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Welcome everyone. Hosting a free masterclass here today. We're going to talk all about writer career paths. Super excited. This is your first time. Great to meet you. Thanks for joining. My promise to you is I'm going to aim to make this the most valuable free webinar you've ever attended in your life. This will not be one of those webinars where you, you sit on it and the person talked for 58 minutes and they didn't say anything helpful. That is not what's going to happen here. My goal is to make this the most valuable free masterclass you've ever attended in your life. So real quick, before we dive in, we're going to start in 60 seconds. If you are currently working as a writer, could be in a full time job, it could be working for yourself. If you are currently working as a writer and making money from your writing in some capacity, drop a one in the chat. And if you are not currently making money from writing and you would like to, you're thinking about how to monetize this thing that you really enjoy, you really love, drop a two in the chat. So one, if you're currently making money as a writer, two, if you're thinking about and looking for ways to make money as a writer. Okay, awesome. Looks like we got maybe a 50, 50 split. Maybe like 60, 40 with the twos. Okay, great. So here's what we're going to cover. Everyone ready? Dive in. We got, we got a lot to jam on. I've been super excited. I've been looking forward to this all week. So this is going to be a lot of fun. Here's what we're going to cover. We are going to cover the nine writer career paths. So for everyone here, this is my next book. I've written a bunch of other books. One of them is the Art and Business of Online Writing. I also wrote a book called the Art and Business of Ghostwriting. I've written all sorts of books on writing on the Internet, marketing, positioning, and this is my next book. It'll be out in a couple months. It's called Writer Career Paths. And so today I'm going to walk you through the big ideas of this book and why I'm writing this book. And after many years monetizing writing and writing on the Internet, writing in all sorts of different vehicles, I have really learned that there are nine paths available for writers today. And this is the book that I wish someone would have written for me 10, 12, 15 years ago when I was first getting started as a writer. Because I studied creative writing in college, and when it was time to graduate, my teacher said, here are your options. You could work at a newspaper or a magazine. You could work for a big publishing house, or you could work as a barista and work on your novel at night. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Those were the three options that we were told, and I was really dissatisfied with those options. So instead, I went out and I tried lots of things, and I monetized my writing in all sorts of different ways. And now, 15 years later, I go, you know, I've actually realized that there are a bunch of different paths that are available. No one has really articulated it this way. And this is what I wish I would have known at the very beginning. So we're going to cover the nine career paths that are available to writers today to monetize and make money. Then we're going to talk about the order of operations, meaning which career paths should you pursue in the beginning of your journey, and which career paths should you wait to pursue until you're further along? This is a very important concept, because where a lot of writers go wrong. Where a lot of writers go wrong is that they pick the wrong career paths to start with, and they expect that different results. Okay? And not every career path promises the same thing. And then at the very end, we're going to do an open Q and A. And for everyone who stays at the end, we're going to do a little bonus. So I encourage you to stay to the very, very, very end as we do Q and A. And we might be giving away one or two of our. Our products for free. So just, you know, maybe stick around and we'll. We'll give some away as a preamble for everyone here. I see some people taking notes. That's great. If you want to take notes as we go along, by all means. But just so everyone here knows this is being recorded, we will distribute the recording afterwards. You have lifetime access. You can watch it as many times as you want. Right. And feel free to ask questions throughout. If it's relevant to the slide and if it's relevant to what I'm talking about, I'm happy to answer questions as we go along. But then we'll save the Q and A for the very end. So don't worry. This is being recorded. We'll distribute it afterwards. Sound good? Everyone on the same page? We know what we're doing. Drop a yes in the chat. Yes, we know what we're going to cover. Okay, great. So there's only one slide. I hate. I hate when I sign up for things and it's the entire time the person is just talking about themselves. So I promise there's only one slide about me this entire, this entire presentation. Okay? And the only reason I'm sharing this slide is to give context. Okay. So most writers, most writers that find success only do so in one career path. So someone becomes successful fiction writing or someone becomes successful creating digital products or someone becomes successful with a newsletter. It is very, very rare that a writer finds success in a wide variety of different business models and a wide variety of different career paths. This is something unique. I really enjoy bouncing around and experimenting with lots of different types of writing. And so just to give everyone some context as to why I even wanted to write this book and talk about this product or talk about this idea in the first place is that I have generated millions of dollars in many different career paths. So we have a SaaS platform software as a service. The platform is called typeshare. We've done over a million dollars in SaaS revenue. Very rare for writers. It's a writing based platform. We have sold millions of dollars of low ticket digital products. Ship 30 is one. Full stack writer is one category. Newsletter creator is one. Low ticket. Launchpad is one. These are $350 asynchronous text and video courses. I write. All of them generated millions of dollars. I've done it with services. I've gotten paid as a ghostwriter and I scaled myself into a ghostwriting agency. I scaled that to millions of dollars in revenue. I've done it with a cohort based course. Me and my business partner Dickie bush, we grew ship 30 for 30, a cohort based course to millions of dollars in revenue. That is a different business model. We've done it with high ticket group coaching. So our flagship business right now is Premium Ghostwriting Academy. We train freelance writers how to reposition themselves as ghostwriters or help people get into ghostwriting. Start monetizing. With ghostwriting, we have generated millions of dollars. With that business model. I have also generated over a million dollars self publishing my own books. Just like this one. I've written 10 different nonfiction books, all self published. That's a different business model. I've grown two different paid newsletters that have done in aggregate over $2 million. So paid newsletters being subscription, people are paying for access. Our paid newsletter right now is called Write with AI. If anyone subscribed to Write with AI and before that I grew a paid newsletter called Category Pirates. And lastly, I've also gotten paid to do what I like to call category copywriting, which is very high level messaging consulting. I've been paid millions of dollars, stock options, equity, that whole game. So it is very rare, and this is why I'm, I'm so excited about this topic, is it's very rare for someone to successfully monetize in so many different business models and then be able to say, look, if I could go back, these are the things I would do differently and these are the differences between each business model. And so here's the big takeaway again, I'm just sharing this for context. The big takeaway is that there are a lot of different ways to make money as a writer. Anyone who says it's so hard to make a living as a writer, they just aren't aware of these different career paths or they haven't stuck with one of them long enough, or they haven't gotten sufficient help because maybe if I did it once, I would go, okay, that was lucky, right? But I've done it seven, eight, nine different times in nine different business models, right? So I know it's not just luck and I know that it's possible. The nuance, and this is what we're going to talk about today, the nuance is that the, the path that you choose promises different outcomes. Okay? So the mistake that people make is they pick one career path expecting the results of another. And not every career path promises the same thing or unlocks the same outcomes. And this is the big idea I've spent the past five years like really obsessing over and thinking about. And I think that it is one of the most important things to understand as a writer is that depending on what your goal is, you are going to pick a different career path. And where so many writers go wrong, myself included, at the beginning of my journey, is they pick one career path saying, I want to do this thing. But they expect the result of a different career path. And so that's what we're going to talk about. So what are the nine different career paths? The nine different career paths that are available to writers in 2025? You could be a literary writer, you could be a genre fiction writer, you could be a nonfiction writer, like nonfiction author. You could be a newsletter writer, a content, writer, a ghostwriter, a sales copywriter, a writerpreneur, and or a category copywriter. Now obviously we're gonna get into the definitions of each one and we're gonna talk about the pros and cons and what business you're really in when you pick one of these career paths. But just to level set, drop in the chat. Looking at this list, which career path do you think you currently want to pursue right now? Could be a number. You could write it out. So some literary writers, some genre fiction writers, some ghostwriters, some nonfiction authors. I see people