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    The Author Income Problem: Author Level Up, #6
    The Author Income Problem: Author Level Up, #6
    The Author Income Problem: Author Level Up, #6
    Ebook90 pages1 hour

    The Author Income Problem: Author Level Up, #6

    By M.L. Ronn

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    About this ebook

    Do you struggle with tracking your author income?

     

    It ain't easy. If you publish your books wide, you might get AT LEAST a dozen sales reports every month. It makes most authors want to pull their hair out!

     

    In this guide, prolific author M.L. Ronn walks through the process he used to tame his sales reports. He transformed a 5-hour per month process into a 30-minute effort using the power of technology and automation. This book is a blueprint to how he did it.

     

    This book is also a blueprint for entrepreneurs and developers who want to solve this problem. It will show you why the author income problem is so complex and exactly how to solve it.

     

    Tracking your income doesn't have to be hard. All it takes is the right approach. 

     

    Ready to solve the author income problem once and for all?

     

    V1.0

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthor Level Up LLC
    Release dateOct 16, 2020
    ISBN9781393055037
    The Author Income Problem: Author Level Up, #6
    Author

    M.L. Ronn

    Science fiction and fantasy on the wild side! M.L. Ronn (Michael La Ronn) is the author of many science fiction and fantasy novels including the Modern Necromancy, The Last Dragon Lord, and Sword Bear Chronicle series. In 2012, a life-threatening illness made him realize that storytelling was his #1 passion. He’s devoted his life to writing ever since, making up whatever story makes him fall out of his chair laughing the hardest. Every day.

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      Book preview

      The Author Income Problem - M.L. Ronn

      The Author Income Problem

      THE AUTHOR INCOME PROBLEM

      TRACK YOUR SALES WITHOUT PULLING YOUR HAIR OUT

      M.L. RONN

      Copyright 2020 © M.L. Ronn. All rights reserved.

      Published by Author Level Up LLC.

      Version 3.0

      Cover Design by Pixelstudio.

      Covert Art © ingka.d.jiw / Depositphotos

      Editing by BZ Hercules.

      Warm thank you to a special group of people who helped me on my sales journey to solve this problem: Tom Donahue, Olga Kirshenbaum, Dale L. Roberts, and Oz du Soleil. This project wouldn’t have happened without their coaching and guidance.

      Special thank you to the following people on Patreon who supported this book: Jon Howard, Megan Mong, and Lynda Washington.

      Some links in this book contain affiliate links. If you purchase books and services through these links, I receive a small commission at no cost to you. You are under no obligation to use these links, but thank you if you do!

      For more helpful writing tips and advice, subscribe to the Author Level Up YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/authorlevelup.

      CONTENTS

      Why I Wrote This Book

      The Great Riddle

      Different People, Different Problems: The Stakeholders

      Existing Solutions: Pros and Cons

      Microsoft Excel: The Ultimate Answer?

      Give Me a Database or Give Me Death

      The Data Journey

      The Lofty Goal of Zero Data Entry

      Data Cleansing Conundrums

      Data Cleansing Tools: Power Query or Macros

      Microsoft Excel vs. Access: Side Note

      Do You Want Access to ALL Your Data or Only the Data You NEED?

      The Amazon Exchange Rate Problem

      The Little Stuff: Other Data Problems to Think About

      Beam Me Up, Scotty: Your Data's Mothership

      Analyzing Your Sales: Visualizing Your Data

      The Test of Time

      One Writer's Answer to the Riddle

      The Ideal Sales Report Tool: What It Needs to Have and Why

      Next Steps

      Read Next: The Indie Author Bestiary

      Appendix: Important Terms

      Meet M.L. Ronn

      More Books by M.L. Ronn

      WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

      Authors have a lot of problems: we have to learn how to write better, write faster, and market our books, among many things.

      But there’s another problem that stands above all the rest.

      When you start selling books, how do you track your author income?

      I’ve written over 50 books, and I make money every month from many different book retailers. I sell books in ebook, paperback, audio, and three languages. I make money on YouTube through advertising revenue and brand deals. I have an audience that supports me on Patreon. I promote at least 20-30 different products and services, all of whom pay me affiliate commissions every month. I also sell online courses and make direct sales with my readers. And I haven’t even gotten into consulting fees and other miscellaneous income!

      Somewhere around book six, I realized that I needed to get organized because going through my income statements every month was time-consuming and difficult. My time is too important to spend hours in Microsoft Excel doing tedious data entry. I should be writing.

      I tried everything to solve this problem, and I mean everything.

      I found a cute little Excel spreadsheet that another author shared with the community. It was a great spreadsheet except for the fact that each tab represented one book. Imagine a spreadsheet like this for 50 books!

      I hired an Excel guru to build me a better spreadsheet. He created an improved spreadsheet with a nice dashboard that did help me for a little while, but I still had to manually enter my sales data into the spreadsheet, which made me stop using it.

      I even hired an assistant to calculate all of my sales each month. After the third month, he quit because he hated the job. I’ve talked to virtual assistants about this problem: it turns out that none of them enjoy doing a client’s book sales—hence, why my assistant quit. This is one job that you truly cannot outsource without causing sheer mental and physical pain to another person.

      I tried different sales tools that I found on the Internet—none which shall be named—and while they were each decent in their own right, they had significant shortcomings. One of them required all of your retailer website logins, which is a nonstarter for me. Another was Amazon-only. Yet another was Windows-only. I’m a Mac user.

      With so many options that didn’t suit my situation, I simply gave up and stopped tracking my sales for several years. Sure, I had an idea of what I was making per month, but I didn’t have the full picture—certainly not what I was making per month per book.

      When you have as many books as I do, this is the number one problem you must tackle in your writing business.

      And yes, I’m 100 percent serious. This problem is worse than building an audience or learning how to sell books. If you learn to do those things, you’ll create a flood of money. Most people would say that a flood of money is a nice problem to have, but if you fail to manage your money, you will drown in that flood.

      If you don’t understand where your money is coming from, you can’t truly call yourself a business owner. Think about a restaurant, or a flower shop, or a convenience store. Do they ignore their income? Absolutely not. They know their income to the penny, and which products are driving it.

      Authors and creative entrepreneurs are the only profession I know of that have such a lax mindset about money. We tell ourselves it’ll just work out, when in reality, it won’t if we don’t face the problem.

      If you don’t know where your money is coming from, you cannot manage your money—your money manages you.

      You also

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