Month two is in the books, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t know what to expect coming into January.

December felt like throwing spaghetti at the wall. Thirty books uploaded across 14 days, zero real strategy, and $7.83 to show for it. Proof of concept, sure, but hardly something to brag about at the dinner table. The question going into January was simple: now that the machine is running, can it actually grow?

Short answer, yes. Longer answer, $56.17 worth of yes.

That’s a jump of $48.34 from my first month, which on paper sounds modest, but in the context of building something from scratch with no audience, no reviews, and no reputation on the platform yet? I’ll take it every single time. The numbers are moving in the right direction, and at this stage, direction matters more than size.

My focus for January was straightforward, publish as consistently as possible while being smarter about what I was publishing. In December I was just moving fast for the sake of moving. This month I started paying more attention to topics I genuinely felt had a higher chance of engaging readers on their own, books that could pull someone in without me having to do much marketing at all. The kind of content that fits what people are already searching for.

I added another 15 more titles on top of that. That 15-book pace seems to be my sweet spot right now, the realistic ceiling between holding down a day job and keeping the content creation side of this moving. I’m not going to pretend I have unlimited hours. I don’t. So finding that sustainable rhythm matters if I want this to last longer than a few months of excitement before burning out. I’ve made that mistake before with other hustles.

I decided on eBook Writer AI from numerous friends and publishers input as my base AI platform to help kickstart my business, purchased the unlimited tier to be able to create as many books as I could.

What’s keeping me motivated isn’t just the dollar amount. It’s the fact that these books are sitting there working quietly in the background while I’m doing everything else. I didn’t touch most of December’s catalog this month. It just kept earning. That’s exactly the model I signed up for.

Is $56 passive income going to replace a paycheck? Not yet. But this is month two. Two months ago I had zero books on Amazon and zero dollars coming from this. The catalog is growing, the revenue is growing, and every month that goes by adds another layer of assets that don’t require my time to keep running.

That’s the whole game. And I’m just getting started.