listing multiple. They're like, I want to be a genre fiction writer, and I want to be a nonfiction writer, and I want to be a newsletter writer, and I want to be a ghostwriter. Right. Okay, so all across the board. So here's the first big idea that I encourage everyone to internalize. If you listed more than one, you're already making a mistake. You cannot. You just fundamentally cannot pursue two at the same time. So for everyone here who's like, I want to be 1, 2, 5, and 9, you've already made a mistake. And this is one of the biggest reasons why writers struggle to see results is because they try to do too much. They think that they need to be everything to everyone all the time, and especially in the beginning. In the beginning. And, yeah. Adam, didn't you say you had success in multiple arenas? I have, but not at the same time. I've been doing this for 15 years, so in sequence. Right. So can you maybe pursue more than one or have more than one going on when you have a portfolio of writing businesses doing tens of millions of dollars, sure, then we'll allow that. But in the beginning, if you're like, I'm just trying to make my first ten grand, I'm trying to figure out how to make three grand a month for my writing, you are making a monumental mistake trying to pursue more than one of these at a time. So that's the first big thing everyone here needs to understand. And I know that that's a little bit like, ah, that stings, Cole. Ah, that's a little bit of tough love. That's what I'm here for. I am not here to validate your faulty beliefs. I am here to tell you the way that things actually are. That is how I can be most helpful. Okay, so think about one of these, and let's go through the list. And I bet by the end, as you realize what business you're actually in, the career path that you've chosen for yourself at the beginning will probably not be the one at the very end. Now, for everyone here who's in PGA or everyone here who's in our writing programs, you probably have a little bit more clarity. But I'm telling you that until you See it this way, your perspective is probably going to change. Okay, so let's talk about the first one. Literary writer. So little fun fact. I studied creative writing and literature in college. I love literary writing. If I'm. If it's a Saturday and I pick up a book, my go to is I would way rather read Nabokov or Dostoevsky or some, you know, Russian literary writer rather than atomic habits. Okay, I love literature. Studied it, obsessed with it. Such a cool art form. Here's the challenge with literature. The challenge with literature for anyone here who's like, yes, Cole, I love literature too. I want to be a literary writer. Hell yeah. Okay, here's what you need to understand about literature. In literature, you are getting paid in status first. You are not getting paid in money. So here is immediately the first mistake that every writer makes. They go, I want to write literature and why am I struggling to pay my rent? And you don't yet realize that when you choose this career path, you can't have both. Okay? This is like the. The epitome of cognitive dissonance. So many writers say, I want to write, I want to create art. I want to write for myself. I want to write literature. I want the stat. I want to be seen as the best writer of all time. I'm the next Hemingway, I'm the next Jane Austen, I'm the next whoever. And then two seconds later they go, why am I struggling to pay my rent? And they are fundamentally two completely different things. Okay? So when you write literature, your business model is you sell books and maybe, maybe you build some IP that might get turned into a movie or something later on. The Color Purple, right? Maybe you write a literary novel that then gets optioned for some other thing. Generally speaking, though, you're just writing books, okay? This is a very high risk, low reward career path. It's high risk because it's going to take you 10, 20, 30 years to master writing literature, and you're going to get paid peanuts the entire way, right? And so just to understand what this career path looks like, the typical literary writer, when you see someone who's late 20s, early 30s, who all of a sudden, like, wins the Booker Prize or wins the Pulitzer or has some sort of big literary win, right? The vast majority of them follow this progression. They got an MFA in fiction, then they started publishing short stories in the Atlantic or the New York Times or some literary magazine. And then as they stack up these little accolades, then a big five publisher gives them a little advance. It's not huge. Might be 20 grand. 50 grand. Spread out over four years. Okay, so you're talking about below minimum wage. And then they write a book, and then maybe, maybe that book is successful enough that they write a second one. That is what the typical career path of a, of a literary writer looks like. Okay? If you're unfamiliar with book economics, when you take that publishing deal, you're getting paid a 10 to 15% book royalty, which fundamentally means the publisher just bought 85% of your product and they paid you 20 grand for it, 15 grand for it. So you just sold your startup for 15 grand. That's basically what just happened. Okay? And literature is the smallest fiction market. It is the smallest. Why? Because the average person has the reading comprehension level of like, a sixth grader. And literature is more advanced, it's more complicated, which means 50% of the planet can't even read what you wrote. Okay? So here's the big thing. And this is 10 years of me grappling with this in myself, because I love literature and I love art. If you pursue the career path of being a literary writer, you are in the business of winning awards. You are in the business of status. You are not in the business of making money. There is a reason why almost every single successful literary writer also teaches at a college. Because their literature is not what pays the bills. Their job is what pays the bills. And then they write literature on the side. Okay? And by the way, screenwriting is really no different than this. Screenwriting is very similar. There's a couple nuances, but, like, this is what you're signing yourself up for. Okay? Now here's an amazing example of someone who found success here and found a way to break out of it. So does anyone here know who George Saunders is? George Saunders is a American literary writer. He's, you know, won a bunch of awards. He's followed this career path to a T. He teaches a class at Syracuse on Russian literature. Okay? George Saunders, by every definition, is a successful literary writer. Pinnacle of successful literary writer in America, has written a bunch of great books. He does not make very much from his books. Okay, do you want to know where he makes the majority of his money now? He teaches a class on Russian literature. A couple years ago, he took that class and he basically turned it into a book. He had been teaching this class for 20 years. He decided to turn it into a book where he breaks down Russian short stories. That book was called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. It is a nonfiction book. It is not fiction. He is a literary writer that wrote A nonfiction book about fiction. That book became his best selling book. Then he took that nonfiction book and he expanded it into a paid newsletter called Story Club, which is on substack. His paid newsletter is the number one literary paid newsletter on substack. Some rough math. I'm guesstimating that he's making between 50 to 100 grand a month from his substack. His substack is not him writing fiction. His substack is nonfiction, breaking down fiction. Note that you have to understand this nuance. That is a massive difference. You are not monetizing literary writing. You are monetizing the discussion of literary writing. So he's making maybe five grand a month from his literature and he's making 50 grand a month talking about literature through a nonfiction lens. Does everyone here understand that if you don't get what business you're in, you're going to really struggle to make money? And this is why one of the biggest pieces of advice I give to fiction writers, whether it's literature or genre fiction, is not just monetizing the fiction, it's also monetizing the how it's monetizing the nonfiction. Okay, so why so much time on this category? Because if you don't understand the nuances of which career path leads to which thing, you're going to make bad decisions. And one of the, like, the number one mistake that writers make is they say this, I want to write what I want to write about and why is it making me money. I want to write what my heart says I want to write about. Why isn't it making me money? And as we go through, you will realize that those are two completely different things. Okay, so that's the first writer, career path, literature. Now the second is genre fiction. What is genre fiction? Genre. Genre fiction is mainstream fiction. Romance, thrillers, fantasy, sci fi. Right. This is not literature. Literature is very niche, tends to focus more on everyday life, social issues, political undercurrents. Right. Things like that. Genre fiction is it's action, it's mystery, it's love. Genre fiction is mainstream. It is the comp. It is the parallel opposite of literature. If you are a genre fiction writer, you are getting paid in money. Typically you're not getting paid in status. The person who wins the Pulitzer has way more status than the best selling genre fiction writer in any one of these categories. But the genre fiction writer in one of these categories is making ten or a hundred times more money than than the literary writer. So here's what's really just to share this with everyone. You know what recently clicked for me is that genre fiction is actually the the one career path with the highest earning potential. It is not the fastest, it is not the one that makes you the most money the fastest. But who are all the richest writers in the entire world? All of them are genre fiction writers. Dan Brown, $600 million net worth. John Grisham, 500, $700 million net worth. James Patterson, $800 million net worth. George R.R. martin, J.K. rowling, go down the list. All of them. All of the highest paid writers in the world are