May 2025 Income Report (detailed)

May’s revenue was $3,771, down from April’s $5,797. Profits were $2,173, down from April’s $4,653.

Still struggling to make a profit, as my efforts to revive my book sales on Amazon have had only a modest impact. Seems nothing could possibly do more than finishing my next book!

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Income over the last twelve months has been $75,833. The last time it was lower than that was July 2024 – about a year ago, so not all that bad!

But profits are another story. My profits over the past twelve months have been $37,400. The last time they were that low was May of 2021, which I guess was just before Digital Zettelkasten came out.

The six-month moving average profit is actually the lowest it’s been since I started making these reports seven years ago.

The six-month moving average book-profit line is pretty much at the level it was before Digital Zettelkasten.

Mind Management giveaway on Readwise

My latest and highest-ROI effort has been giving away Mind Management, Not Time Management free through Readwise. If you would like a free copy of the ebook, follow these instructions. If you haven’t used Readwise or Readwise reader before and end up paying for it, I’ll earn a commission!

This is the third time I’ve given away an entire book on the Wisereads newsletter, and it’s a surprisingly effective marketing tactic. Here’s what my Amazon sales looked like when I gave it away.

Mind you, I gave away the entire book, so it’s kind of crazy that I’d then sell well over 100 copies. Maybe people prefer to have the Kindle edition, maybe they want to say thank you. In any case, I’m glad.

Someone also ordered 50 copies of the paperback through Amazon (about $400 in revenue!). I first saw it in my Amazon Ads dashboard.

Since paperback sales don’t show up until the books are printed and shipped, it didn’t show up in the KDP dashboard until a couple days later. I’m pretty confident these sales are misattributed to Amazon Ads. At the least I suspect Readwise deserves the assist.

What’s up with the Amazon algorithm?

Along with my pricing promotion in late May, I’ve now delivered a couple big sales spikes. I would expect this to help boost my book in Amazon’s algorithm. So far, nothing super convincing.

I did notice one weird thing, though. My sales rank is higher than it was at the beginning of the year.

It’s strange, because my day-to-day sales are lower than they were before.

I’ve sold 777 copies in the past 90 days, and my sales rank is about 36,000. I sold 576 copies in the 90 days starting October 1st, and my sales rank fluctuated between 39k and 221k. So, more spikes in sales, but a smoother ranking. There’s at least one long thread on the 20 books Facebook Group with people going crazy over Amazon either changing their ranking algorithm, or there being a glitch. Not clear what’s happening, or if it’s actually affecting my sales.

Since I’ve been running pricing promotions, I’ve sold more copies in the past 90 days, versus the last 90 days of 2024. But, the last 90 days of 2024, I made $3,907 revenue from MMT. In the past 90 days, I’ve made just over $2,000. In the 90 days before this Readwise promotion, I made only $1,346.

But, in the past 90 days, I’ve spent $1,028 on Amazon Ads for MMT. In the final 90 days of 2024, I spent $3,728. Weird, that doesn’t make the sales crater look as bad as I had thought. That’s $179 vs $972 Amazon profit (with lots of help from Readwise).

The real problem was the first quarter of 2025, when I made $1,994 revenue from $2,961 – almost a $1,000 loss over three months!

I just noticed an anomaly doing this analysis, which I hadn’t noticed before. The final months of 2024, when MMT was selling better, I was advertising it on Meta.

Notice I also spent some on Meta ads in April of this year. But that ad was for a pricing promotion. The ad I was running on auto-pilot the last several months of 2024 was an ad aimed only at engagement – a simple quote tile.

As you can see, that ad has gotten quite a bit of engagement. I’ve spent about 2¢ per engagement for over 7,800 engagements.

On the surface, it doesn’t make sense that this would affect my Amazon sales. The ad pointed to my Shopify store, and MMT hasn’t been selling great there. But, it very well could have added that extra boost of incoming organic traffic that could boost the book in the algorithm.

So, I’m turning that ad back on. I’m also going to try a creative variant that points to the Amazon store, now that there’s “Amazon Attribution” for tracking such links in Amazon Ads. Maybe I can think of some others like it.

Controlling spending on (sneaky) new Amazon Ads features

It’s been a long time since I really took a look at Amazon Ads. Since then, they’ve added a bunch of new features that sneakily make you spend more money than you had planned, if you aren’t careful.

• Dynamic Bids: They added this change I think in 2019, but I haven’t paid much attention to it. By default, they used to lower your bid if there wasn’t much chance of a conversion (“down only”). Now by default they also raise your bid if they think there’s a good chance of a conversion (“up and down”). I now make sure all my ads are set to down only.
• Increase reach (off-Amazon spend): By default, new Sponsored Products ads have “Increase reach” on, advertising your products outside of Amazon. They probably already did this, but now you can select “Limit off-Amazon spend.” There’s no setting for this when setting up an ad. Even if you leave “Further increase bids across placements on Amazon Business” (a different thing?) unchecked, this will be on.
• Placements (Top of search, etc.): You can increase your bid for various placements, such as “Top of search” or “Product pages.” Note, you can’t decrease your bids, so you have to do confusing math to only bid highly on well-performing placements.
• Audiences: You can boost your bid for only one (currently) “audiences built by Amazon,” including “High likelihood to purchase based upon recent shopping activity.”

