How This Idiot Wrote A Book In 10 Days And Made $1,150.06 In A Month
My four-year old Czech student’s tooth got punched out (I can’t watch 34 kids at once!), so his mom berated me. “What are you going to do about it?” I had already cleaned up and consoled him.
The pay was shit. I quit.
Unemployed, I had no excuses. I had to write that damn book about sports betting.
I was a 23-year old American in Prague, with a guaranteed monthly freelancing income of… fifty dollars. My idea wasn’t developed beyond: Things I’ve Learned About Sports Betting. I didn’t reach out to publishers, because the poor intern recipient would have died of laughter, and I assume even accidental email murder looks bad on resumes.
10 days later, Smart Sports Betting was for sale on Amazon.
The next day, I went to Split, Dubrovnik and Budapest for two weeks.
12 days after returning, my book was number one in Amazon’s “sports betting” category.
A month later, I got my biggest royalty check: $1,150.06. For a month in which I did nothing beyond one day of Twitter direct messaging (I had <900 followers). It easily covered my (meager) Prague and travel expenses.
I got thank you emails and 5-star reviews. No reasonable complaints (though the book is far from perfect). I woke up every morning with that day’s expenses covered. Passive income. From doing something I loved and helping people, in some small way.
I’m not bragging, and I don’t want you to buy my book. I’m just some idiot who took a job “teaching” 34 toddler Czechs who spoke zero English, for $10 an hour.
But I’m an idiot with a valuable message for you. As Seneca wrote, “I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.” My line is:
ANYONE with ANYTHING to teach or say that ANYONE cares about, can and should write a book. (Or have one written for them.)
If I can make $1,150.06 in a month of doing no work, you can probably make 10x that. And I continue to earn money, daily, without doing anything.
You have excuses. So did I. I promise that they’re all bullshit.
“I have no time.”
If you have a full-time job, you probably can’t write a book in 10 days. But 118 pages (short, but sufficient) took me fewer than 30 hours of pure writing. Get up an hour earlier, or go to bed an hour later. Write on your commute (David Levien did this). Stop having sex with your significant other (kidding!).
Schedule an hour a day for writing. One month later? Boom, bam, book.
(Note: I’m talking non-fiction. I’ll address fiction sometime in the future; it’s a different animal.)
“I don’t have the money”
It’s free to publish on Amazon. I spent $5 on a surprisingly sexy cover and edited the book myself. I wouldn’t normally recommend those things, but they’re options. You can also Kickstart the book (which I’ll write about in the future).
“How do I know if anyone will read it?”
Great question. Easily refuted. Here’s what I did.
I wrote a weekly NFL betting column at SportsGrid that averaged ~30,000 hits. But I needed more to prove people would actually buy a book. So I asked them.
At the top of every column, I wrote:
(ALSO: Interested in learning how to transfer from smart, dedicated fan to rational sports bettor? Email [mattyruds@gmail.com] with the subject “book” to get free advice on how to start betting on sports, from psychology to money management to picking winners.)
That’s far from perfect copy, but it was good enough. If no one emailed, I knew to tweak or scrap the idea. But people did.
So I gave them free advice, asked what they wanted to learn, and eventually served them in a book.
“But I don’t write a weekly column!”
You just need to write SOMETHING, SOMEWHERE, that has an audience. (Have you heard of “Medium dot com?”) See how people respond, and adjust course.
There are a million ways to do it. I’ll get more detailed in another post.
THERE ARE TWO REQUIREMENTS TO WRITING A BOOK:
1) Have something to say that someone cares about.
2) Care enough to go through the hard work that is writing a book.
You don’t need to “get a publisher.” You don’t need to be chosen. You just need a worthwhile idea, and then to write the damn book.
Learn more about making a living writing at writersshouldntstarve.com, and in my book.