genre fiction writers. It is the largest total addressable market. It is extremely competitive. But it is one where you can have a true lottery outcome. So here's what you need to understand about genre fiction. Genre fiction, you're in the same business, you're selling books and you're building ip. A lot of books now are getting bought to be turned into TV shows, movies, right? So that's great. This could be very lucrative. This is actually pretty low risk because anyone could self publish a story. Like 50 Shades of Gray started as a self published story on a forum and then a publisher bought it and then it made a gazillion dollars. Right. Twilight, same thing. So very low risk, doesn't cost a lot of money to get started, but very high reward. This is what I like to call a lottery career path. Meaning you buy a ticket and it might be a dud or it might make you $10 million. You have no idea. Right? The thing with genre fiction is that it has a medium to long time horizon. So literature is very long time horizon. It's like you need to Write literature for 50 years before anyone even cares about what you've written. Genre fiction, you might find success in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years. Right? It's not as long as literature, but it's not tomorrow. Okay, so medium to long reward, very similar structure. If you do a traditional deal, 10 to 15% book royalty is standard. But a lot of genre fiction writers now are self published. And when you self publish, you're looking at a 60 to 100% royalty. So here's the thing that people misunderstand about genre fiction. The business that you're in is volume. If you want to succeed as a genre fiction writer, the way you succeed is you write as many quality stories as you possibly can. It is volume. If you are trying to be a genre fiction writer who writes one book every four years, it doesn't work. So just to level set a lot of the most successful self published genre fiction writers Today, aim to publish a book every three months or less. So that is what you're competing against. Okay, so this is a very different business than literary writing. Here's a great example. Colleen Hoover, drop in the chat. Anyone know who Colleen Hoover is? This is about as big as it gets. Writes romance, pumps out a ton of volume. Just had one of her books that ends with us turned into a major motion picture. And here I pulled some data from a cool tool I have called Publisher Rocket. This is just what a small subset of her library is doing on audiobooks. So one book, she's doing $350,000 a month from audio. Another one 200K, another one 130K, another one 100K, another one 186K, another $1 141,000, all from just audiobooks. That's not including print and that's not including ebooks. Now she's not getting all of that. She's getting 15% of that because she signed a traditional deal. But I also know genre fiction writers who are self published who have those numbers. You will never unlock this outcome as a literary writer unless you are the top 1% of 1% or 1% or 1% and you write the next whatever the biggest literary book is of that year. And it'll be for one book. So genre fiction is a lottery career path, extraordinarily lucrative, but it is a lottery. And so you have to understand that that's the game you're playing. Okay, is this making sense for everyone? Anyone having some aha's realizing, wow, I never actually thought about it this way before because if you don't know what game you're in, how are you supposed to win? You don't know what business you're in. So let's move on to the third one. This is one that I know very well because I've done this. I've made millions of dollars with this career path. Literary writing and genre fiction writing are two of the only career paths that I have not crossed a million dollars with. And I guarantee you in the next five years or less, I will do that. Because one of the next ones I'm experimenting with is genre fiction. Playing my lottery tickets. So if anyone's here, come back, see me in two or three years, I bet you that I will have achieved that. Because it's all the same thing. It's all the same thing. It's just applied to different games. Nonfiction writer, nonfiction author. Okay, what game is this? In this game, you are getting paid in status first and money Second. Okay, so here's the business model. The business model is that you write a book. You write a book. And then who's heard this phrase? Writing a book is the new business card. Anyone heard that? Writing a book is the new business card. That is this entire career path, what you do is you write a book and then you use that book to get speaking gigs. And then you turn those speaking gigs usually into consulting gigs. Now you could also sell physical or digital products. Sure. But really the business that you're in is you write books and then you get paid to speak. You get paid to coach, you get paid to consult. Malcolm Gladwell, what does he do? He writes books. He gets paid to consult. Ryan Holiday, what does he do? He writes books about stoicism. He gets paid to speak. He gets paid to consult. James Clear, Atomic Habits. What did he do? He wrote a book. He gets paid to speak. He gets paid to consult. So the business that you are in is it's actually not about the book, it's not about the books that you write. A lot of times these authors sign traditional deals, so they're getting 10 to 15% royalties. They're not making a ton off of their books. They might get a big advance, but like it's just one payment and then that's it. Most of them don't recoup their advances. It is faster to monetize than fiction. But the real business that you're in is that then you're on the speaking circuit. So you're not building really long term ip, right? You're not building a library of books that pays you every month. You might get a little. But the real business that you're in, the people who really succeed here, they write a book with some sort of insight, right? Thinking fast and slow. And then they take that insight and then they go on the speaking circuit and they charge 20 grand, 50 grand, 100 grand for speeches. Now that might sound like a lot, but you need to understand what business are you in. And the business that you're in is in coming up with unique insights in a specific industry or in a specific topic. Usually those insights are backed up by data or research. And then you're in the business of getting on planes and staying in hotels. And if that's exciting to you and, and that's what you want to do, then this is a career path. But the thing that people don't understand is they go, I want to write nonfiction books. Not realizing that all the upside in nonfiction books is typically unless you write atomic habits, which Nobody does. That was like a massively outlier. Very far from the norm. Right. Unless you have a grand slam home run like Atomic Habits, you are not really making money from your books. The vast majority of these authors use their book to make money speaking or consulting. And so that's the business that you're in now. Who's an amazing example of this? Ryan Holiday is one of my favorite examples. Ryan Holiday, all he does is create content about stoicism. He tweets about stoicism. He has a YouTube channel about stoicism. He has a podcast about stoicism. He has an email list about stoicism. Every time he writes a stoicism book, it becomes a bestseller. Why it becomes a bestseller? Because he has a traffic engine. And so with nonfiction, if you are trying to write a nonfiction book or you are trying to write nonfiction books and you do not have a traffic engine about that topic, you have already lost. The publisher is not giving Ryan some big advance just because his name is Ryan. They're buying his 300,000 person email list in a niche. That's what they're buying. So it is all about having a traffic engine. And then what does he do? Yeah, he makes some money off of his books, but really where he makes his money is he sells physical products like this little Memento Mori storage stoicism coin. I heard on the pot on a podcast that he makes way more money selling that little coin than he does any of his books. He makes like millions of dollars a year selling that little coin. Why? Because he has a traffic engine. He also has courses. How to read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. You buy the course, right? He speaks. He gets paid to speak. He does some consulting. He gets paid to consult. So the thing to understand with this career path is that the books are actually in service of monetizing in other ways. This is fundamentally different than genre fiction authors, where genre fiction is about writing as many quality stories as you can, building your library, and then letting your stories pay you. That is not what you're doing in nonfiction book writing. Nonfiction book writing is a game of leveraging credibility. Does that make sense? Does that make sense for everyone? Okay, is this clicking? Starting to see the game? Starting to see how, wow, I never really knew what business I was in. I had all these aspirations. I want to do this. You don't even know the point of the game you're playing. Right? Okay, let's keep it rocking. Newsletter writer. Newsletter writers. This is a very exciting. This is a newer career path in the past 10, 15 years. Newsletter writers, you get paid in money first. The biggest newsletter writers in the world, they have very low status. They might have really niche status. They might, you know, the people in their little corner of the universe and, and the Internet might be like, oh, this person's awesome. They have very low mainstream status. Nobody knows who they are, but they make a ton of money. So here, this is a great career path for making money, right? And the business model is you build a newsletter, you build a list, and you either sell ads or you charge people a subscription fee to read that newsletter, which is called a paid newsletter. This is another career path that I have generated millions of dollars from. So I can tell you exactly how this works. This is very low risk. Anyone can start a newsletter. You could start one tomorrow, easy. And it has medium to high reward, meaning it's not. It has a similar lottery outcome function as genre fiction, but genre