Nicholas Cole (0:00)

This book has made me over $150,000 on Amazon alone. And it only cost me $5,000 to design the COVID to format the interior, and then to put it up for sale. That is a 30x return on my money. And I did all of this without paid ads. I haven't spent a single dollar marketing this book or going viral on booktok. I've never even seen my book mentioned anywhere on TikTok actually. And no big publisher behind me, I self published this book all on my own. So how did I do it? Well, in this video, I'm gonna walk you through the entire publishing process, from outlining and testing new ideas, to how to self publish on Amazon, to the really simple evergreen marketing strategy that I execute every single day that consistently generates anywhere from 3,000 to $10,000 in royalties each month from just this book. And I'm gonna point out some of the mistakes that I made along the way so that you can make six figures from your next self published book a lot faster than I did. Part one. Testing ideas and outlining your book. So there are two ways of writing a book, and I've done both. The first way is where you open a blank document, you light a candle, you put on your chapeau, and you begin with the first word and then you just start writing from there. And this is a recipe for disaster. The metaphor I like to use here is that this is like trying to find your way out of a 10,000 acre forest with a flashlight that only shines three feet in front of you. And. And yet this is how most people write their books. And this is how I wrote my first book, which was a memoir called Confessions of a Teenage Gamer. And that book took me four years to write and only ended up making me a few thousand dollars in lifetime royalties. The second way to write a book is where you start writing online instead. In fact, I would encourage you, if you've never written a book before, to forget that you're even trying to write a book. Instead, you should ask yourself why? What's the topic you want to write about? What's the niche you want to dominate, and who is the target reader that you want to help? Then go write about that topic in that niche for that specific person online for a year. That is what I did for my second book, the Art and Business of Online Writing. I knew I eventually wanted to write a book about how to write in the digital age, but instead of starting with the book, I started writing about that topic online. And you want to guess what happened I attracted my target reader. I became known for that niche and I got to test in public every single idea that I had on this topic with readers telling me in the form of engagement or comments or questions which ideas were most helpful to them. So by the time I actually sat down to write the book, I didn't have to do very much writing. Okay? All I had to do was go back through my library of content and pull out all the highest performing ideas and then build my book around them. And it should come as no surprise that by taking this strategy, it didn't take me four years to write this book. I wrote this book in four months and it has made me hundreds of thousands of dollars. Part 2 Editing Now a question I get all the time from self published authors and even authors that land traditional book deals is where can I find an editor? And my answer is, well, it depends because there are three different types of editors. First, there are positioning editors. So these are people who help you through what I like to think of as the highest level decision of your which is where you plan on sitting on the world's bookshelf, AKA how to most effectively position your book for success, whatever that means to you. Second are structural editors. So these are people who help you think through the content of your book, the order in which you should present your ideas, how to best deliver on the positioning, how to deliver on the promise that your book is making in the title. They're really helping you think through the structure of the content. And third are grammar editors. So these are people who exclusively help you do a final read through and all they're doing is checking for spelling and grammar. They have no input on positioning, they have no input on structure order of ideas. They're really just another set of eyes. My personal take here is that hiring an editor is completely optional. Conventional wisdom says you absolutely need an editor, and the truth is you don't. If you want the writing process to feel less lonely and have someone to bounce ideas off of, sure, you know, maybe hiring a positioning or structural editor would be helpful for you, but personally I enjoy doing all of this work on my own, and more than that, I enjoy moving really quickly. So I don't typically hire editors for my books because I don't want to have to wait around for someone to sit there and give me feedback. At most I might hire someone to do a final grammar edit and that's about it. But this is a very subjective choice and you should make the decision that feels best for you. Part 3 Publishing on Amazon so People think that publishing on Amazon is way more complicated than it actually is. Yes, there is a little learning curve, but I promise it is really not that hard. So let me walk you through what goes into it so that you can understand just how easy it is to self publish a book on Amazon. First thing you do, you buy an ISBN on Bowker. Okay? So you want to buy your own ISBN because then you can also publish your book on other platforms besides just Amazon, like Apple Books, Kobo, Google Books, et cetera. If you're not familiar, the ISBN number is this little number right above the barcode. And this is essentially how books get tracked, how book sales get tracked. This allows your book to get populated into the master library of all books. So most people don't know this, but everyone says, oh, you can't get into bookstores without signing a traditional deal. Well, actually you can. Someone could go to a bookstore and request this book right now and the bookstore would just look up this book and look up the ISBN in their massive directory. And then if enough people asked for it, they would order it to their bookstore. So you want to buy your own ISBN, because then if someone or a group of people start asking for your book in a certain neighborhood or territory or area, bookstores can actually order it for themselves. Second, I recommend using a platform like Reedsy to format the interior of your ebook or print book. So Reedsy has this really cool free tool that I've been using for years and all you have to do is just throw all of your content in there and the tool allows you to format it by chapters. It gives you some stock intro copyright pages that you can use. It helps you fill out the front matter and the back matter of the book and then it literally takes 10, 15 minutes. And then you can just export it as either a Kindle file to upload as an ebook, or you can export it as a PDF file to upload as a print book. Third, the thing I would recommend investing the most money into is the COVID design. So nothing is going to have a bigger impact on sales for your self published book or traditional book, every book than the COVID I recommend using this website called ineedabookcover.com this website is essentially a directory of designers who have worked or currently work for publishing houses. And they just want to freelance on the side, which effectively means that you can hire the same person who has designed covers for your favorite writers, even writers that have sold millions and millions of copies. Those designers want to freelance on the side and they are not as expensive as you think, expenses here range anywhere from maybe $1,000 for a cover, upwards of $5,000 for a cover. Absolute top tier designers, you're looking at like 10 grand for a cover. And that might sound like a lot, but you have to think of each book and your self published library as like a digital real estate portfolio. Right. Some properties will lose money, some will break even, a few will outperform the rest and then a couple will be outliers and they will pay for the whole thing. Right. And so for context, you know, If I spend $5,000 designing this cover, well that sounds like a lot of money until you see how it plays out and you realize I turned that five grand into, you know, combining Amazon sales and my website sales north of a quarter million dollars at this point. Right. So it's up to you on the level of risk that you want to take. But my recommendation would be if you're going to spend money anywhere, right. If you said, I'm going to self publish a book and I only have $1,000 to invest in the whole thing, invest in creating the product, invest in marketing, everything, I would literally put the entire thousand dollars in the COVID design because nothing will have a bigger impact than your cover. Okay. Fourth, I recommend doing some pre publishing research using this really cool tool called Publisher Rocket. No affiliate code or anything. I'm just obsessed with this tool. I use it constantly. So Publisher Rocket pulls data straight from Amazon so you can look up how other books are selling. You can find low competition, high reward book categories to associate with your book. You can identify keywords with lots of search volum. You can do a lot of cool stuff with this tool. I spend probably an hour or so playing with Publisher Rocket before I publish any of my books because I want some context around what category should I put it in or what keywords should I use when I upload it. Especially if you plan on writing more than one book and you want to build out a library of books. That's how I think about it. I would absolutely spend the money and buy Publisher Rocket. Fifth, if you don't have a KDP account already, you can create a new KDP account using your Amazon login. So KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing. This is Amazon's publishing arm. And all you do is just link that to your Amazon login. Then you go to the bookshelf, you add a new title, you select ebook, print or audio, depending on what format you want to upload. You fill in the details, Title, subtitle description, ISBN number, Price, et cetera, all that stuff. You hit publish and your book will go live 24 to 48 hours later. It is very easy. I have done this 10 times now, so I've self published 10 books at this point. Some have lost money, you know, like my poetry. No surprise there. Some have broken even or made a tiny positive return, like my memoir, Confessions of a Teenage Gamer. I invested probably $1,000 into that book. It's made $3,000 maybe in royalties. So made me a little money. But also no surprise that the books that are most relevant to the niche that I write about consistently online, which is digital writing, ghostwriting, those books have made the most so on Amazon alone, the art and business of online writing has made over $150,000. But including sales from my personal website, that number is probably closer to Maybe I've crossed $300,000 in lifetime royalties at this point. But I also invested five grand into the next book in the series, which is the Art and Business of Ghostwriting. And that book hasn't sold as many copies. It's also a more niche topic, but it's already made me over $25,000 in royalties on Amazon alone. And again, if I count my sales through my personal website, it's probably closer to 50,000. And this book and all of the books in my library are going to continue making money every single month. Some will be more profitable than others, but that's why I take this portfolio approach and why I would recommend that you do the same. Part 4 My Evergreen Marketing Strategy the big question that everyone has and wants answered is always, what should my marketing strategy be? Well, why don't we just take a look at what other big creators are doing. Alex Hormozi self published his book $100 million offers. And he did the same thing with the follow up book, $100 million leads. And he has shared publicly that he sold over 800,000 copies worldwide of these books by himself. What is his marketing strategy? His marketing strategy is he makes content, specifically YouTube videos, and as he's talking, he has the books on the table in front of him. It's very simple. Or let's look at Dan Ko, who self published his book the Art of Focus. I don't know how many copies he's sold, but based on some rough napkin math, I can tell you he's probably sold above the average self published author. So what is his marketing strategy? Well, he makes content and either organically in the content or in the description, he reminds people. By the way, I wrote a book and what am I doing right now? I am explaining a topic to you in my niche and as I'm talking I have the art and business of online writing on the table next to me. So what is the big secret marketing strategy? Just follow the instructions on the box like you're baking a Betty Crocker cake. Okay. You make content in a niche, you turn your highest performing ideas into a book and then you make more content in your niche and remind people, by the way, I wrote a book on this same topic and you do that every single day for a year and you will sell hundreds if not thousands of copies. But if you do that every single day for 10 years, you just might be the next Ryan Holiday. He is one of my favorite examples of why becoming a successful author, whether you sign with a traditional publisher or you just decide to self publish, is all about becoming known for a niche you own. A lot of writers want to be as successful as Ryan Holiday, but not very many writers want to write a thousand articles or make a thousand videos on Marcus Aurelius 10 tips for living a Stoic Life this is something that has taken me a very long time to learn on my own writing journey, which is why I want to share it with you. Becoming a best selling authority in any capacity has way less to do with what kind of book you write or how great the writing is and has way more to do with dominating a niche and building a traffic engine in that niche and then driving traffic to your book or library of books over and over and over again. You don't win by writing a great book, you win by building a traffic engine in a niche and reminding people over and over and over again, hey, and by the way, I wrote a book. My name is Nicholas Cole and I have self published 10 books and each month my library of self published books pays me around $10,000 on autopilot. I have very strong opinions about why self publishing is better than traditional publishing. So in today's video I'm going to first share my argument for why 99% of writers would make more money and have way more creative freedom if they just self published. And then I'm going to answer some of the most commonly asked questions on how to actually self publish your first book. Okay, first let me explain why book deals are such a bad idea for the vast majority of authors. Which means you, my fellow writer who just wants to be creative. You need to understand the business side of how traditional book deals work and what the publisher is actually promising you versus what you're Getting a publisher is good for three things. Number one, they're good for playing the New York Times bestseller game. You actually can't really play the New York Times bestseller game unless you're with a big publisher. If you sell a gazillion copies as a self published author, the New York Times list doesn't count you. So it's sort of a Ponzi scheme. You have to be with a publisher in order to play that game. Second is they help you get into physical bookstores. We'll talk about that in a minute. And then third is it gives you status and approval. So let's walk through each one of these. First, a publisher will help you win the New York Times bestseller game. All right, so listen to the words very carefully. New York Times best seller game. Not best written game, not most creative game. Best seller game. So just think through it. If you're a writer who has a very particular vision and wants their book or story executed in a certain way, or has a strong point of view on an unpopular topic, not a mainstream topic, or just wants to write something from the heart and share it with the world. Right. Do you think you're going to win at the best seller game? No, you're not. And I think the thing that so many writers misunderstand is that that's okay. The problem is every writer wants to believe two opposing things at the exact same time. They want to believe that they should be able to write whatever they want to write about. And simultaneously, they want to believe that whatever they want to write about will also win the best seller game. And that is not true. Obviously, there are outliers, but broadly speaking, in 99% of cases, that's not true. But writers are romantics, okay? They want to believe in the magic of writing for love and writing for capitalism all at the same time. So they rationalize the decision by saying to themselves. Which leads to the second point. A publisher will help you get into bookstores. The vast majority of writers think if I sign a book deal, I will get into bookstores, and if I get into bookstores, I will become a best seller, regardless of the topic of my book. Okay? So you can see how the faulty beliefs start to compound on each other. So let's break this down. Have you ever walked into a bookstore? How many books are in the average bookstore? Because on average, 3 million new books are published every single year. Now, are all 3 million books in every bookstore around the world? No. Right. But wait, I thought you just said taking a book deal would get you into Bookstores. And this is where my dad used to always say this to me. He'd say, oh, you look but you do not see. See, grasshopper. Right. A publisher doesn't get you into all bookstores. First of all, it depends on how big of an advance the publisher gives you. So a massive advance, like the kind they give to celebrities. Sure, they might start you out in Target and Barnes and Noble and throw you in 500 different locations around the country or around the world. A small advance. You'll be lucky if you get in five bookstores in the middle of Arkansas. This is a really important point. Bookstores are not a destination. They are a marketing channel. And so what the publisher does is put your book in a couple bookstores, and then they wait and they wait to see how it sells. If it sells really well, they'll put you in a couple more bookstores. And if it doesn't sell very well, then the test failed and no more bookstores for you. Which again, goes back to the first point. Are you trying to win the best seller game? Then maybe bookstores will work to your advantage. But if you're not, then what's going to happen is you're going to take a book deal. Thinking, if I get into bookstores, I will sell lots of copies. Not realizing you aren't even writing a book that has the potential to sell a lot of copies in the first place. Which means bookstores do nothing for you. And by the way, just some really important context here. The number of books bought online goes up every year, and the number of books bought in physical stores goes down every year. So the thing I never understand is why writers are chasing a declining trend line. I'll tell you exactly why, though. Because this is the real reason writers want book deals, even if the deal isn't in their best interest, and even if they know they would make more money self publishing, because a book deal gives writers status and approval. If you say you self published your book, the average person goes, oh, good, good for you. But if you say you got a book deal with a traditional publisher, even if that book deal was horrible financially, the average person goes, wow, that's so incredible. Congratulations. And so that is the unfortunate root of the root reason why most writers want book deals. What they really want, more than being on the New York Times list or even seeing their book in bookstores or even making money, is for an authority figure to tell them, good job, you are now a real writer. They want the badge. And as someone who feels very strongly about the benefits of self Publishing over traditional publishing. I live this on a daily basis. It is painfully apparent to me how much more status I would have and how much more validation I would get if I pursued a traditional book deal. The problem is the entrepreneur in me. Just I can't do is such a horrible financial decision. And the only way it turns out being ROI positive is if you win the lottery. Taking a book deal seems like an amazing idea if you end up writing the next Atomic Habits, but if your book doesn't reach that level, you're going to lose money on it. And just for some context, so you know, the average book deal advance is not a quarter million dollars. The average nonfiction book advance is around 25 grand, and the average fiction book advance is around 15 grand. And that might sound like a lot of money, but until you read the fine print and realize you don't get all of that all at once, you get a third now and then a third when you turn in the manuscript, and then a third when your book gets published. And so that amount is spread over two or three years. So really, you're getting paid like seven grand a year to write your book, AKA way less than minimum wage. Second, the average book deal pays you, the writer, on average, a 10 to 15% royalty after your advance has been recouped. Okay, so said differently, when the publisher gives you, say, 25 grand, they are effectively buying 85% ownership of your book. So imagine you started a business and you went looking for investors, and an investor said, sure, I'll invest in your business. I'll give you $25,000, but I want 85%. In that context, almost every single person on earth, no matter how bad they are at business, understands that that is a horrible deal. And yet writers agree to this every single day. And it just makes absolutely no sense. So with all of that in mind, let's answer some questions about self publishing. All right, Greg the homie, what's up? Greg asks, where is the best place to find an editor? So, short answer, there's a really cool platform called Reedsy that is essentially a marketplace for editors. I use Reedsy because they also have this Sass tool that allows you to format your ebook, and then you can just export it as an ebook file and as a PDF and you can upload it straight to Amazon. It's a really great tool, but the core of the platform is that it's a marketplace for editors. So if you're looking for an editor, I would poke around there. You could also find people on Upwork. You could Find people on Fiverr like you could find people on Twitter. Editors are everywhere. My longer answer here is I think it's important to define the word editor. Like what are you actually looking for help with? Are you looking for someone to just do a final pass on grammar and spelling? This is primarily what I do with my books. I will write the whole thing and then I'll hire someone to just do a pass. I'll say flag any misspellings, flag any punctuation errors and leave like open ended questions as a comment. If there's anything that's unclear that you want me to expand on. To me, that is the primary value of hiring an editor, especially when you have some competent competency in writing. But you might be looking for something different. You might be looking for someone to help you with the structure, someone to actually help you think through the book, right? And if that's the case, you know, you can find individuals. The challenge with that is whenever you're looking for help with structure, what you're largely paying for is that person's subjective opinion. You know, like if you talk to three different editors, they might all tell you to structure it in three completely different ways. So you sort of have to find someone whose point of view you like or feels aligned with you, because that's really what you're buying. But if you just want sort of a repeatable or proven structure, I might look at a company like scribe or even publishing.com that does this. All on the self published side, these companies are really great at creating repeatable structures. So you sort of have to decide what do you want out of hiring an editor? High level though, just my opinion. I think that hiring an editor is largely overrated. And the reason that I think that is because the best editor is always the market. Like if you hire an editor, what you're really paying for, like I said, is their subjective opinion. But what would be a lot better and what's a lot more helpful is if you take all of the things that you want to write a book about and you just publish them out into the world and then you're basically getting micro editors in all of your readers, right? They're going to tell you, I understood that, I liked that or I didn't understand that. I don't like that. I have a question. I don't have a question. That was great. The market is the ultimate editor and you get so many different perspectives on your writing. And I find oftentimes there's a direct correlation between the people who ask, where do I Find an editor. And they're also the same ones who go, I'm not going to write about any of these topics in public. So they jump straight to writing a book. And I always find that that person is always the same person. And on the other side of the spectrum, the people who are constantly writing about their ideas out in public, usually as I explain this to them, they realize, oh, I don't actually need an editor because the market has been my editor. So if you're sitting there and you're jumping straight from, you know, I've never written about any of these things online before. I want to write a book. That is a mistake. You should be writing about all of these things online first and letting the market be your editor. All right, SGG research asks, how do you balance writing what you love versus writing what sells? Is there a secret formula or do we just cry into our keyboards while caffeinating? So we did a whole study about this in the nonfiction world in my book Snow Leopard. It's one of the books in this pile. And what we found is that of the best selling 444, we did the top 500, but there were some duplicates and like the same title in ebook and print, whatever. So top 444 business books of the last two decades, the vast majority fell into two categories, personal development and personal finance. And the takeaway there is that people either want to improve their lives or they want to make more money. And those are the easiest topics for them to rationalize buying a product. Right, because the return is, if I buy this $20 book, you're going to give me something that improves my life or makes me more money. Everything else, every other topic, it didn't matter how great the book was, how well written it was, didn't it? Didn't matter. And for the only ones that performed well, that weren't personal development or personal finance, like maybe a leadership book, for example, they were written by someone extremely noteworthy. So a celebrity or some sort of mainstream famous CEO. And if you notice, almost every single nonfiction book on the New York Times bestseller list tends to fall into one of these two categories. So that's important context, right? If you want to write a best selling nonfiction book, what's the single best way to increase the likelihood that you achieve that goal? Well, it would probably be to write in one of those two categories. And by the way, the same rules apply to fiction as well. The single largest fiction category is romance. And most people don't realize that romance is twice as big as the next Largest category, which is fantasy. So if you want to write a best selling fiction story, which two categories should you probably play in? Romance or fantasy, because they're the largest markets. So how do you increase your chances of success? You play inside the largest markets. And I think the mistake that writers make is they say, well, I don't want to do that. I want to write what I want to write about. Which is fine, but you can't say that and also ask, but how do I guarantee financial success? Right? And again, it's that cognitive dissonance that writers struggle with so much because they go, I have opinions on what I want to write about and I want to write about it for me, but also how do I guarantee that people buy it? And oftentimes those are not necessarily the same thing. All right, sensei asks, what is the best way to pick and validate a topic? So I talk about this all day, every day. Short answer, start writing online. Okay. My best selling book, the Art and Business of Online Writing, which is another book in this pile, is really just one big collection of all the things I've written about online, about writing, about editing, about formatting, about rhythm, about hooks, everything that I've written about this topic over the past 10 years. So I'm actually not surprised that my most engaged content in book form led to my most popular book. But a different way of thinking about this question, which I think is a lot more important, isn't which topic will make for the best book? The real question is, which topic can you build a content engine around? And I think this idea is so powerful. And I find the vast majority of writers really do not understand this. Okay, Ryan Holiday is a great example of this. Ryan's books on stoicism by themselves probably would not be as popular as they are today. As a topic, it's not necessarily the most popular topic on earth. And it's probably not something that just magically is going to stand out in a bookstore and everyone's going to want to buy it. The reason his books have grown so much in popularity is because he's built a content engine around the topic of stoicism. So he tweets about stoicism, he writes medium articles and blog posts about stoicism. He makes YouTube videos about stoicism. He has a newsletter about stoicism. It's the content engine that drives the book sales, not the other way around. And I find that most writers think, oh, if I just come up with the perfect idea, my book will sell itself. And that's not going to happen. The goal shouldn't be to write one book anyways, right? The real goal should be to build a one person publishing empire and to build an entire content engine and product ecosystem around a niche topic and then write books in that niche and dominate that niche for a very long time. That's the real goal. Joe asks, is it worth trying to self publish even if you haven't established an audience and tested on social what topics work? Short answer, no. No. And the irony is I say this all day long, even to really, really smart people, and they still ignore this advice. I can't tell you how many times I've talked with some executive and they're like, I want to write a book. And I'm like, have you written about this at all before? No. Have you tweeted about it? No. Have you written a newsletter about it? No. Have you written a single blog post about it? No. Then why do you want to write a book and they want to write a book for all the wrong reasons and that is the worst place to start. So sometimes you need to learn this lesson the hard way, you know. But if you're trying to write a book about a topic you have not written about online first, you are just wasting your time, wasting resources and making a huge mistake. All right, Noah asks the biggest question has to be distribution. I understand writing in public in order to get the feedback loop necessary to validate the value. But when it comes time to publish, should you do a soft launch to your list or just post on all platforms and let it ride? So I could talk about book marketing and distribution for eight hours, but I'll compress it down here for you. I have found there are two types of book launches. The first is the really big launch. You know, six to 12 months of marketing leading into the day of the launch week. And then the other approach is you hit publish on Amazon and you immediately start working on the next one. And there are strong cases to be made for both approaches. Personally, I've always done the second and I think when you're a first time or second time author, I think that is the right strategy because you are still learning and acquiring so many of the skills. Right? Like what is the first bottleneck to becoming an author and writing a book? The very first bottleneck is actually writing and publishing your first book. It has nothing to do with getting the launch right. It's have you ever written a book before? Great, go do that. You know, what's the next bottleneck of becoming a successful author? Well, it's actually not getting the launch right. It's having a library of books, right? Because when you attract a reader, okay, great, you have one book. But it's so much better if you have three books or you have five books or you have 10 books because then they can go through your library, right? So work on the second one, work on the third one. And as time goes on, it will make more and more sense to focus on bigger launches. I'm feeling the same in my own career. I mean, I've self published 10 books, so I've learned a lot and I can start to see how with the next one. With the next one, it might be worth me slowing down and doing three months of marketing ahead of time or six months of marketing ahead of time. But that's because I'm here and I self published my first book in 2016. So that's almost a decade later. But I'm of the opinion that until you've acquired a lot of these skills, it's kind of a waste of time and resource to engineer this perfect launch because there's so many components that you don't know what you don't know yet. And I'm more of the mind of get reps in, build your library and then focus on those things especially too. Because if you do some huge launch and let's say the book absolutely explodes, well, there is a huge upside difference between doing that with your first book and say your first book becomes a giant bestseller versus doing that with your tenth book and you have a library of nine other books. Books like could you imagine if James Clear's Atomic habits wasn't his first book, but it was his 10th book. If it was his 10th book, the sales on all of the nine books before that also probably would have gone up and some might have even exploded, right? But if it's your first book, the reader goes, hey, cool, I love this thing. What else do you have? Oh, you don't have anything else. So I am so much more of the mind of postponing these things so that you can build foundations and build a library so that when something does hit, the whole average of the library goes up. The other thing I want to mention here about distribution is everyone thinks there's some sort of trick or secret strategy, like there's something that the best selling authors know that everybody else doesn't, or they think if I get a book deal, the publisher is going to take care of distribution for me. And I can tell you I have talked to people at the biggest publishing houses in the world. Okay? And here's what they tell you. They tell you if you want to sell books, you should start writing online and you should build an audience. And that is it. The whole secret is literally just, are you going to do it? Yes or no. And so many writers hear that and either convince themselves that's not it, just don't want to do it, talk themselves out of it, or they just are on this endless hunt for, no, that can't be it. There's probably some secret that makes me a best seller. No, I'll tell you what the secret is. Ryan Holiday executes the blueprint every single day. Write about stoicism 100 times a day and then write books about stoicism. And then tell everyone who reads your free stoicism stuff to go buy your paid stoicism books. That is the model. And so you just take a niche and you build a content engine around it and you do it over and over again and you do it for two decades. And that is the secret. The secret is just the long term consistency in a niche. That's the only thing that separates the really successful writers from everybody else. All right, Garrett asks, how many books in a series should you do before doing another series or pivoting? Is it different by genre? And at what point should you switch to a new series? So this is a great question. I am a recovering perfectionist, and the way I've learned to stay sober from overthinking is by making as many decisions as possible based on data. So how can we gather some data here? Well, before investing 5,000 hours writing some epic 10 book fantasy series, let's write one book. And maybe before we write even one book, we can write some short stories and publish those as short reads on Amazon instead. And maybe before even publishing any of those short reads on Amazon, we can start even smaller by publishing them as like a web serial on Royal Road or Wattpad or something like that. The point is that you always want to find ways to accelerate your feedback loops so that you can conduct a valid science experiment. And the only way that I've found to do that is start small, probably smaller than you're thinking or that you want to start with. Everyone wants to jump to, I have a 10 book epic fantasy series. Don't do that. Start very small. Write one short story, see if people are interested. Second is practicing in public. So not alone in your bedroom, not by yourself at a coffee shop. You have to get it in front of some people to see what's working, what's Not. And you have to deploy volume. You can't just write one thing. And if that one thing doesn't work, then you throw in the towel. You have to write lots of things because you need volume to see, well, is the bottleneck just effort? And it's hard. I struggle with this too. I mean, it's really hard to put a specific number on how much you should create before pivoting. But in general, the answer is usually more. It's just more so. For example, this secret fiction series I'm working on that I'm hoping to have the first one out by the end of the year. I'm going to start with three books. Three books in the series. If the first one flops, that's okay. I'm going to try again. I've already committed to a three book series, so I'm going to write the second one regardless. And then if the second one flops, two doesn't matter, I'm still going to press on and I'm going to do the third one. And then after three, you know, if nothing is clicking, I might consider pivoting to a different story. But before I do that, I'm really going to stress test whether or not I'm doing everything that I possibly can to run a clean and valid science experiment. And so I'm going to put excerpts up on Royal Road. I'm going to tweet about it, I'm going to make YouTube videos about it, I'm going to write newsletters about it. I'm going to try and get early readers. I'm going to ask them if they can give me some feedback, maybe in exchange for a couple free bonuses or something. I am going to deploy as much effort and resource and attention as possible so that I can get a real read on, no pun intended, a real read on whether or not is it a series problem or is it an effort problem. And I find more times than not, the bottleneck for writers is usually not talent. A lot of people are very talented. The real bottleneck is effort. They just deploy almost no effort and they expect the world in return. And no shade here, Garrett, but I also find that people who ask this question, they're like, at what