The year was 2020. Pandemic had hit. Michelle Kulp, a struggling writer, made a bold announcement on social media.
“I am going to write and publish a book a month.”
The day she started her first book, her daughter moved in with a two-year-old child. She had separated from her husband.
“Have you ever imagined writing a book with a toddler in the house,” moaned Michelle.
But Michelle didn’t let that deter her. She was determined to keep her commitment. Just a few months ago, she had read a blog post by Written Word Media that said that an average self-published author who makes $100K has 28 books published.
She immediately thought, “I need to make a $100K with my books! I’m going to write a book a month and create a 6-figure passive income stream SOLELY from my royalties.”
She had published eight books since 2011, but most of them were old. The information was outdated, and she hadn’t been marketing them. So they were dying a slow death.
In 2018, she had spent more than a year writing the second edition of her book, Quit Your Job and Follow Your Dreams. It was earning a few hundred dollars per month, but considering the time she had invested in writing, editing, publishing, and launching that book, the payoff wasn’t huge.
While she was mulling over her decision, she came across a quote by Seth Godin, author of 18 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into over 35 languages. (He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership, and, most of all, changing everything. You might be familiar with his books Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, and Purple Cow. He has also been writing a blog post, every day, for 20+ years and has a collection of over 8000 blog posts at his site.)
Seth Godin wrote:
“One of my books took more than a year to write, ten hours a day. Another took three weeks. Both sell for the same price. The quicker one outsold the other 20 to 1.
A $200 bottle of wine costs almost exactly as much to make as a $35 bottle of wine. The cost of something is largely irrelevant, people are paying attention to its value.
Your customers don’t care what it took for you to make something. They care about what it does for them.”
When Michelle read that quote, she realized she didn’t need to spend months or years working on one book. I needed to write short books.
Since writing and teaching were her passion, she knew I could easily do this. So she embarked on her project.
She built herself a system.
She called it BAM! (Book-a-Month)
She would write a book in the first two weeks of the month, get it edited in the second two weeks, and self-publish it on Amazon.
She started writing a book a week.
She had heard the prolific author’s adage, “Nothing sells your first book better than your second book.”
She found that adage to be true. Each new book she released she included references to her previously published titles, which created new readers for those books.
Volume Boosts Visibility!
Today she has 23 books published and is still counting. She is making a four-figure monthly income and is on target to make a six-figure income.
I read her story from her book 28 Books to $100K: A Guide for Ambitious Authors Who Want to Skyrocket Their Passive Income By Writing a Book a Month.
I have adopted her strategy.
For the last two weeks, I have been working on my next book, Eight Steps to Authorpreneurship. It will be done by the end of this month. Next month I will start another one.
To succeed with this strategy, you need to have a few things in place.
- Write Shorter books. I write 100-page books which are roughly 20,000 words. Kindle has many short book categories. Since time and attention are in short supply, there is a great demand for quicker reads.
- Write Your Book as quickly as possible. I share my process of writing a book in a week in my book How to Write and Publish an eBook in One Week. You can use the same format and extend it to ten days and take the weekend off in between. It is surely doable. I have been doing it since June this year.
- Pick a narrow niche and dominate it. The more books you will write in a narrow category, the more authority you will gain in that field. I write books for authors who what to be entrepreneurs. I target ambitious authors and entrepreneurs who have a strong desire to meet their writing goals.
- Make a schedule for an entire year. Identify 12 titles you want to write, allocating one to each month. You can change them as you go, but knowing them in advance means you will be able to do research in advance, which will make writing a breeze.
- Write each chapter as a Medium post. This way you will write your first draft, test it with the audience and refine it before including it in the book. This article is going to be a chapter in my next book.
Are you intrigued? Are you a game to write a book a month? Write me a note in the comments section and we can buddy up and help each other. It is not a sales pitch. Just a genuine note to meet like-minded aspiring writers.
Photo by Jarek Jordan on Unsplash