fiction has higher ceiling, right? Like you don't see newsletter writers worth $800 million, right? So genre fiction has a higher ceiling. Newsletter writer has a lower ceiling, but you can typically get there faster. So it might take a genre fiction writer five or ten years to get up to a million bucks a year. Newsletter writer, you might be able to get there in a year, get there in two years. So it's faster. Okay? Beauty of newsletters, very high margin, 80 to 100% margin, right? It doesn't matter if you have one person on your email list or 10,000 people on your email list, the effort is still the same. You're still writing your newsletter. Very high margin, very scalable. It is also a faster path to monetization than writing nonfiction books. If I sell this book right, let's say I sell 300 copies a month and it's 10 bucks a copy, I make 3 grand a month. It is very easy to make 3 grand a month from a paid newsletter. Much easier than selling books. Why? Because books are one off products. You buy the book once and then you're done. A paid newsletter, you subscribe. So now I'm subscribing, I'm reading every single month, right? So this is actually it. So with non fiction books, you, what you're really in the game of is you're in the game of speaking and consulting. You could do that with newsletter writing, but newsletters are more of a paid engine in and of themselves. It's a never ending book. That's right, Jake. So people are paying you to keep reading or ads. I prefer the paid newsletter model. I don't love the ad model. But this is. This is an engine that you can create that is very good at monetizing quickly. Okay. It is also more defensible, and it's more consistent. Book sales are one off. I constantly need new customers. Paid newsletters are, yeah, you'll have some churn. But subscribers stick around for two months, three months, five months, 12 months. Right. So here's what business you're really in. You're in the business of writing exclusive or timely content for one industry for a very long period of time. And a great example of this is Ben Thompson. Anyone know who Ben Thompson is? He writes a paid newsletter called Stratecherry. He really helped pioneer this whole category of paid newsletters, like, a decade ago. So I found some rough math. Just so everyone here understands. He charges about 12 bucks a month. It's just him. He writes the newsletter. He started it in 2014. It's estimated he has around 40,000 subscribers. Subscribers. Paid subscribers. Which means he's making about 5 million a year from his paid newsletter. There are very few writers in any career path that make five mil a year. Okay. So this is one of the. This is a very unique career path, and it's one I'm particularly interested in. And. And I keep my focus on this one a lot these days because it is one of the fastest to monetize and also most scalable to monetize. Now, that doesn't mean it's easy. Right. He's. He's been at this for a decade. Right. It is a commitment to a niche, to a topic, to consistency, to. Right. But you sort of have to do that no matter which career path you pick. But this is a very scalable career path, and it's very exciting. And so this is something I would encourage, especially if you want to write about nonfiction. I actually think that the newsletter, the paid newsletter career path is better than the book career path for nonfiction. Unless your goal is you want to get into speaking and you want to get into consulting, and you want to use a book as a leverage point to get there. I think if you're trying to monetize nonfiction content, it is typically better to go with the paid newsletter model. It's more scalable, faster to monetize. Okay, makes sense. Who here is this the first time you've ever even heard of a paid newsletter? You're like, wow, I had no idea that was even an option. This is an amazing option. Amazing option. All right, here's the next one. Content writer. Now, the reason that I include this is because this has historically been a very popular and very mainstream career path for a lot of writers. Content writers could be anyone from you were hired internally at a company to write content. Right? It could be someone who builds an editorial team. It could be someone in charge of SEO. Right. Content is a very wide and all encompassing term, but typically what it means is it's SEO ish related and it's around creating content on a company's blog. And this has been a very popular career path for the past two decades. Okay? When you are a content writer, you essentially have zero status. Nobody cares about you. The only thing they care about is are you churning out content for the company's blog? Right. And you get paid with money for that. Right. So you can't really choose the content writer career path and be like, and why is no one looking at me like I'm the next Earnest Hemingway? It doesn't work that way. All right? The business model is that you provide a service. You could be providing that service as an individual contractor, as a freelancer, or you could get hired by a company. Right? There's nothing wrong with zero status career paths. It's fine. It's just you have to be okay with the trade. Right? People are paying you to not have status. That's what you're getting paid for. Right? The problem and this, and I want to include this because I think we're at an interesting inflection point when it comes to career paths, is with the rise of AI, this is going to be the first career path to probably go away. I think that the path from here is the, the only way that you, as a content writer survives is that you have to build leverage. And what that means is either you create your own ip, your own frameworks, and you sell them. I'll show you an example of that. Or you scale yourself by using AI or labor by building teams. So instead of being a content writer, you have to ascend to being some sort of department head or you build teams either inside a company or as a service. Okay? So, Nicole, this is the one that is most vulnerable to AI replacement, because most content, most blog content is the easiest for AI to learn how to write. And so the thing that I want to hammer home, though, is that's okay, you can still survive and you can still make money as a content writer, but you have to successfully ascend. You have to learn how to use the technology, otherwise the technology is going to replace you. So here's a great example. Anyone here know Steph Smith? Really good example of how to have a successful content writer career path. So started out, I mean, did a bunch of content marketing earlier in her career, then led trends at a company called the Hustle. So Trends was basically a paid newsletter where they would talk about different business trends that entrepreneurs could capitalize on. Then she found leverage. The leverage, the screenshot on the right is she thought, well, I'm getting paid as a content writer. But you know what's higher leverage is me sharing all of my frameworks for how I do content writing and selling those. So she put together a little ebook course called Doing Content Right, sold it for $129, and just on some quick math, some mental math here, based on orders sold, she's made about half a million bucks, give or take, selling that. That is called leverage. Okay. Then a different form of leverage is that now she hosts the podcast for one of the most well known venture capital firms in the world, which is Andreessen Horowitz. A16Z. Okay. And so she's built teams, she's taken over higher level content projects. So the big, the big idea here is that if you are a content writer or you're a technical writer, you want to find ways to build leverage for yourself. And building leverage either means selling your own frameworks in the form of, could be a digital product, it could be some sort of service that you offer, doesn't matter, and, or building teams and using technology. Okay, so the, this is true for any career path is you're always looking for leverage, but because this one is so vulnerable to AI, the, the idea that I really want to hammer home here is that you're going to see content, you're going to see a lot happen in this career path where the bottom 50% of content writers are going to go, I'm out of a job. This is so hard. And the top 50% of content writers are going to ascend. They're going to become 10 times more powerful and efficient with AI. They're going to build teams, they're going to sell their own frameworks as digital products. You want to be on the top 50%, not the bottom 50%. Okay, makes sense. All right, now let's move on to one of my personal favorites, Ghostwriter. All right, we have a lot of ghostwriters here. Drop in, drop in the chat. If you're currently making money as a ghostwriter, maybe you're inside pga, one of our programs. Awesome. So ghostwriting, I think, is one of the least understood, highest potential career paths. Okay, so some things to understand about ghostwriting, you get paid in money first and status second. Now, on the surface, ghostwriters don't have very much status because you typically don't talk about your clients and most people don't know who you are. But the nuance, the difference with ghostwriting relative to something like content writing or even sales copywriting, is that ghostwriting means you typically work with the founder, the business owner, the executive, the investor, which is actually very high status. So it's. It. It can be very high status, but it's high status behind closed doors. So, for example, I have. I don't know if I, in aggregate, added up all of the CEOs and founders who I've worked with as a ghostwriter and whose cell phone numbers I have, I don't know, in charge of $100 billion. I don't know, maybe a trillion dollars. Right? Very, very high profile, powerful people. That's awesome. Very high status, very cool. But it's behind closed doors, right? The business model is you're selling a service, so you are getting paid a premium to provide a service to someone else. This makes it very low risk and very high reward. Anyone could start ghostwriting tomorrow, right? You could go find a ghostwriting client tomorrow, they'll pay you three grand a month. Five grand a month. That's awesome. You need two clients, all of a sudden you're at ten grand a month. There