Not all this is on by default, but the result is there are a dizzying number of variables you can look after, and if you aren’t optimizing your ads, someone else is, and probably beating you out of the game completely.

I have yet to see how effective moving some of these dials is, but I found some pretty dramatic differences amongst performance of placements. For example, for one ZET campaign, I’ve spent over $600 in the “Top of search” placement, with a 123% ACoS, but I’ve spent nearly $300 on the “Product page” placement, with a 304% ACoS.

Kind of makes me wonder, do I want “Product page” placement at all? The way to reduce those placements is to reduce your bids across the board, then increase your bid adjustment on other placements. Better remember your, say, 300% bid adjustment for your preferred placement on that campaign as you’re looking at your individual keyword bids!

The Heart to Start pricing promotion

I ran a 99¢ promotion of HTS during May. As a result, I sold more copies than usual. 155 copies on Kindle – in the first quarter I only sold 56 copies.

As is pretty normal with pricing promotions, that didn’t result in a profit. I spent $180 on ads, including listings on various discount email lists, including BookCave, The Fussy Librarian, etc. I spent only $61 promoting HTS the first four months of the year.

My profit from HTS for the month was about break-even. I lost $4. I’ve averaged $198 profit each previous month this year. Will that lead to more organic sales and a higher profit? So far, June is unexceptional. Even with the lift from the Readwise promotion, I’ve made $130 across Kindle and paperback. I averaged over $180 a month the first quarter of the year.

Join me on Substack Notes

This year I’ve been dabbling in Substack, and that dabbling has developed into a habit. In fact, after offloading all my social apps to another phone, I’ve installed Substack on my main phone, in an attempt to make it my default, instead of X.

I’ve been on Twitter for almost nineteen years now (!!!) I’ve gotten varying amounts of enjoyment over those years, pursuing varying motivations, but the past couple years I’ve felt really out-of-sync with the culture there.

Add to that I’ve gone through several stints of very concerted efforts to improve my engagement and reach, and I just can’t make it work. There hasn’t been any social channel I’ve put as much effort into with as little success.

I’m now in a nice honeymoon phase with Substack Notes. I’m generally finding it to be a less-snarky, more intellectually honest culture that loves the written word!

I’m trying not to get too excited about it. The medium is the message and when you copy Twitter, you eventually get Twitter. Plus, they’ve raised a lot of money, it doesn’t seem on their current course they’ll be able to satisfy their investors, so it’s only a matter of time before it implodes or changes big time.

But I’m enjoying it for now! I’m very rarely publishing articles there, but I’m active on the “Notes” portion. Follow me on Substack Notes.

Experimenting with AI video with Google Veo 3

I’ve done a couple small projects experimenting with Google Veo 3 (or do you call it “Flow”? So confusing.) It’s amazing what you’re able to do and it seems we’re just getting started.

My biggest project was Hamlet in 60 seconds, which took me something like 15–20 hours! The most exciting use-case for me for AI video is you can produce historical content very cheaply. I feel like there is a lot of potential historical content that just can’t justify the budget that would be required to produce it from scratch.

I have other ideas I’d like to produce, but my experimentation is on pause for now. The credits I used I bought for a $125 introductory trial price (which goes in R&D, not in these reports). Also, no business model in sight for me, and I don’t have the bandwidth for so much wild card experimentation when writing a new book is my main focus.

If you’re interested, check out my recent post on what I’ve learned using Veo 3.

Direct sales low

Direct sales were only $134, which is the lowest they’ve been since September of 2023, when they were $92 and I was on the $5/month Shopify starter plan.

For the low direct sales, I blame that I am running fewer Meta ads. I also had higher sales when I was introducing new products, such as the Journal Prompts Workbook and How to Sell a Book.

Kill direct audio?

I’ve been considering killing direct audiobook sales, or at least restricting them to limited periods. The reason being I’ve made only $633 from audiobooks, out of my all-time direct revenue of $25,000, and I pay BookFunnel $15 a month just to have the chance to sell audiobooks, whether I sell any or not.

When I started selling direct audiobooks with BookFunnel, it was included in their beta program. I missed their introductory $10/month price for beta users, and I can’t justify the $15 a month price.

I have considered trying to push “educating” people on direct audiobooks, such as by offering a huge discount on one’s first audiobook, which would get them familiar with the BookFunnel audiobook platform, but, again, almost all the energy I have is going into the book, and if I’m using my energy for something else, I want the ROI to be pretty high.

I should definitely kill direct audiobooks, for now, but there are some things to consider, such as removing them from product pages and email sequences – and how easiest to revive them, should I do so when my next book comes out (a distinct possibility). Hmm, arguably that labor costs more than I would save. Aye, there’s the rub.

Income

Book Sales

Misc. Products

Affiliates / Advertising

Reader Support

Services

Expenses

General

Advertising

Hosting