Procrastination is the Enemy of Success
Procrastination is the enemy of success. I’m not sure who is accredited with this quote, but it is very accurate in my situation. We had made a few funny Valentine’s Day lined journals in January, and to our surprise, one of them sold multiple copies. Since then, we had started a letter and number tracing workbook for preschool-age children. The problem seemed to be that we were aiming for perfection, an elusive and sometimes impossible goal to reach. In effect, that goal became further out of reach as the days and weeks progressed. It wasn’t until mid-April when we realized that we needed to publish it as it was in order to move on to the next project. In retrospect, we should have set small, attainable goals in order to complete that task in a more timely way. It should have taken a few weeks to complete that book, but instead took three months. In the meantime, we have been neglecting social media, blogging, our monthly newsletter, and other things that could help us in other ways.
Speaking of social media, we have been seriously considering creating a TikTok account to promote our books. We’ve seen examples of how others in our field have been using it as a promotion tool and it’s brilliant. We are excited to get started.
We wanted to briefly mention a bit more about organic versus ad sales as it relates to the past few months. February was a good month for us, where we had our first organic sales and our first overseas sales. We were heavily advertising our Valentine’s Day books on Amazon and that really set us back. Our ACOS went through the roof in February - so much so that we cut back most of our advertising as soon as Valentine’s Day was over. Shortly afterward, we made our first organic sales. In fact, most of our sales ever since have been organic, which is amazing. Sales have dropped since then, but we are attributing that to our lack of marketing - something we are planning to rectify very soon.
Our top three best-selling books since the beginning of the year have been our Blood Pressure Logbook, our Bible Stories Coloring Book for Kids, and our General Ledger. This information will help inform us what books we should publish in the coming months.
If you have any suggestions on how we can improve any of our workflows, no matter how small you think it is, please drop a comment below. Constructive criticism of anything you see on our website or in our published books will also be welcomed. Until next time, keep reading!