aren't very many writer career paths that can get you there that quickly. Can you get there as a literary writer? No, not. Not in any sort of short time horizon. Can you get to ten grand a month as a genre fiction writer? Maybe. Probably going to take you a year or two at least to start getting your library of books going. Can you get there as a content writer? Maybe. But the positioning that you have as a ghostwriter is way more powerful. It's higher status behind closed doors, right? So for ghostwriting, charging three to ten grand a month or three to ten grand per client. Very standard. Very standard. If you've never done this before, you look at those numbers and you're like, that's insane. I can't imagine anyone ever paying me five grand to do anything. I'm telling you, we have over a thousand writers in our premium ghostwriting academy, and we coach them on how to charge five grand for projects every single day. We see it happen over and over and over and over and over again. So if you think that that's impossible, it's. It's just because you've never done it. And that's a faulty belief. It is 100% possible. It is also in. And now that I've experimented with so many different career paths, ghostwriting is the single fastest path to ten grand a month. It really doesn't matter. It is the single fastest path to ten grand a month. Now seeing a lot of comments or questions on, well, what about AI? Here's the thing about ghostwriting. Yes, there are some elements that AI will automate, but the, the majority of your value as a ghostwriter is not just in the writing. It's in the asking the questions of the client. It's in the setting up the different email systems that you're, if you're going to go straight their newsletter, well, they don't just need the words, they need help setting up the infrastructure. It's ghostwriting different emails like upsell sequences or downsell sequences or book a call sequences. That means being proficient in the technology. It means ghostwriting social content which means staying on top of trends, staying on top of how algorithms change. All of these are not things that you can just press one key and go ChatGPT does it all for me. We actually encourage ghostwriters to use AI. It'll make you more efficient. But so much of your value is in all of the skills that surround, that surround the ghost writing. It's not just the words itself. And yeah, this idea of like, okay, so if I'm pitching someone what's the ROI of ghostwriting services? I built my ghostwriting agency to millions of dollars in revenue at any given time. We had 80 plus clients. I've ghostwritten for some of the biggest, most successful founders and CEOs in the world. 100% of my clients. I did not promise some sort of financial roi. The only thing I said is do you understand that if you, if you build yourself as a thought leader in your industry that you are going to attract more opportunities. Do you understand that? They go, yes, I go. So we're in agreement that as you write more things and you share your insights at scale on the Internet, more good things will happen. They say yes. I go, great, that is what I help you do. There is, there is no. I promise that you'll get a thousand clicks and you'll convert at a 3.47 cpm and that you will have a 5x return. No. And anyone who tells you that you need to do that just hasn't sold ghost trading services. So I'm telling you this is an incredibly lucrative, very fast, fast writer career path. It is also the best way to get paid to practice. If you ever Want to get into any other sort of writing? Why would you not want to get paid a premium? Why would you not want to get paid a premium to practice, to build your skills? Why not? So this is the business that you're really in, is that you're getting paid cash up front to provide a service, help someone else scale themselves on the Internet. And I'm telling you, I've done it from every angle for the past eight years. I built an agency around it. I worked with hundreds of founders. I wrote a book about it. I now have an entire training program where I train other writers how to do it. I can't tell you how many writers I've seen go from. I've never written something on the Internet ever before. Oh, now I'm doing 10 grand a month. Now I'm doing 20 grand a month. We've had people go through PGA that now have ghostwriting agencies of their own doing 50, 60 grand a month. So anyone who says, you can't do this, like, unequivocally, that is just wrong. You absolutely can. And it is the single fastest career path to make five or ten grand a month. To be perfectly honest, it's the fastest career path to get to 20 or 30 grand a month. Now, are you going to be able to be worth $800 million as a ghostwriter? Probably not. Probably not. It's not quite as lottery of an outcome as genre fiction writing. But why don't we. Why don't we focus on making our first ten grand first, Right? We don't need to solve problems we don't have yet. Okay, so does this make sense? Everyone understand. There is a reason why I advocate for people to start with ghostwriting. Because the primary problem in the beginning is you need more hours. You need. You need to practice, and you probably need to power level your income. And no career path accomplishes those two things faster than ghostwriting. You get paid to practice, and you get paid a premium. You need, like, one client, and you. You double. You double everything. And Amar, I did start off with ghost trading. I wasn't making money writing on Quora. I wrote on Quora because I enjoyed it. And then I did ghostwriting because I wasn't making money on Quora the way I made my first 5 grand a month, 10 grand a month, 20 grand a month, 30 grand a month was ghostwriting. I've done it. I've helped other people do it. I've watched hundreds of other ghostwriters adopt it. I don't know how many other ways to say it this is the single fastest path. So for everyone here, if you're like, I don't understand how to make money from writing, you should start here. Now, a similar, although slightly different nuances for your path is sales copywriting. So sales copywriting, a question I always get asked is what's the difference between ghostwriting and sales copywriting? Okay, the difference is that sales copywriting is sales and ghostwriting is education. Okay, I'm gonna say that again. Sales copywriting is sales ghostwriting is education. All right, so what that means is when you're ghostwriting something for someone, typically what you're helping them do is you're helping them share their insights. Right? So you're the founder of a software company. How do you think about hiring? How do you think about firing? How do you think about product creation? How do you think about scaling businesses? These are all education. It's people sharing what they know. Sales copywriting is typically reserved for when you have someone on your email list or you have someone in a funnel or you're running ads, or it's something that is more one to one, sales driven. You are writing things with the specific goal of not just educating them, but selling them. Okay, so in a very tangible example, ghostwriting would be you writing content on a founder's LinkedIn to help them drive traffic to their weekly newsletter. For example, sales copywriting would be once a month. You take all the people on that newsletter list and you pitch them on a product. Those are two completely different types of writing. Okay. Now there are a lot of similarities. So in our, in pga, in our premium ghostwriting academy, I teach a lot of copywriting principles because great copywriting also can be applied to ghostwriting, and great ghostwriting can be applied to copywriting. The nuance though is that you are typically writing different things. A founder is typically not hiring a sales copywriter to help them create LinkedIn content. They're not hiring a sales copywriter to help them write a weekly newsletter. Right. They're not hiring a sales copywriter to help them create some like, really valuable educational opt in. They're hiring a sales copywriter to write ads or to write email sequences deeper inside of a funnel to maybe rewrite a landing page. And so if that's what you want to do, this is a different career path that's available now. Again, you can dip and dabble, you can do both. Right? But it's worth understanding that you're creating different types of assets. What business are you really in? You are in sales, you're writing, but you are in sales. And so sales copywriting is no different than you getting on the phone and selling something. It's just you're doing it with words instead of on a phone call. Okay. So, yes, like abandoned cart sequences, like book a call sequences, like upsell sequences. These are all things that sales copywriters typically create. Now what is the higher end of this career path look like? Well, has anyone ever read this book, the sixteen word sales letter? If not, I highly, I highly recommend it. It's, it's a short read, it's a fun read. So the guy who wrote this, his name is Aldo and he worked for one of the largest direct response marketing paid newsletter companies called Agora Financial. Now, little history lesson for everyone here. Agora Financial is a billion dollar company and they started something like 20 plus years ago. And what they do is they pioneered this model where they would go find like financial experts, experts. This could be someone who has a degree in finance. It could be someone with a TV show, it could be someone with a podcast. Anyone with some sort of perceived credibility. And what they would do is they would hire a ghostwriter and they would hire a sales copywriter and they would turn that person's credibility into a paid newsletter. So if you go to Agora Financial's website, you will find hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different paid newsletters that are all based in finance. It could be stock tips, it could be money tips, it could be retirement tips, it could be credit tips, whatever. They're all based in finance. Every paid newsletter has a different face, someone with credibility. And then a copywriter like Aaldo will write all the sales materials selling people on that paid newsletter. And then a ghostwriter will work with that person and take over and write the content for that paid newsletter. And this is how they've scaled to a billion dollars a year in revenue. So I took a little screenshot here. This is on the right. This is like what a sales page might look like for one of these paid newsletters. And someone like Ivaldo would write this. And when you become a top tier sales copywriter, and it usually happens when you're working within a company like Enagora Financial or a company that is very direct response, marketing driven, if you get good enough and you prove yourself enough, you can negotiate a revenue share. And so what that means is a Voldo might go into one of these funnels and go, I can, I think I could lift the revenue of this funnel by 10 or 20% by writing different words. I think I could write more Compelling sales copy. And depending on how much he's able to lift the revenue, he gets a percentage of that. And so if you want to know how all the highest paid sales copywriters in the world make their money, it's like this. They typically either work within a business or they get hired as like a hired gun, you know, third party. And they rewrite a funnel. And if that funnel makes a certain amount of money above the threshold that they set, they share in the upside. And this is typically how sales copywriters end up making half a million to a million bucks a year. Okay, now this is very hard to do. It takes a long time to get this proficient. It's very hard to find someone that would be willing to do a rev share deal with you. Right. These are harder clients to land. But I just wanted to let, I just wanted to give some free education here just so everyone understands this is what this career path looks like. There's, there's a gazillion copywriters who make 5, 10, 20 grand a month. They just provide services. There's a very small number of copywriters who are so good that they negotiate rev share deals. Does that make sense? Does that make sense? I'm not saying it's easy. I'm just letting you know, if you go down this career path, 10 years later, that would, that would be the goal. You would want to get to that level if this was the career path that you fell in love with. Okay. All right, let's go to career path number eight. Writerpreneur. Now, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. You could make the argument that there's some version of entrepreneurship with all of these different career paths. And I understand that. However, the reason I'm breaking this out is because there are some nuances to this very specific career path. This career path, you get paid in money first and status second. Writerpreneurs, we could also call creators. So if anyone here has heard the term, like, I want to be a creator, right? Especially with written content, that's really what a writerpreneur is. And the business model is very simple. You create content, you build an email list, you sell digital products. That is the way that you monetize this writing. I have also made millions of dollars with this career path. So I know exactly how it goes. You pick a topic, you create lots of free content on social platforms, you drive people from social platforms to a relevant email list, and then you sell people on that email list low ticket digital products. $350 less asynchronous text and video courses. This is very low risk. Anyone can start writing on the Internet today. Very high reward. There are creators making a million a year, 2 million a year, 3 million a year, 5 million a year, 10 million a year. Selling digital products. Now most writerpreneurs. Can you write a book? Sure, but books are not the primary business model. Can you get hired to speak? Sure, but speaking is not the business model. Can you get hired to consult? Sure, but consulting is not the primary business model. The primary business model is selling digital products. And that's the important thing to understand. Now a big question that people usually ask is, okay, well, selling digital products is more scalable. So which one should I pursue? Should I pursue ghostwriting first or should I pursue being a writerpreneur first and selling digital products? The problem with digital products is that they require volume, right? You have to build an audience. Building an audience takes time. So yes, this career path is more scalable, but it's slower. So that's a really important thing for everyone here to understand is just because something is scalable doesn't mean that it's faster. It's more scalable, but it's slower. And yeah, John, if you want to run ads and light a bunch of money on fire, by all means. But all of the money here gets made from people who have organic audiences. Okay? The other nuance about this career path is that it is the least writer specific career path. So if you're in the business of selling digital products, you don't really think about that as the same way as a writer writing a literary novel, right? Or writing genre fiction books or even writing a paid newsletter. It's it. There are more tangential skills related to this career path, right? You need to understand funnels, you need to understand audience building, you need to understand some direct response marketing, you need to understand creating products, you need to understand text and video courses, you need to understand automations. You need. There's a lot that's packed in here. So this career path is the least writerly and the. And the most digitally savvy. And that's what you need to understand here. An amazing example. I mean we've done this. But. But another amazing example is Justin Welch. Anyone, Anyone here? Follow Justin or aware of Justin? Yeah. Okay, so this is. Yes, this is a clientless career path. You are not providing services to clients. So ghostwriting, you need one client and they'll pay you three grand a month. One digital products, right? You're selling a $300 product well, you got to sell 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 of those a month. You need volume. There are two completely different things. Services. Ghostwriting will always make you more money faster. Digital products will probably make you more money over the long term. They're more scalable, but they are not as fast. It is very, very hard for someone to just create a new account on social, have no audience, go and create a digital product and then all of a sudden be making three, five, ten grand a month. That's very hard. I'm not saying that you can't do it. I'm just saying if you evaluate these different career paths, it is way easier to get one client to pay you three grand. It's way easier. Okay, so what business is Justin in? The business that Justin is in is I create content about solopreneurship on social. I drive those people to my weekly newsletter where I talk about building yourself as a solopreneur. I then sell those people digital products. And that is how he monetizes his writing. Now he could write a book. I know Justin, so I've been telling him to write a book for three years. I think his book would crush. Right. But that's not the core business model. He does some consulting, but consulting is not the core business model. He makes the vast majority of his income doing this. And so if this is the career path that you want, you have to understand what game you're in. Okay. All this making sense. I'm starting to see people in the chat go, this is making me realize that I'm trying to do too much at once. Yes, you are. Each one of these career paths has. Requires different skills and they require time and they require a commitment to that career path. You can't just be all willy nilly and say, I want to be five different types of writers. No, you have to do them in sequence. We're going to talk about that in a second. So the very last one, this is the most advanced career path. This is the one that I would strongly encourage everyone here to completely ignore until you are way further along and you have made plenty of money with one other career path. But just to future pace so that everyone here understands category copywriting is essentially getting paid a premium to do very high level, very strategic messaging. So you're getting paid in money. You're typically getting paid in status behind closed doors, but not like no public status. Right. You're never going to be seen as Stephen King. Right. This is very niche, very behind closed door status. And the business model is consulting. So you are getting paid for messaging and consulting. This is very high risk, but it's also very high reward. The reason that it's high risk is because typically you do not unlock this career path in the first decade of being a successful writer. And second is when you unlock this career path, yeah, sometimes you might get paid in cash, sometimes you might get paid in some cash, but typically you're getting paid in stock options or equity or shares in a company. So when I have done this, I've had a couple cash deals, but when I have done this, what happens is you work with a startup, you work with a venture capital firm, you work with a publicly traded company, something and you're like, I can help you fix your very high level, very strategic marketing and messaging, AKA I can help you clarify your category in the world, which is your positioning. And in return, I would like some of the upside because if I successfully reposition a $10 billion company, I don't want five grand. I want to share in a little bit of the upside. And so that might look like equity, it might look like stock options. Right? These are very high risk, high reward things. Now a mistake. And I coach writers through this all the time in PGA is writers want to jump to rev share deals or equity deals or whatever at the very beginning of their journey and they don't even have five grand in their savings account. So what are you doing? You're trying to skip to the, to the last boss. That's not how this works. This is high risk, high reward. Okay, so what business you're really in is startup or venture capital consulting. And again, I like don't even want to spend that much time on this because this is a much more advanced career path and it's not something that you unlock at all. But just for context, when I was building category pirates, this was a paid newsletter and on the back we had a