Part 7 - £100K KDP Business Case Study

Shit or Seasonal?

Is this just just seasonal decreases or is there a process broken?

Since our promising part 6 results of getting 30+ a day, we’ve dropped back alot. In the past couple of weeks, without any other changes happening, it’s dropped to £23/day and £19/day.

Quite a big drop considering things were starting to ramp up.

That’s annoying, it sucks etc etc.

But more importantly than just being annoyed about it, is to understand whether this is something that’s a random decrease due to overall demand (seasonal) or if it’s a process issue (something we’ve done or not done leading to the decrease).

After thinking this through for a few days, I think it’s a bit of both, but annoyingly it’s tough to tell exactly either way exactly.

This is a business that’s only 22 weeks old. So understanding if August is a super quiet month is not something we have data on.

Amazon itself slows in August/September but ramps up in Q4, especially in November and December, so we should see a nature uptick during these times, and the natural downtick could be now, but without multi-year data it’s tough to know.

But seasonal changes are non controllable to a certain extent, so more importantly, what’s something that could have gone wrong/not going well that we do have control over.

The most important point I believe is that we do not have any external channel to drive traffic to the Amazon listings.

For most people this would be a terrible waste of money as the majority of funds that go into this marketing just get funnelled to advertisers and never produce a positive ROI, or anything close.

Instead we want a more systemised approach that allows us to have the launch process (that works about half the time), but then add one further element that costs X and produces Y in sales output with Z degree of confidence.

Understanding all the formula inputs is tough but actually creating a process (X) that you can implement for each new launch is the real tough part.

But that’s what we’re looking at.

One team member is looking full time into one of these channels. I’m unsure on the chance of success but it’s something that needs to be attempted.

Aside from that, focusing on 1 excellent book per month/period and launching that fully, will be the new approach. Currently there’s too many medium quality books that have failed and act as a drag to overall profitability but more importantly they act as a drag to actual momentum within the business.

So all in all, bit of a disappointing update for part 7 but something that hopefully is at least 50% seasonal, and we can start to see £25-30/day averages in September and scale from Oct-Dec thereafter.