Recently I shared with you a couple of pictures Indiana Jones, my charity shop treasure hunting friend sent me.
Well he has been at it again.
I received two more pictures after another weekend trawling through the junk jungle.
For some reason he yet again thought that being a publisher, I would like to see a collection of books on a shelf.
I’m not sure why he seems to think that I would be interested but there you go… it keeps him amused at least.
However…
These two photos had me thinking.
Maybe that is why he sends me these photos; he knows that they get the old grey matter working.
In these photos you can clearly see that someone has donated a stack of books by the late author Nevil Shute.
No, I hadn’t heard of him either.
I Google his name to find that Nevil Shute Norway, born 1899, was an English novelist and aeronautical engineer who emigrated to Australia and died there in 1960.
His Wikipedia page makes interesting reading. He had quite a full and interesting life.
As an engineer he worked on ‘secret’ weapons for the military during the Second World War, and as a writer he was sent to the Normandy beaches by the Ministry of Information to record the landings.
He also spent some time in British occupied Burma as a correspondent.
His Wikipedia had this to say about his style of writing; ‘Shute’s novels are written in a simple, highly readable style, with clearly delineated plot lines’.
Apparently Shute was one of the world’s most popular author’s in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
I never knew that.
A couple of his books were adapted for television and, this bit I find interesting, his last book was published 42 years after his death and all 23 of his books were republished in 2009.
Okay, so I know what you are thinking, why am I am telling you the fascinating story of Nevil ‘the author I’ve never heard of’ Shute?
Nevil enjoyed success as an author writing simple, highly readable and clearly delineated stories.
He was earning money from 23 published books… well 22, number 23 was published 42 years after he died.
Those books were republished nearly 50 years after he died so that a new audience could enjoy them.
This is what we call an evergreen passive income.
Books can be enjoyed and read for many years after they were first published.
Yes, popularity can wane after many years and sales of specific books may not be in the same numbers as enjoyed when the book was first published.
Authors who were household names in say the 1960’s may not be as well known today but that doesn’t mean that people will not want to read their books.
Times have changed greatly since Nevil Shute personally enjoyed his success.
He had to have his books published and distributed around the world by a publishing house and had to wait months before he was paid his small royalty share of the book sales profits.
Today, anyone can write and publish a book.
Thanks to the digital age, companies like Amazon will list and sell your book as an eBook, they will also print it as a physical copy and send it out to the buyer on your behalf and through their Audible platform they will sell your book as an audio book if you have it read out and made into an audio file.
Writing a book is far easy today than it has ever been. You can write it yourself or you can pay someone to write it for you.
All the tools, people and services that you require are there for you to use.
Today is the greatest time ever to make money from home using the written word.
If you are not into writing and publishing educational or training products like we do here at Streetwise, then writing fiction maybe for you… after all, it can’t really be hard because you are basically making it up.
Think about these popular fictional stories for a minute…
- Harry Potter – Wizards, witches, strange creatures, strange powers, strange broomstick game.
- Alien – Future humans in space fighting nasty acid bleeding alien.
- Lord Of The Rings – Hobbits, wizards, witches, and all kinds of creatures fighting.
- Armageddon – Astronaughts prevent a meteor from destroying Earth by planting nuclear bombs on it.
- Moonraker – James Bond using laser guns to stop a megalomaniac from committing mass genocide from a space station.
- You Only Live Twice – James Bond fighting people stealing spacecraft from space.
- Superman – Alien comes to Earth and develops superpowers and battles crime.
- Batman – Billionaire with exclusive technology fighting bizarre and nutty criminals.
- War Of The Worlds – Alien invasion from Mars that took years to start.
- Return Of The Living Dead – Zombies… dead people eating alive people turning them into dead people… who are alive… kind of!
- Star Wars – Aliens in a galaxy far, far away battling each other with a few having superpowers.
- Underworld: Rise of the Lycans – Wealthy vampires battle with werewolves while humans battle both.
- Blade – A well disciplined compassionate vampire battles vampires on behalf of humanity.
- Planet Of The Apes – Talking apes and gorillas riding horses carrying guns… what more can I say!
If any of the above had to be written using only known and scientifically proven facts, none of them would have been written.
They are completely made up.
Fact is irrelevant when writing fiction, so how hard can it be to write something which people can enjoy?
Probably not as hard as you think!
A clearly defined set of rules will help to keep a story flowing such as:
1 – All names of films and music are capitalised and in italics.
2 – Only use metric when describing measurement unless it is a specific character talking.
3 – Always use the double quotation marks when people speak and single quotation marks when people are thinking or quoting someone else’s line while speaking.
Etc.
The rest is all made up!
As we saw with Nevil Shute, he was making money from having 22 of his 23 books published while he was alive.
Every book was a separate income stream.
Imagine for a second that at one point in Nevil’s life each book sold 100 copies each per month – I’m sure that it would have been a lot more – and imagine that he was paid the equivalent of £1 per book.
He would have made £2,200 per month from those books.
He would earn money from assets he had produced in the past.
That is more than doable today for nearly anyone.
There are people who you will not of heard of, that generate tens of thousands each month writing and publishing short fiction stories to Amazon Kindle each month.
In the article below (Click the link to read), you will see how one author took an old and outdated form of publication and turned it into a six figure a year business.
How One Man Generated $746,256.61 Using An Outdated Business Model
The article is based on when he first started writing and publishing fiction.
Today he is generating close to a million each year with his books, as well as making over a million with his other businesses.
What’s more… this man was once homeless and living in a tent and he learned how to make money writing by borrowing the computers at his local library, so if you think that you cannot do it, think again… anything and everything is possible if you take the time to learn and try.
Go take a read of the article because it is incredibly fascinating.
Who knows, if you challenge yourself to give it a go, you may become another Nevil Shute, making money passively from books written and published once, which sell for many years.
Kind Regards
John Harrison
PS… You don’t need to write the books yourself either. If you have some money spare, you could always outsource the writing to a freelance writer and pay them to write the stories for you. You simply become the publisher and reap the rewards.
Here’s that link again: