How To Make Money As A Shameless Writing Whore

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Yesterday I promised to reveal the secret as to how anyone (well, within reason) can make money out of writing.  Since then, I had some second thoughts, thinking that I would be better off to keep my big mouth because I could sell these secrets for $19.95 instead.

Perhaps I will too, one day – when I run out of faster ways to make some bigger bucks.

But a promise is a promise.  In any case, of the thirty people that will probably read this posting, half won’t be in the slightest bit interested, the majority of the rest will be too lazy to implement the ideas contained within and the remaining half won’t have the skillsets to be able to get it together without the detailed advice that I would sell them in the $19.95 paid-for version of the scheme.

So that probably leaves just one person who will make some money from this blog entry. And good luck to you to, sir or madam.

OK, stop reading now if you are determined to write:

(a)  Fiction

So maybe you are the next JK Rowling.  Maybe the next lottery ticket you buy will make you a millionaire – the odds are about the same.  Some people are able to make a living at it, but it takes a lot of time, effort and luck (not to mention connections).  This is not what a greedy writing whore should be looking to write.

(b)  Poetry

You should have stopped writing this crap back in kindergarten.  No one wants to read this shit – not even your mother.  If you want to write poetry, learn to play an instrument, form a band and call your poetry lyrics instead – then people will listen to you.  But only then.

No, this method is only going to work if you are prepared to write non-fiction.  I’ve forgotten the stats, but I seem to remember reading that something like 75-90% of all books published are non-fiction.  They don’t create celebrity authors, but they get published because there is a demand for them.  And they make money.

So you’re still interested in becoming a shameless writing whore?  OK, now you need to choose your subject.

There are two surefire ways of making money:

(a)  Find a need and fill it.
(b)  Find a problem and solve it.

Have a good think as to which of these two approaches you can take.  Look at some of the best-selling titles in the non-fiction category at the moment.  What areas do you already have an interest in and some knowledge of?  Helping people to make more money is always a great starting point, because people are always ready to invest some money if they think it is going to make them, or save them, lots more money.

Go on, have a think. 

Think hard.

Once you have come up with an idea, go to Amazon and buy all of the books on your chosen subject.  Plus a nice yellow highlighter pen.

Read all of the books with your nice yellow highlighter pen poised in one hand.  Highlight all of the sentences/paragraphs that you actually find useful from the book and didn’t know already.  Chances are that, by the time you finish the first book, you will have maybe highlighted only around 5% of the book’s text.  By the time you are on the fifth or sixth book, you will have probably highlighted just an occasional paragraph or two.

Now here is the most important piece of knowledge that you should highlight from this blog entry – collections of words are copyrighted (I don’t know the exact amount and am too lazy to research it at the moment) but if you simply typed out the contents of Freakonomics and published it yourself, the publisher’s lawyers would be after your ass in an instant.  However, the knowledge that you can gain from reading other people’s books cannot be copyrighted. 

You simply need to rewrite that knowledge in your own style and the copyright to your words now belongs to you.

This is the basis of being a shameless writing whore – taking other people’s knowledge and making it your own.

Back in the late Eighties, I was working in the video business and I dealt with a few book publishers.  I remember thinking then that they were in the Dark Ages when it came to marketing and promotion.  And this was before the era of the Internet.  Now they appear to be like lumbering dinosaurs in the age of nimble little fluffy mammals.

Book publishing is based upon the idea of producing great big, thick, massive books which are sold pretty cheaply.  The result is that the majority of non-fiction books actually contain quite small amounts of new and useful information which are then padded out in order to get them up to the 80-100,000 words that all the oldskool publishers seem to think are necessary in order to comprise a ‘proper‘ book.

However, in the 21st Century, people’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter all of the time.  OK, so when you take a John Grisham novel on holiday, you want a lot of pages to entertain yourself with.  But when it comes to non-fiction, you just want to get the important nuggets of information out of the book as quickly and painlessly as possible so that you can instantly rush off and go do something with that knowledge.  Like make some money with it or solve your problems.

Well at least I do. 

I know that I am pretty strange, but I’m not that strange.  And so I can’t believe that I am the only one.

