Michael saw a webinar with some internet marketing gurus who were talking about all the money they allegedly make with their Kindle empires.
Michael thought he would do the same thing and would have 5 figures a month in passive income in no time.
What the gurus didn’t say in their video training is that they hired cheap ghostwriters from freelance sites who speak English as a second language. These writers were told the gurus needed a “report” on a certain topic, and then slapped a cover on that and put it on Amazon.
Michael wrote his magnum opus, but he took shortcuts like relying on Grammarly.com and not hiring or even asking an actual human being to edit his book for him.
He scoffed at the idea of letting beta readers look at the book before it went to market.
He didn’t even ask his mom to read it for feedback.
He thought he had a “great eye” for catching errors in his text.
To save money, he did his own cover in Corel Paint. “Good enough,” he told himself. “It’s the content that matters, after all!”
Michael also didn’t realize that he wasn’t the only one copying the gurus’ methods, but so were thousands of other people looking for a silver bullet to five figure monthly royalties.
Amazon got saturated with all the trendy fad e-books and dieting cookbooks the gurus were teaching people to create. Michael didn’t realize they were really making all their money on the $997 training webinars that wide-eyed authors were paying big bucks to learn from.
Michael also did absolutely nothing to market his book save for spam all his friends on Facebook and post a link to it in every group he was in.
He couldn’t figure out why he sold very few copies.
He thought Amazon would promote the heck out of his book for Him, because it was just so good, it would sell itself practically.
But with the book’s amateur-looking cover and boring book description, many potential readers skipped over it.
Most readers who did give it a chance didn’t give it a good review, as every page swipe of the Kindle edition had quite a number errors. The flow of thought was incohesive and didn’t make sense to most.
And it was 800,000 words long when it easily could have been 10% that length.
Michael made the typical mistakes a lot of authors make when they self publish, and didn’t know it until it was too late.
Over time Michael grew bitter and disillusioned. He started drinking to numb the pain.
Then one day he missed work.
And then another.
One day he showed up hungover. Another day he showed up late and passed out in his office. He doesn’t remember the fight everybody says he started with Big Mike but felt the migraine and black eye for days.
Eventually his boss had enough and fired him.
Michael lost his home and now couch hops at different friends’ houses and sometimes stays at the local mission.
All this happened because Michael didn’t hire us to help to coach him in the manuscript writing & strategy for his book’s launch and its promotion.
Michael wishes he could go back in time and work with us on his book.
But he can’t.
He had to sell his time machine to buy groceries.
Don’t be like Michael.
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