With a switch of a button, Amazon can make or kill you.
Today, I share our failures, screw-ups, misfortunes. And how… we … somehow claw back and reinvent ourselves.
Related reading:
- 9 things I learned from Elon Musk
- How to Self-Publish an eBook on Amazon
- Self-Publishing: What is Draft2Digital and Why all the fuss with Publishing wide?
- The 1% Rule: The No-Brainer Secret to making four figure a month in Kindle Publishing
Publishing on Amazon built me a passive income empire.
It got me married, allowed me to pay back my student loan, kick-started my company abroad and it opened doors that were previously locked.
People are sorely mistaken when they think that publishing is hard. It is not.
And if you followed my blogs and email closely, you’ll notice some of my Easter eggs scattered around for you to seek. Seek and you shall find.
You may think it’s all about the money. But all that is just scratching the surface.
Where it really mattered, is something I rarely talk about openly until now…
A) IT TAUGHT ME ABOUT IMPERFECTION
Many people write and write and write for years, publish a handful of books but never sold more than a hundred copies.
Together, me and my wife sold well over a million copies.
The secret lies in execution and imperfection.
Cause you see, I used to be a perfectionist. The standards I set for myself was not always attainable.
It created a ton of misery when things don’t work out as planned.
What I found out later on is that…
Perfection is highly egocentric. The mind likes to play tricks on itself.
It constantly whispers into your ear saying that you’re no good. weak. dumb. ugly.
Instead of feeling insecure, angry and stop writing or publishing; you should do the exact opposite.
Let all that bad ideas fill all the empty pages. Publish and let the crowd decide for you.
Truth is, you will never truly know which is a work of art or which is a dud.
You can only keep trying and let the marketplace decide.
Don’t be the judge, jury and executioner of your writing.
It’s not about 10,000 hours spent on 1 single masterpiece. It’s about the 1,000 works you accomplished in 10,000 hours.
Picasso painted 50,000 works of art during his lifetime. Today, there are but a handful of art that he’s most notable for.
That handful of work that he’d done forged his name to Eternity.
So did Thomas Edison, with his 1,093 patents.
But what is he most famous for? the incandescent light bulb.
You have to play and be willing to destroy your ego in order to learn more about yourself.
Identify your winning play and produce more of them.
This is the same as anything you do in life.
You get a whole lot better at writing and publishing books when you EXECUTE imperfectly!
B) IT TAUGHT ME ABOUT TEMPO
When I first started to write, I was slow. I improved my skill quickly but still lack much-needed zest.
The pursuit of greatness isn’t always pretty.
No matter what your dream is about, you can be sure that hard work and sacrifice will be part of your repertoire.
But sometimes, bluntly putting in the hard work isn’t enough.
You will likely need to learn how to flow with the trends and get a feel of the marketplace.
Know when to light the fire. Pour in the fuel if necessary to fan the flames of your productivity.
Ask yourself this question: What is the price you’d pay for selling a thousand copies of your book in a month.
The punishment is a reward in itself.
You have to be cruel to yourself to be kind.
Be Aggressive!!! Imperfect action is always better than perfect inaction.
Draw in the relentless energy and dominate your niche no matter the price.
C) IT TAUGHT ME ABOUT CARELESSNESS
Valued at $1 trillion, Amazon is one of the most powerful companies in the world.
They employ over half a million people full time excluding the sellers and self-publishers who are in the millions.
Today, Amazon is more than just books. They do more than just retail. Much more.
Amazon publishes books, comics, TV shows, movies, build wind farms & robots, rockets, medicine.
Yeah. Pretty much anything under the sun.
Amazon is an empire that Turned Cannibalistic on its Authors.
They’re the sole monopoly, the beast in information.
They have an unfair advantage that will see them swallow the competition. Destroy new and innovative industries.
Sure they may grant us special privileges for a piggyback ride. But that comes at a cost.
Interview thousands of sellers and publishers and you will find that their Amazon sales account for more than 50% of their revenue.
It allowed many to quit their full-time jobs. Buy a house and a car. Go on a month long vacation.
But once their income start pulling some weight over their livelihoods, they began to fear.
Fear over Amazon’s whims and fancies.
Their emails are LAW!
Thousands of authors and publishers got banned for no reason.
Most just get an email telling them that their account is terminated with immediate effect.
There’s no due process, no appeal, zero transparency, no defense, no means of recourse, nothing…
One Amazon seller describes his situation as an “indentured servant.”
Amazon used to be David, challenging monopolies. Today, they’re the Goliath.
But once you grow big, you become careless.
Carelessness leads to death.
D) IT TAUGHT ME ABOUT PEOPLE
People today operate at a level of mystique. They don’t like any easy answers. They want the challenging ones.
People always feel that I’m hiding some secret formula from them. Some secret sauce.
They want to learn my secret. But my secret lies in plain sight.