point should you pivot? They're trying to solve a problem they don't have yet. Most of the time, the people who ask this question haven't even written anything yet, period. So they're like, what do I do If I write 20 things and it doesn't work, then? So they want the answer to a question. That comes way further down the road. But they haven't even done the first thing, which is, well, did you write something and did you publish it? And until you actually go write and publish 10 or 20 things, this question and this problem isn't even on the table yet. And this is something. Writers have a special talent for trying to solve problems they don't have. You know what problem to solve, it's right in front of you. Write a bunch of stuff and put it out into the world and see what happens. Then when you do that, then you can focus on tweaking and going, what could I do better? All right. Gene asks, most self publishing stories focus on genre writing. What are the best practices for writers of literary and upmarket fiction? Any success stories to share? So I love this question because, to be perfectly honest, of all the different types of books that I read, I enjoy literature the most. It was my favorite part of studying in college, whenever I'm traveling or. So I'm way more likely to pick up a piece of literary fiction than I am genre fiction. And probably because deep down I am romantic about great writing, you know, And I really love the idea of writing literary fiction. It's something that I want to do. The challenge, though, is I am not confused about the fact that generally speaking, literature is where writers typically make the least amount of money, because literature is the hardest to read, which by definition means it is the smallest total addressable market. You know, I always forget, I forget what the stat is, but it's like a huge percent of the country and of the world can't even read English. So that's bottleneck number one. And then number two is literary fiction is such upmarket and complicated English and language that the vast majority of people can't read beyond like a third or fourth grade reading level. So you're playing in the smallest market of publishing and of fiction. So you have to sort of anchor your expectations to that and recognize if you play in the smallest market, your upside is significantly less and significantly more rare than someone who plays in a giant category like romance or fantasy, or even sci fi, mystery, thriller, stuff like that, where there are not just 100 times more readers, but 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 times more readers. Now, a couple interesting success stories to look at. I can acknowledge that literary fiction doesn't make as much money as genre fiction, but there are still some cool success stories. And these are people that I look to for inspiration. And I think they bring unique perspective to how you can write upmarket fiction but still find A way to achieve some version of mainstream success. So the first one is Gabrielle Zevin. She wrote this novel most recently called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. This novel is a really amazing blend, I think, of genre fiction with literary qualities. Fun fact. She's a Harvard grad where she studied English with a concentration in American literature. And it shows. I mean, in her writing, it's very clear that she has a strong understanding of language. And reading the novel, it's very clear that it is not a genre fiction book. That said, it is more fun to read, and it is an easier read than the average literary novel. You know, like, really highbrow literary novels are hard to read. Like, they are a mental exercise. And this doesn't feel that way, but it still feels smart. So if you want to write highbrow fiction, but you don't want to write, you know, other side of the spectrum. Colleen Hoover, Romance fiction stories, I think aiming somewhere in the middle is a good idea. And Gabrielle Zevin as a writer is a really good middle ground to look at. Her books are fun. Her books are really smart. There's some very clever wordplay and use of language in there, but they are not. It's not like reading Crime and Punishment. You know, a different success story would be George Saunders. So he's an American literary writer, and he's a professor at Syracuse where he teaches creative writing. And he has for the past, you know, two decades, and he's written all sorts of literary fiction, but he's found a lot of success recently with two projects. So first, he wrote this book on Russian literature called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which, again, going back to everything that I talk about in terms of writing and writing in the digital age, that is really just him doubling down on a data point. That book is essentially the book version of the class he's been teaching at Syracuse for the past two decades. So he just went, wow, students love my class. I should probably scale my class by writing a book about it. And no surprise, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain has become one of the, if not his most popular book. Right? So take what's working, double down on it. But then second, and this is where you know, it goes even further, doubling down again. He also has a paid substack where it's essentially an evergreen version of his book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which is the reflection of the class he's been teaching for the past 20 years. So in his substack, he just picks other different stories to break down and Explain and dig into the writing. And that's exactly what he's doing in his class, which is what he does in his book. But now he's just doing the evergreen version. It never ends in his substack. No surprise. His substack is very, very popular. It's one of the most popular substacks, one of the most popular paid newsletters on substack. And my napkin math. I don't. I don't know if this is correct or not, but judging by, you know, engagement and how many paying users I think he might have, he's probably making upwards of 50 grand a month from his substack at this point, which is way more than he's making from his. His book deals and his literary fiction sales, and way more than he's getting paid as a professor at Syracuse. Okay, so, of course, if you ask this question to a bunch of literary snobs, you're going to get very different answers. You know, how do you make a living as a literary writer? They all live in the cognitive dissonance. They're like, you shouldn't care about money. You should write only for the love and only for the passion. And then two seconds later, they're going to pull you aside and be like, writers don't make any money anymore. Right? So, like, they all live in the cognitive dissonance. My takeaway is, I think if you really like literary fiction, write it, but write it with the expectations that most people don't make a ton of money writing literary fiction. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. There's a lot of value in it. And some of my favorite writing is literary fiction. But just find other ways to monetize your talents. I really think that George Saunders is an amazing framework here. I mean, he writes literary fiction. He's really good at it. It's super high quality. But he essentially makes all of his money from the nonfiction side, explaining and digging into what makes great literary fiction. And that is such an amazing barbell. And I think about that with my own writing, too. I will write literary fiction, but I'm not going to, you know, expect those books to pay my rent. Right? Like, I'm going to do it because I love it and I'm going to monetize my talents in other vehicles. All right? And lastly, Bobby asks, how do you handle the design side of self publishing? So the design side is not as complicated as people think. So just so you know, when you self publish on Amazon, literally all you have to do is you create a KDP account. You upload your manuscript, you upload a cover image, either a JPEG for an ebook cover or a PDF if you're doing a print copy, because it shows front and back. And then every time someone buys the book, Amazon prints it on demand and ships it to them. I don't hold any of these. I don't hold them in a warehouse. I don't hold inventory. I'm not the one driving to UPS shipping these out to readers. I just upload it to Amazon. And every time someone orders Amazon prints it on demand and extracts my printing cost. And there you go. So you literally have everything that a publisher would have at your disposal. And it is that easy. Like all of the information, all of the walkthroughs and everything is on the Internet and you can figure it out in a couple hours. And it is not complicated at all. It's gotten a lot easier. I remember self publishing my first book 10 years ago and it's 10 times easier now than it was 10 years ago. You know, so anyone can do this. Most writers also don't realize that all of the designers who work for major publishers also want to freelance on the side. Okay? So you can literally get the same designer who designs Stephen King's book covers to design your book cover. You can get the same person. And so that's why I don't understand when writers say, you know, oh, I can create such a higher quality product with a, with a publisher. Yeah, maybe they'll help you print some super fancy ding dong hardcover, something that Amazon won't let you. Although Amazon now you can do hardcover as well. But a lot of times writers talk about this through the lens of design, like, oh, I'm going to get access to these special people that are going to make my book look beautiful. You can hire them. You can literally hire them. And it is not as expensive as you think. It's not like, oh, it's going to cost me 100 grand to work with this person. It's going to cost you like three grand, you know, five grand, ten grand, max, Max. And so if you have a business or if you have, you know, you start with something a little cheaper, maybe you, you don't invest as much in your first book or your second book. I remember my first book I invested like a thousand bucks into, you know, and then that starts to make you a little money and then the next one makes you a little money and then eventually, you know, now every book that I self publish, I invest about five grand into it. But that's okay because I invest five grand into the art and business of online writing and that book's made me $200,000. Right. So you have to look at your books as mini businesses and then start to ladder it up and realize that you can increase the quality with each one. And hiring these people is not as expensive as you think. And you have access to all of them. If you want to find a lot of really great designers, there's a website called ineedabookcover.com and it's basically like a big directory of all sorts of designers who currently work or have worked at major publishers or publications or. I mean, these are really talented people and they all want to freelance. And so I always find that so many of the questions people have on the self publishing side and why they default to I'll just take a book deal is because they don't realize, they don't know the answers to these questions. They don't realize how easy this process is and how it's like, yeah, you invest 10, 20 hours in learning these skills and then all of a sudden you are a one person publishing machine. And now I can write and self publish a book every three months if I wanted to. I could do this every month if I wanted to. And that is my plan. I'm going to self publish books for the rest of my life and I am going to write a hundred of them, 200 of them, and I'm going to build a library and I'm never going to go buy rental properties. I don't need rental properties. My library of books is going to pay me. And I just want to pass along this point of view to as many writers as possible because these skills are not that difficult. They are so doable. This is not capital intensive. If you have any aspirations of writing lots of things over the course of your life, self publishing is the way to go. Now I will end this by saying there is a time and a place to take a book deal, but you should not do it when you don't have leverage. At a certain point I will probably do a book deal, but I will do it for one book. I will do it when I have maximum leverage. I will do it when I can negotiate a deal that the average writer cannot. I will have postponed this decision for a very, very, very, very, very long time. And to be perfectly honest, I'm only going to do it when I say I'm ready to play the New York Times game. And I'm going to do it one time. And I'm going to get the New York Times bestseller badge and then I'm going to be done and I'm going to go right back to my library of self published books. And I think just internalizing that as a mental model. If you want to build a successful career as a writer and really as an author, it's important to understand that you have these options and you don't have to jump to taking a book deal. You can start self published, you can postpone that decision, and I encourage you to postpone that decision until you have maximum leverage. There are some really great I'll leave you with this. There's some really great podcasts with Hugh Howey, the fiction writer who wrote the Silo series, where he talks about negotiating his book deal and things that he postponed and things that he negotiated and things that he learned about working with traditional publishers and decisions he ultimately made. Like he ultimately decided that he wanted to keep the rights to a lot of his work and it's made him a ton of money as a result. But this is not as hard as you think. And anyone can get started very, very quickly writing and self publishing their first book. I have been studying the fiction world for a decade. In fact, my degree from Columbia College Chicago is actually in fiction writing. That's what it says on my diploma. And I've already built a nonfiction writing empire that has generated more than $10 million in lifetime revenue. So now what I want to do is I want to do the same exact thing in the world of fiction and you're going to watch me do it publicly here on YouTube and I'm going to do it by myself using these five secret tools that I find the vast majority of fiction writers don't know exact exist. These tools are going to help you survey the market, find niche opportunities, and build a library of profitable self published books. First is a niche website called K Lytics. Now don't judge the website by its landing page, because even though this site looks like it was made in 1999, it provides an insane amount of Amazon data for authors. K Lytics is basically an evergreen library of Amazon data and it digs deep into every possible niche and subcategory on Amazon, both fiction and non fiction fiction. There is so much information here, but I use K Lytics for two things. First, I use it to look for fast growing categories. So inside K Lytics There are these PDFs called strategy maps and inside you can see which categories are growing in popularity the fastest. So this helps you find niche Opportunities before everyone else. Almost like finding stocks early before they go mainstream. Second, I use it for detailed information inside inside specific categories. So there are hundreds of deep dives into individual fiction niches on Amazon. And for example, if you're interested in writing science fiction or fantasy, you should probably be as educated as possible on that category. And so what you can do is go into these deep dives on those categories and see all sorts of data, popularity, trending, keywords, most popular price points, literally everything. So especially if you're a data nerd like I am, I think K Lytics is one of the best kept secrets