As you probably know, I published the book I have been working on for the last few months this week. For me, primarily, it is not a book for earning royalties, but a guide to a part of the new economy emerging right before our eyes. In some way, it's a trial balloon to test whether there is a space for such a type of book on the market. As you can imagine, I would be happy to get feedback from the target audience, and luckily enough, the target audience is you. If you want to give your input and you have Amazon Prime for free delivery, I would be more than happy to cover the cost of the book via PayPal. Shoot me a message if you're down to it. Why don't I just publish the link? It's for the next few weeks. Today, I want to get private feedback to understand whether it was worth it.

I published a new video breaking down my 5-step Amazon KDP Ads strategy for promoting a book with a $500 budget. For most books, spending $500 wisely on ads is enough to increase sales, collect meaningful data for optimization and scaling, and identify potential bottlenecks holding the book back. The amount of data you gather depends on the cost per click (CPC) in your niche. What are your average CPC levels?

I wanted to share my personal experience with using a pseudonym, so far. First of all, my written work is in the non-fiction genre, so why use a fictional name? At first I launched a podcast and was planning to talk about some personal trauma history. Using a pseudonym was my way of not drawing direct attention to people from my past that I might be telling stories about. Later, when I began writing books on the same topics, I wanted to have a cohesive flow back to the podcast content. So, I decided to use the pseudonym for the books and everything downstream from that (including my skool community). More importantly is what happened as a happy accident because of this choice. I was careful to select a pseudonym that was unique back then. The result is that if someone does a google search of my author name, a very cohesive and thorough response is returned (especially when using AI search engines). This has resulted in an online presence that is not distracted by my personal history, my other business presence or any other person with a similar name. The search yields results that include my book titles, book reviews and my social platforms that compliment the books. More importantly, it highlights my authority on the subject I write about (trauma healing and personal transformation) Just thought I would share this as it might help others to gain visibility.

It seems we have a big shift in "authors-helping-authors" review services. Until yesterday, moving from one such service to another posed a risk, since a new service had no data about your reviews, and a cross-review situation could arise. And now we have a solution to minimize such risks. Yesterday, BookVillage presented its browser extension. It imports your existing reviews and allows the service to correctly configure your profile to prevent situations where two users may end up reviewing each other's books. Have you already tested it? What is your experience? A brief reminder: Guild members can access BookVillage under special conditions: - The first 30 days are free - Performance guarantee (if you didn't get enough reviews in the first month, you can ask for one more free month) - The next 2 months are 25% off ($15 a month) - A fixed price of $20 forever, as long as the subscription is active. Even if the price is raised for other users. To get the special conditions register by the link: https://bookvillage.pub/?via=guild

I had no plans to publish my 2025 results not to create unproductive comparisons. On one hand, we have members with results in tens of thousands of dollars a month. On the other hand, nine out of ten publishers' earnings are measured in tens or hundreds of dollars a month. After much thought, I decided most of the Guild members are adult enough to understand that the only productive comparison is the comparison with your previous self. And example of the possible trend, not exact numbers, would be inspiring for publishers, struggling to break the plateau. So, in late April 2025 I had catalog of about 50 low-content journals which generated a total $50 a month in average, zero ads spent. At the time I was bored and searched for an idea for productive daily activity. KDP seemed like an decent candidate for it and I started process of re-train myself to modern day publishing in May 2025. Now, eight month later, royalties are increased 22 times with healthy 15 times increased profit. On the way I learned a few things: 1. All necessary information is freely available on the internet: you do not need to spend money on gurus, magical recipes for success, or expensive software. At the same time, a good mentor (not necessarily a human; an LLM works well in this role too) and useful tools can save you a lot of time and effort. And the time saved usually means money earned. 2. As in any business, in KDP there are no magic tricks; instead, feedback loops and effective processes win the game. 3. No matter how low your results are now, if you are ready to grow, you can increase your earnings rather fast. The only limit to the results is your own mindset. What's next? I have a book of my own that has been sitting at "half-finished" for weeks because I've been so focused on our community. To be the best host I can be, I need to finish what I start. I'll be a little quieter here for a short bit while I finish this manuscript. I'm handing the "microphone" to you guys: keep the discussions going, help the newcomers, and let's see who can post the next big growth story!