The result is that you have a bizarre and irrational situation.  Oldskool publishers are churning out big, thick, massive and expensive books containing 100,000 words for $10 a time through Amazon that busy people really don’t want to spend the time reading, whereas other people are charging $30 or more for a downloadable ebook on the Internet containing 10,000 words which costs them nothing to produce as the production costs are zero.  And people are buying them because they don’t want to wade through the 90,000 words of padding that are needed to beef up an oldskool printed book to 100,000 pages.

OK, now you understand this – go ahead and write your book.  Your aim should be to get over all of the core information you have ‘acquired‘ from the books you’ve read and get it over to your reader in as quick and simple a style as possible.  Do a lot of Googling as well to answer any outstanding questions that you might have and to make sure that your content is as current as it’s possible to be.

Don’t ponder over every word, just churn the bloody thing out as quickly as you can – you can go and change bits of it later.  And don’t try to be more clever than you really are – try and inject some of your own personality in there to stop it coming over as too bland and generic.  I managed to churn mine out in just a couple of weeks.

OK, so now you have a book.  Congratulations! But what are you going to do with it? 

Choose from all or any of the below options:

(a)  Try and pitch it to one of the oldskool publishers.  There’s no harm in trying, but don’t get your hopes up too highly as they are, after all, oldskool, and will probably want you to pad it out with another 90,000 words to turn it into a ‘proper‘ book.  Even if they do want to publish it, the entire publishing process from start to finish can be counted in years and, if you’re like me, you won’t want to wait that long.

(b)  Publish it yourself through a company such as iUniverse or Xlibris, etc.  They will want a few hundred bucks of your hard earned cash to do so, but will get you listed at Amazon and the other major online book publishers.  If you’ve written something decent, you’ll get your money back – and more.  This is the route that I went down and, being such a greedy, evil, commercial writing whore (with no money at the time) I sold some advertising in the book which paid for the publishing of my book, with a little more on top for my efforts.  And the other great thing about going down this route is that you can have your book produced in just a couple of weeks using their Print-on-Demand (POD) technology rather than having to wait years for an oldskool publisher to get it out into the marketplace.

(c)  Publish it as an e-book through an online bookstore such as Clickbank.  I’m too lazy to tell you how to do it and what the advantages are, so just click on the link and they will explain everything themselves.

When I wrote my book, Propertastic’s Complete Guide to Hurghada Property and Egypt’s Red Sea Real Estate, I used a combination of (b) and (c) – I didn’t use Clickbank as I had my own website to promote but, with hindsight, I should have done so.

So now you are a published author.  Well done!  But, unfortunately, the hard work is far from over yet – now you need to get out there and promote it.  I don’t have the time (or inclination) to detail here how to go about it, but the principle is really no different from promoting a website, and there are hundreds of books available telling you the basics of how to do it out there.  It’s like anything else in life – the more effort you put in, the more reward you will get out of it at the end.

But there is one more huge benefit from becoming a published author than the revenues that can be generated by the book itself, and this is the credibility that comes from the perception of being a published author.

Stupid old Joe Public has no idea as to the difference between a POD book churned out in a couple of weeks that you have to pay for yourself compared to an oldskool book coming out of one of the lumbering giant publishers.  A book is a book as far as they are concerned and, as the author, you must be a real expert in your field in order to have had something published.

The leverage that you can get from this can be enormous if you use it properly.  I went from being a complete schmuck to the fount of all knowledge in my chosen micro-niche in the course of four weeks, all as a result of producing a quick and dirty POD book. 

I was either quite clever or quite lucky to have gotten into an area where there are stupid amounts of money being spent – international property.  The amount of money I have earned through sales of my book is minuscule.  However, through leveraging the reputation I gained from writing the book, I was able to form a very profitable company where I have been able to earn thousands of dollars in sales commission from a just a few readers. 

So try and bear this leverage in mind when trying to pick a subject for a book – where can you make the really big bucks from the back end by being perceived as a great expert in your chosen field?

OK, you now have a little over 2000 words of content  the bare bones of how to make a living as a shameless writing whore.  I’ve left out a lot of the details here which I would need to include in order to make this quick blog entry into a marketable product, but I know damn well that I could do it given just another two or three weeks to do a little more research and give you the basics of how to promote the product.

Then that will have been twice that a complete fucking idiot like me will have managed to make money from the same general concept.  And if I can do it twice, surely you can do it once?

Have I got your creative juices flowing?  Have you got a decent idea but don’t have enough understanding from these 2000 words to make it happen?  Then Contact Me and maybe we can work something out together.

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