for fiction writers online. Second, if you don't know who John Truby is, well, you should. And now you do. So in terms of pure storytelling, there are two books you should absolutely read as an aspiring fiction writer. The first is the Anatomy of Story and the second is the Anatomy of genres. So John Truby, otherwise known as the Script Doctor because he has helped improve so many popular screenplays in Hollywood, is probably the best resource I've found when it comes to storytelling and structure. If you're trying to play the fiction game and you haven't read these books, that's sort of like trying to make it into the NBA and not knowing the rules of basketball. So buy these books, study them, because this is the whole game. On top of that, John was clearly ahead of his time because he also has a handful of different education products on his website. Now, his website is pretty outdated, but again, don't judge the website by its landing page. Okay? The information here is insane. For example, he has audio classes for every different story genre, as well as a very outdated piece of software that helps you actually outline your stories. Now, ideally he would update these assets for the modern digital world, but the truth is the information is timeless. And in the nonfiction world, the equivalent here would be studying old recordings from copywriters like Gary Halbert or Gary Bensivenga, like I've also done. A few years ago, I even spent $3,000 buying two massive three ring binders of all of Gary Halpert's old newsletter issues originally sent via paper mail. There's a lot of them in here. Anyways, I'm getting sidetracked here. The point is, there is a lot of value in studying these old school legends because most of their insights are timeless and still highly, highly applicable today. Third is publisher Rocket. So this is a tool I talk a lot about because I've been using it to help me self publish books for almost a decade at this point. This is a tool made by kindlepreneur.com, which you should also know about. Kindlepreneur is a website completely dedicated to self publishing on Amazon. Tons of really great resources here, but in my opinion publisher Rocket takes the cake. It's a SaaS tool that basically gives you real time data for books on Amazon, including how much money a book is generating, which categories have the lowest competition or are growing the fastest. Fastest. Which categories have the highest search volume but the lowest competition, and if you want to run Amazon ads, which authors or other books are most relevant to your book so you can pay to get in front of their readers. It is such a cool tool and something every single aspiring fiction writer should be using. Fourth is Reedsy, which is another tool I talk about a lot. I should have affiliate codes for these things. I use Reedsy to format all of my ebooks okay for print books. What I typically do is hire a graphic designer to create the interior just so it's formatted really professionally and that my self published physical books have a similar quality to traditionally published books. But ebooks are all kind of the same and you can just use a tool like Readsy to quickly and easily format your ebooks by yourself. All you have to do is load in the content, organize the sections, add your book's metadata, ISBN number, title, subtitle, all that stuff and then hit export. And when you export you'll receive an epub file which is the file type Amazon prefers for ebook files. Super easy free tool and I find a lot of writers have never heard of it. So again now you have. Fifth is a newer website called ineedabookcover.com so this is a directory of book cover designers who either currently work or have worked at major publishing houses. Which means yes, you can hire the exact same designer or art director who created the book cover of your favorite author. Literally the same person who designed and Stephen King's book covers you can hire and they are not as expensive as you think. For example, I have invested anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 for each of the covers of my self published books. Most break even, some lose money, but a few have been massive outliers like my art and business of online writing. I spent five grand on this cover and to date this book has generated over a quarter million dollars in royalties. So nothing will have a bigger impact than your cover. And I promise this is true for both nonfiction and fiction. So if you want to find an all star designer then you should use I Need a book cover dot com. The last thing I want to share is the overarching strategy for using these tools and building your one person fiction empire. Because I have spent literally thousands of hours reading every book and listening to every podcast I could find on the topic of fiction writing, self publishing versus traditional publishing, storytelling, book marketing, you name it. And let me tell you, the recipe for success is actually very simple. The problem is it's so simple that fiction writers, myself included, want to believe it's more complicated than it really is. So we do everything else except the one thing that matters, which is to write and to write a lot. So again, here's the recipe for success. And it's so simple, it's complicated. Step one is you write and publish as many quality books as you can. One book every couple years is not enough. All of the top self published authors are writing multiple books per year, so that should be your goal. Step two, invest as much as you possibly can in the success of your books. So that means prioritizing having a great cover and then reinvesting as much as possible into your next book. So if you only have $500 or $1000 to invest on your first book launch, I would recommend spending the entire thousand dollars on your book's cover. Then as you start to generate a little bit of revenue, reinvest all of it into the next book. And step three, do this over and over and over again. For decades. I self published my first book, a memoir called Confessions of a Teenage gamer, back in 2016. I had no money. I was broke, living in a rundown studio apartment, and I had to save up for an entire year just to scrounge together $1,000 to get the COVID designed, the interior formatted, and I even had to pay someone to teach me how to publish it on Amazon. That book has only made me $3,000 in royalties, so it made a little money, little positive return. But I was hardly rolling in the dough. But I reinvested all the money I made as well as money I started making, getting into ghostwriting into my next book and the book after that, and the book after that. And Now I've written 10 books and my library has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's not counting the millions of dollars I've generated as a result of being a ghostwriter or launching writing related products or even just consulting for companies because of my credibility in the writing world. Which means now I have resources to play the fiction game and I'm going to keep reinvesting in my fiction library and my nonfiction library until my library of books are making millions and millions of dollars. And like I said, you're going to watch me do it. I am documenting the entire process here on YouTube for you. So that is the game. I've studied this space for a decade. I've tried to learn from every possible successful writer, even writers in genres I have no interest in, like romance. And I've spent a lot of money paying very smart people to tell me what the strategy should be. And the strategy I outlined for you is everything that I've learned and everything that people have told me. And it's not complicated. It's actually really simple. It's just boring. Write a lot. Publish as often as you can. Reinvest in your library. Repeat forever. Do that for the rest of your life, and it will be very, very hard for you to not become a successful author.