I think I likely had 25-35 conversations for every bit of paid work, and probably an extra 100-150 of handing out pre-made marketing materials or giving talks before that. The sales funnel takes a lot of time. You don't necessarily have to like the sales process, but you should at least be able to tolerate it or consulting will be very hard.
I would suggest:
* getting some sort of American and European business entities stood up where it is easy for companies to pay you. I believe Stripe Atlas makes this straightforward now for the American side (but I have not tested)
* writing blog posts, recording YouTube videos, giving talks at conferences - anything to get your name out there. You want something where you draw attention to yourself and people can say "who is edem?" and then look up your website and discover you have a consulting business
* figure out how to get a list of 200-300 people with buying power at their organization and reach out offering services. Target your conversations to their needs, like, "hey I see you have job opportunities for Big Data Architects, would you be interested in some consulting work to bootstrap your efforts?"
* be prepared that sometimes you won't get quite the consulting work you want. Sometimes you might hope for a software engineering consulting role, but you might get asked if you can advise on how to hire people like yourself. Money is money.
* ultimately, work hard, try lots of things, be flexible. Most attempts probably won't work, so the ones that do should pay you very well. If you are doing 75% sales and marketing at first, 25% coding... that sounds about right.
If that doesn't interest you, Solutions Architect (or even Sales Engineer) might be a better fit. These are pretty common roles at medium to large companies, but they come with a lot more assistance in the sales and marketing pieces.