – ads creation, downloading data of my customers, managing particular ads and the like.

Thank God for minions. I had my hands full anyway. This business begot some unexpected opportunities. For example, I was hired to write four book descriptions for one of my prospects who didn’t finally work on ads with me. I also made a complete revamp of book pages for a few people. It required a high level of trust, because I needed the access to my customer’s Amazon account. I did it mostly for men from my mastermind, but also for one existing customer of Resurrecting Books.

After my visit to the USA in April I also got busy with revamping my Resurrecting Books website. I got priceless advice from Dave Chesson, the owner of Kindlepreneur and hired again the marketing coach. We not only rebuilt the website, but also the whole funnel. Before the new site was up, I had spent a lot of my time providing initial free assessments for my prospects. The sheer volume of prospects saturated my schedule (and inbox). The new process automated my feedback and I contact only those prospects I personally pick, because I see the biggest potential in their books.

While most of the times my service is nothing groundbreaking, and sometimes the advertised books barely break even, I love the cases when it makes all the difference. I love to see books that had 7-digit bestseller rank (meaning they sold a copy once in a blue moon) that are getting a consistent trickle of sales. In their cases, 10 sales a month is the difference between life and death. It is the true resurrection that justifies the name of my service.

A few times, the success stories were more impressive. The “good client” I got in December? He already paid me over $3,000, because my ads earned him twice as much. I got a new customer in July 2018. He had five books and none of them were selling decently. We sold 50 copies in the first two weeks of running his ads.

Tidbits

I got back on Quora in April for good. In the last year, Quora generated over a million views of my answers, pretty nice! I love Quora for what it is. I have a chance to engage with my readers, to get to know their pain points and I have material for a few books ready right there. I only need to put myself together and dig into the 1,000 answers I gave.

At the beginning of 2018, I heard about a website called Fiberead. They translate books and publish them in the Chinese market. I uploaded three of my books there. One of them is already published. So far, I haven’t earned even a dime from it, but the thrill of seeing those strange Chinese characters on the cover of my book is priceless