consulting arm. We scaled that to a couple million dollars in revenue. We did rev share deals with publicly traded companies. We did it with like really big venture backed startups. So I've gotten to do these types of deals. I will tell you, like can be very lucrative. But also pretty much all of the equity deals that I've ever done have gone to zero. So high risk, potentially high reward. But for the first decade of building yourself as a writer, you would way rather just take the cash. Just take the cash. Don't, don't try and jump to some rev share equity deal. That's way beyond you. Okay, we got 15 minutes. So here's here's how I want to wrap things up. We've covered all nine career paths. Now let's go back and ask the same question again. Which one do you want to be? Which career path do you want to pursue? Because you've probably learned something here today. And you've probably learned that each career path promises something different. And by the way, if you don't want to start with ghostwriting, don't. You don't have to. I'm not forcing anyone here to do anything. My job here is to tell you all the options. Okay, but here's the nuance. You're not allowed to say, I don't want to start with this thing, which you told me makes me more money faster. I want to start with this thing over here. And then two seconds later, ask me why you're not making money faster. That's what you're not allowed to do. Because the whole purpose of this presentation is to make it very, very clear that when you pick a certain career path, you have to level set your expectations. You can't pick one career path and then go, but, Cole, why aren't I unlocking the outcome of the other one? Because you didn't pick the other one. Does that make sense? Each career path promises something different. Okay, so I'm. Look again, I'm just going to tell you what I would do differently, all right? Because now that I've. I've generated millions of dollars across almost all of these different writer career paths, here is what I would do differently. If I was 22 years old, graduating from college, trying to figure out how to make money as a writer all over again. Okay, this is the order of operations that I would do if I wanted to be a successful fiction writer. The first thing that I would do is I would power level my income and get paid to practice as a ghostwriter. Why would I do that? Well, it would have saved me probably a bunch of years working at an ad agency, getting paid minimum wage, which is what I did out of college. I could have power leveled my income faster. I could have gotten paid to practice, and I would have unlocked a bunch of time for me to reinvest in my fiction writing. When I power leveled my income and unlocked time, I would then reinvest it in genre fiction. Genre fiction is our lottery tickets. They have the highest potential. And I would aim to publish. I would self publish a genre fiction book once every three months. And I would use my ghostwriting revenue to fund the COVID design of my genre fiction. That's what I would do. And then I would do that literally until I had made tens of millions of dollars. And then maybe in the last third of my life, I would consider writing literature. That is what I would do now for everyone here. If I could go back, this is what I would do differently. But now, because of the path that I've taken, I'm basically doing this now. I'm just now getting around to genre fiction. Okay, genre fiction. Would you do it with a pen name? Not necessarily. I think there's a lot of benefit in just using one name. Okay, so that's what I would do with fiction. Okay. In nonfiction, this is what I would do. I would do the same thing. I would power level my earnings, and then I would unlock a bunch of time. Then I would start building an audience for myself. I would play the writerpreneur game. I would start building my own audience. This is only going to make it easier for me to keep getting ghostwriting clients. But then I would start launching low ticket digital products. This would unlock even more revenue for myself. Pure margin, right? 100% margin. Then, as I have my ghostwriting business and my digital products making me money, I would start a paid newsletter. Now, why would I start a paid newsletter? Well, because it becomes the flywheel for everything else. It becomes the extension of my social audience and my digital products. It becomes subscription revenue. And most importantly, as I write paid newsletters, every year, when I write all my paid newsletter issues, I would compile them into a book. So I would double monetize my paid newsletter by then turning it into nonfiction books, which is what I've done over and over and over and over and over again. And then at the very end, as I've built all these different revenue streams for myself as a nonfiction writer, I would then, 10 years later, once I have my large audience, once I've made a bunch of money building all of my other things, I would then explore category copywriting, and I would do some consulting. This is the order in which I would pursue these two different paths. Fiction or non fiction. Does that make sense for everyone? It's actually very deliberate. It's very thoughtful. And instead, what most people do is they're like, I'm a beginner. I'm going to start a newsletter. I'm also going to start a YouTube channel. I think I should write a book. Should I also position myself for speaking? What if I want to write a novel? They have no clue what business they're in, and they have no clue which career path they've actually chosen for themselves. And yes. Million dollar question. Would I still encourage beginners to start with ghostwriting? Yes. Look, I know I'm biased, but I'm telling you, I have watched people who have never written a single thing ever before. I've watched people who don't even have English as their first language and then they get into ghostwriting and then two months later they're making ten grand a month. I don't promise that, but I'm telling you that I have seen that happen over and over and over again. And anyone here, it doesn't matter if we're talking about ghostwriting or not. Anyone here, if you are sitting there thinking, I don't think I can because it's a faulty belief that is like the mission that I'm on is to educate as many people as possible, that you absolutely can make a living as a writer if you understand what business you're in and if you understand how to write things that accomplish the goal of the career path that you've chosen for yourself. All right, I'm going to do a quick little Q and A. I know we, we covered a lot here, but just to level set drop in the chat, 0 out of 10, how helpful has this been? Do you learn something new? Awesome. I'm seeing a lot of a hundreds. I like that. I like that. Great. All right, so let's do a couple questions. Drop the questions in the chat. It's the easiest, it's the easiest way. If you have a question, drop in the chat. I'll stick around and cover. Cover a bunch. Do you think thought leadership articles are still in demand? Yes, yes, they absolutely are. They just changed. When I was writing thought leadership articles, it was on Quora and Medium and now I would do long form articles on X because that's where it has the most distribution and probably republish on LinkedIn. That's what I would do. Should you start posting on LinkedIn or other platforms to build credibility for ghostwriting? You can if you want, but you don't need to. The way that we coach writers to get started with ghostwriting is that you reach out to people directly and you do what's called free consulting. And it's very value forward. It's not salesy, it's very, I want to help you. And that's the, that's the methodology that I built my whole ghostwriting agency around. That's what we train people to do. It looks like people have a bunch of ghostwriting questions. So actually Daniel or rtf, either of you are here. Maybe drop, drop the PGA app in the chat for people, if you're interested. This is all of these questions, by the way. Like, I've answered all of these questions a thousand times. I'll answer them again. I don't mind. But I cover all of these questions on my YouTube channel. And all of the advanced versions of these questions are, are what we coach people through in pga. Like, it's just. So if anyone here wants help, I'll. I'll tell you the answer. Go ahead. But you're probably going to run into some friction. You're probably going to run into other questions. You're going to run into things that are specific to you and your industry and your client. So if you want help, that's why I built pga. Are there particular platforms that are best for building a ghostwriting brand? Not necessarily. I mean, the two biggest text platforms right now are X and LinkedIn. So no matter what you're doing, I would encourage you to write on those two platforms. How do you choose a niche? This is a huge focus for us in PGA. 90% of people who join PGA start by going, I have no idea what my niche should be. That's what we help you figure out. It's not as hard as you think. It's way simpler than people think. No, you do not need to have everything figured out before you get started. These are all just faulty beliefs and excuses that people come up with to postpone action. What do I think about Substack? I think if you are building a paid newsletter, you should do it on Substack. Substack is the paid newsletter platform. This is where we have our paid newsletter called Write with AI. What's the impact on ghostwriting if more and more people get into this niche? So the funny thing about this question is that people have a very hard time wrapping their heads around how much opportunity there is in the world. You need, like three clients. You do not need 3 million clients. So everyone thinks, oh, this niche is so saturated. Really? Do you know how many businesses there are in the world? Like, millions, Millions and millions and millions and millions and millions. You need like 1% of 1% of 1% of 1 percent of 1% of 1% of one percent of that. Right? So human beings have a very hard time wrapping their heads around how much opportunity there is in the world. See what else. What deliverables are offered with ghostwriting depends on what service you you choose. The big