New Milestones - 5 Members + 22 Books

STATS

Hit the following Milestones in March Useful books:

• 5 new subscription members at $19/month
• 22 books sold at $24 (one-time payment)

I've been marketing more on IH, Sub-Reddits like r/writers, r/entrepreneurridealong, and r/nonfictionbookclub.

CONTENT DASHBOARD

Here's a screenshot of my content dashboard. I find it easier to stay organized with this when it comes to repeating tasks. But for literally every other task, I (and the rest of the team) use a Notion Kanban.

I also make a sticky in the Kanban when I start working on these task just to keep the process the same and also so others can see what I'm doing and have done at any given time.

This is the EOM overview. This allows me (and the rest of the team again) to see how much has been shipped each month. The right column is the "outcome" column. This is a type of goal used in behavior science. Green means I've hit it. Red means "I done fucked up". I update this Fridays.

And finally, this is the lagging part of the dashboard.

I've decided against using a goal and working backwards and opted for using the previous month as a baseline and improving upon that.

The reason why is because of my background in behavior science.

Goals, especially early on, aren't based on anything. You just pull them out of the ether. Then if you do really well but just barely miss them, there's a huge tendency for people to get tremendously discouraged.

So instead the overall aspiration is to grow, but the montly outcome is to do X% better. I kept it small at 10% for now, because behavior science shows it's better to have a small outcome and crush it than the inverse. It's feeling successful that leads to an escalation of behavior change but I'm getting off-track.

I'll keep tweaking these numbers as I get a better understanding of what's doable.

GAMEPLAN

The game plan for April is to simply continue doing that and then review what's working in early May.

Then it's "do more of what's working and axe that which isn't."

As you can see, I'm focussed on leading indicators. All the stuff within my control. Then it's observing the lagging indicators to see if the work is impacting them.

CONTENT

I'm also experimenting with different kinds of content. It's still difficult to reproduce content that resonates. Most disappear into the void but such is the nature of the content game early on. The goal is to keep trying different formats until I find something that resonates.

E.g. This one $7,144.56 in royalties in two weeks from books performed poorly much to my surprise. However, this one This is How You Make Your Book Sell More Every Year, performed better. And here's a quick link one that did just as well April Dunford on Nailing Positioning.

That's a beautiful demonstration of what we all already know... there's not really a correlation between how much effort you put in and how valuable it is to people.

Alright, I'll get off my soap box. I hope this has been useful but mostly I'm interesting in what you guys think. What's your marketing game plan like?

And of course, if you want to become better at writing content that sells go have a look at Write Useful Books.

RJY signing off.