This obsession of trying to figure out something that isn’t really there is mental torment.
Our minds hate simplicity. They create these mental gymnastics to justify what is otherwise unjustifiable.
All you need to do to spare your emotional distress is to keep things simple and put in the long hard work.
Publishing, writing and blogging are where you have to play long-term games.
Long-term players make themselves rich. Short-term players blow themselves in the foot looking for get rich quick schemes.
All returns in life come from compounded interest. The fruits of your labor usually come at the end.
E) IT TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS
Publishing taught me the art of bootstrapping my business out of nothing.
I learned how to reinvest And Scale Up my publishing business. The simple beauty of compound growth.
It’s easy to start making some money and go spend it all up on new cars, watches and clothes.
But ultimately the more you reinvest your profits and pour resources into a model you know that already works – the faster you’ll get to join the millionaire’s club.
This takes discipline. This is how the rich become richer.
I used to be proud & afraid of being misunderstood. But once I overcome that mental barrier
I discovered that the willingness to fail – is the language of entrepreneurship.
By ramping up my rate of experimentation, I was actually publishing a lot of crap that readers don’t care about. But every now and then, I’d discover something amazing.
If you want to do a lot of that, you basically have to increase your rate of experimentation.
When you’re one with the process – you learn the language of business.
How do you go about organizing your life and how you spend all that free time dedicated to increasing your rate of experimentation?
That’s for you to find out for yourself.
F) IT TAUGHT ME ABOUT FOCUS
Everyone thinks authors are smart. That’s a myth.
Authors are not much smarter than you are. They are just much more FOCUSED.
I used to be afraid of saying “No”
Saying “No” could mean hurting someone I love. Or it could mean turning down an opportunity?
Remember that movie “Yes Man!”, Jim Carrey said yes to everything and everyone and that ended up creating lots of opportunities for himself, but at the expense of meaning.
If you FOCUS on what you’re good at, this will tend to drive the best results for you.
Focusing is about saying “No” – Steve Jobs agrees with me.
Before you start writing a book, write a dozen blog posts every month.
Before you start writing a blog post, craft a thousand tweets each week.
All that is just absolute focus on doing the one thing that matters most. Your writing.
When you’re publishing a book, don’t do a couple of things at the same time—focus your energy on writing, master it, then move on to formatting, then cover, then marketing, etc. If you’re a new writer looking to publish your first book—look at your strength, your experience and find what’s working on Amazon and what isn’t.
Research has proven that multi-tasking, can often lead to inactivity. Paralysis by analysis
G) IT TAUGHT ME ABOUT FREEDOM
“Don’t quit your day job!”
That’s what they all used to tell me.
All the smart ones tend to end up getting shackled to their jobs, houses and cars.
What is the price you put on your freedom?
Is it $100,000, 200,000, $1 million, $10 million?
People find it difficult to leave their artificial islands.
They couldn’t abandon the safety and comfort of their beautiful homes.
So many people go by life accumulating more and more things – objects, not easily transportable, that tied them down.
Our evolutionary success is meaningless without freedom.
We’ve been lied to by society, governments, our families and friends.
A job gives you money in return for your freedom.
It’s the price you have to pay for all your unhappiness.
When you decide that you have a pay-grade to observe, what you’re really saying is that you have a price for your absolute obedience.
“Take this money, start a family, buy a house and a car and settle down. Work for us and be loyal and we’ll consider improving your pay-grade next year.”
Did you account for inflation? Are you sure it’s going to be enough for you to retire and upkeep your lifestyle? Can you resist that temptation of upgrading to that new iPhone or changing to the latest BMW?
Do you know that governments have a monopoly on the money you earn?
They can inject and supply the economy with trillions of artificial dollars and buy assets that generate more money for them.
Praet: As a central bank, we can create money to buy assets #AskECB https://t.co/zTQuU4y1ch
— European Central Bank (@ecb) March 12, 2019
While everyone else, gets to trade their limited time for money printed out of thin air.
It’s an elaborate ponzi scheme and you get to work until you’re 65 and still not have enough money to retire.
Sure, you can always invest your money.
Can you expect a farmer or a teacher to learn the intricacies of investing and get good returns on their hard-earned money? I’m not entirely sure.
People aren’t supposed to need to learn how to invest like Wall Street money men or like that sneaky old grandpa, Warren Buffett .
People want to work hard and make enough money so that they preserve their wealth and retire happy.
Inflation is stealing our wealth from right under everyone’s noses.
Hey! I get. The money is important. You need it now. But…
The fake money is also there to bribe and tempt you from living the life you’ve always wanted.
I’ve been there. I’ve been scarred. I’ve been through the pain and adversity you can only imagine at the surface.
I quit my profession. My career.
I was optimistic in the beginning, reality sets in, but persevere and the rewards are blissful in the end.
I never ever looked back.
Are You Interested in Publishing Books on Amazon?
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