three that we coach people on are social ghostwriting. So creating social content, newsletter ghostwriting, ghostwriting weekly newsletter, and educational email Courses. So creating a really valuable opt in. A really valuable opt in looks something like this. We use these for all of our businesses and this is what we train ghostwriters to create for other businesses. And we, we train them to create them, to write them, to do, offer construction, to set up all the emails, all the technical skills, all the writing. We have templates, we have prompts, we have chatgpt prompts. We have literally everything to assemble these. And then we show you how to go sell this to businesses for $5,000. Extremely doable. I've watched hundreds of writers do it. If you don't think you can give your give yourself permission because you can, how do you reach out directly? That's literally like 80% of PGA is walking through all the steps and all the skills and everything that you need in order to take control of the opportunities and go out and pitch people directly. Anyone who creates an upwork profile and your strategy is, I'm going to sit around and wait for someone to come to me. Congratulations. Your business is never going to grow. You have to go out and pitch people directly. And we show you how to do that in a way that's not salesy. I'm not talking about that. It's just free value, free consulting. Let's see, um, can you plug in genre fiction in the middle of the non fiction career path? I mean, you can do whatever you want, right? My advice though, my advice would be to stick with one career path until you reach some sort of meaningful financial miles, milestone, whatever that means for you. And I think one of the mistakes that writers make is they bounce between paths too quickly. So they get to like five grand a month or ten grand a month and then they're like, time to do something different. Not necessarily. I think you'd be better off sticking with that and continuing to grow that until. Until you come to a point where you feel good about the decision. But it's a mistake to jump between paths too often and too early. What about pitching yourselves to large publications? So I used to write for large publications. I had a column with Inc. Magazine for two years. I wrote pieces in Forbes, cnbc, Business Insider. Extremely overrated. They don't really pay you. If they do pay you, it's a very nominal amount. And more and more nobody reads those publications because they're just littered in ads. Everyone just reads content on social platforms. So that's where you should be writing or that's where you should be ghostwriting for people. Yeah, you could do translations, translating could be a service. But Again, it's just a, it's just a different service, you know. And should you translate fiction or non fiction? I mean, that's a completely subjective decision. What's the cost of PGA? So PGA is a 16 week coaching program, full curriculum. You get a one on one coach. We have live sessions where we cover all these different skills. Every week I hold a hot seat where we workshop things directly. Everyone else gets to watch. So any questions that you want to ask me directly, you can. Otherwise you have access to a one on one coach who answers all of your questions for you as well. I am in every single private channel of everyone that's in pga. So if anyone has any more advanced questions or nuanced questions, I'm always there and I will always weigh in if you need it. And the cost for PGA is 6800. So it's 16 weeks, one on one coaching, 6800. And then afterwards, if you get through the coaching program and you want to keep working together or you want additional coaching or you want to scale, we also have a continued coaching program on the back of it. But yeah, PGA has been a lot of fun. It's where I spend 85, 90% of my time. I love mentoring writers. All the people that are in there, I've gotten to know. And yeah, I just, I, I really, really enjoy that work a lot. Let's see, I'll do a couple more here. Yeah. Safina, how long does it typically take to land your first ghostwriting client? The reality is, I mean, again, we don't, we don't make any promises because we're not the ones doing it. We don't have control over the outcome. We, all we can do is just hold you accountable, tell you the right things to do, keep helping you overcome any faulty beliefs or give you frameworks on how to execute it. But I will tell you, I have seen some people, it takes them a year and some people, it takes them one day. I've literally watched people join pga, make two tweaks, and then, and then land a client. So we do not promise that and we, we see it all across the board. So I just, I want to be like honest about that. But I mean, that's the thing is like it can happen very quickly and there's no reason why it can't. I will also just tell everyone here shocking news. The people who put more effort in, the people who make use of more of our resources, the people who ask more questions are typically the people who see more results. Like it's Just true for anything in life. Right? Like the people who show up and like we did a hot seat call this morning. The people who show up to the Thursday hot seat call every week and they ask me questions and they implement what I tell them and they learn, they grow very quickly. The people who don't, don't. So, you know, that's the element that we don't have control over. See? I'll do a couple more. Oh, this is a good one. Yeah. Why did I choose writing as a career path over other career paths? Because it was the only thing I was ever good at and the only thing I enjoyed. I was like, I either figure out how to make this work or, or I don't. Took a long time, but I figured it out. And now my job is to go and take all the things I've learned and pass it along to as many people as I can. Branding strategy for a ghostwriter. Call yourself a ghostwriter. It's literally, literally that simple. Start saying, I am a ghostwriter. Start saying, I specialize in ghostwriting for this specific type of person. Oh, that's, that's really all it is. Let's see how to choose between the three top ghostwriting services. So newsletters, social and EECs. So honestly, all three of them can work. The thing that we train people on is to build the EECs first. Because if you understand how to build an educational email course, that really is what gives you all the skills to do all the other stuff. So I think it's the best vehicle to learn. I also think that it's a really amazing thing to pitch people because social and newsletters are recurring services, whereas ECs are project based. So it's, I pitch an educational email course, you pay me five grand, I build it and then it's done. Right. And I find that that tends to be a very easy thing for people to say yes to. And it gets your foot in the door. And then once your foot's in the door and you build an ec, then you can upsell them on. Well, now you need to drive traffic social ghostwriting or you need to keep the list warm. Right. Keep, Keep things top of mind with readers newsletter. So both of those are, are amazing upsells. You can, you can start with all three, but that's, that's typically the, the path that we like coaching writers on. Greg sixteen weeks. So it's, it's, I mean, you can go through it at your own pace. The live sessions are there for you to make use of every single week. If you need them. You don't have to show up, but they're there for you. If you need help, your coach you can interact with. Every day, every week we have different calls set up as like milestones and check in points. But it's a 16 week curriculum that you follow. And typically we would say the average person probably allocates somewhere in the ballpark of like on the low end, three to five hours a week to it. And on the higher end, maybe someone who's like really taking it seriously, maybe like 10 hours a week. But we have a lot of people where ghostwriting is a side hustle. You know, they have a full time job, they want to start ghostwriting on the side, they want to do it after work. They've got kids, you know, they got a lot going on. So. So it's like an evening or weekend thing. That's totally fine too. You could. I think ghost trading is an amazing side hustle and if you really love it and you're seeing success with it, you could make it a full time career path if you wanted to. Awesome. How long are the hot seat calls? An hour. They're an hour every Thursday. Okay, awesome. Wow. This was great. This was great. All right, thanks everyone for showing up. We're gonna do, for everyone who stayed to the very, very end, we are going to do a fun little giveaway here. I'm gonna say a word and the, the fifth person to type it in the chat. We will do. Let's see, Daniel. I think we do free. We do ship 30. We'll do CNC and we'll do low ticket Launchpad. We'll just give the, the whole stack away for free. Okay, so the fifth person to type. Gravity. Oh, boy. That was a race. Okay, let's see, let's see what we got. Let's see. I gotta scroll. Okay, we got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. All right. Jean. Jean Gray. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Jean Gray. All right, Amazing. Okay, Gene, can you do us a favor and send us an email to hello@ship3430.com Send us an email to that and we will get you all hooked up. That was awesome. Yeah, chat almost broke. That was a lot of fun. That was a lot of fun. Okay. Love it. Well, thanks everyone. Thanks everyone for showing up. I know this was, this was a long, long masterclass, but I hope that it was valuable. I hope that you learned something. I hope that you had a blast. And really my ultimate hope is I hope that this changes the way that you think about what it means to build a career as a writer. Right. I hope that it makes you more aware of the different options that are available to you. And when you pick a career path, you should stick with it for a bit and not bounce around so much. So. All right, everyone, thanks very much. Happy Thursday. And for anyone who's interested in ghostwriting, I hope to see you inside pga. Otherwise, if you want to pick a different career path, all the best. I hope that this helps you. And we'll see you around. All right, thanks, everyone. Happy Thursday.