2021 - The Year In Review for Sunset Creative Publishing
December was an incredible month in terms of sales and in terms of Amazon ad costs compared to my previous months. I’m told that Quarter 4 this year was not as good as last year as far as sales go, but since we started in August, I can’t complain. We haven’t made $50 a month in royalties yet, but I understand that sales will come with hard work and time. What can we do differently in the coming year? We will be publishing more books of all kinds, especially more of what we’ve sold a lot of so far. For me, that means more coloring books, activity books, and blank journals with funny sayings on the cover. I would also love for us to create a children’s book soon. Hopefully, it will turn out great!
Our ACOS for running Amazon Ads (Advertising Cost of Sales) ran a little high this year - about 63%. This is most likely due to the fact that we didn’t really know what we were doing when it came to creating Amazon advertising campaigns when we started using them in September. ACOS should be as low as possible, ideally around 20%. This is something we need to improve in the coming year.
I’ve been watching and learning from a handful of YouTube channels in order to get better at what I do. There are so many, but two of the ones I watch the most are the Home Boss and Paul Marles. If you’re interested in learning more about Amazon KDP let me know in the comments below and I’ll give you links to some of my favorites.
I also belong to a few Facebook groups that are very helpful, but I notice they seem to be overrun by people from other countries who try to game the system by reprinting public domain books (badly) or publishing hundreds of notebooks a month just to see what catches on. I think that quality outshines quantity and that you need to focus on your craft before publishing something. I don’t think I’m at creating works of art yet, but I think I’m getting better as time goes on and as we create more books!
We decided to put a pause on adding products on Redbubble for a while. I think I should focus on one business at a time if I want to succeed. Dividing our attention across multiple projects will most likely affect my book production. We will probably get back to creating Redbubble designs later this year, but not until we have a nice selection of books in our collection.
In the month of December, we had sold 19 books. So why did I say earlier it was an incredible month for sales? That’s because more books than we’ve sold in any other month so far. As I mentioned before, my best-selling books for the month surprised me - blank journals with a humorous saying on the cover! They outperformed even our Christmas coloring book and our Christmas activity book. This tells me I need to make more of these.
Our latest books last month were our Debt Reduction Planner, our General Ledger for Small Businesses, and our Bible Stories Coloring Book for Kids. The Debt Reduction Planner took a lot of work to create because we wanted to make sure it was something we could actually use. The General Ledger is simple, but it has a cool duotone design on the cover that hopefully, people will like. The Bible Stories Coloring Book was something I worked on with my son, and it was completed right around the end of the year.
As always, if you have any suggestions on what book products you would like to see us produce, let us know in the comments below. If you have any questions about details on anything we’ve learned on this journey so far or even if you have constructive criticism about our blog or our website, again let us know. See you next month!