Interesting title, wouldn’t you say?
Well, it’s kind of a quote…
You see, this weekend I was listening to Mike Shreeve talk about his seven-figure-a-year fiction business, and at one stage he said that fiction is about ‘making stuff up’, and that authors basically ‘get paid to lie’.
Now there’s an interesting thought.
Mike is not just an author; he runs several businesses including a marketing agency which now gives all of its profits to charity.
He has worked as a copywriter for many years and is now at the stage where he can retire from copywriting and allow his businesses to run themselves while he focuses on his fiction writing.
What I found interesting was when he compared his fiction business with his marketing and internet marketing businesses.
The main differences were:
- Fiction books make far less profit per product than internet marketing courses due to the different nature of the products.
- There can be more work involved creating a fiction book than a short marketing course.
However…
- It costs far less to market fiction books meaning that he can break even quicker with his customer acquisition funnels.
- He can grow a larger email list with his fiction books.
- People are more willing to buy fiction books than they are marketing products and courses so they are far easier to sell.
Over the last ten years he has had eleven different pen names writing in different genres. He has retired most of them and now focuses only on three specific pen names.
Each pen name has an email list of its own.
He said that his goal for the rest of the year is to grow his email lists to one million people. Apparently he is not far off from achieving that.
Starting 2024 with one million people on an email list would be a fantastic position to be in.
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The reason people are more willing to buy fiction books is that for the most part, the majority of the population want to be entertained and are not necessarily looking to learn new skills.
When they enjoy being entertained and enjoy a specific book, they want to carry on with that enjoyment and so they happily choose to buy more.
There is very little resistance to buying a book they know that they are probably going to enjoy.
Humans want more of the ‘good stuff’.
They enjoy enjoyment.
Plus, the price point is a lot more affordable.
I don’t know how much he charges for his books, but people are more willing to gamble £5 or £10 on a fiction book. It’s not a lot to lose if they don’t enjoy it.
One of his most recent marketing courses was priced at $295 (£232.53 ATOW).
That is a big price difference to a book that may cost as little as £5. It’s also one of his cheaper products.
A member of our team has probably spent close to £2,000 buying several of his courses over the last five years.
He has learned a lot and it has helped advance his career – you can never put a price on education – but it is a hell of a lot compared to what an avid fiction reader spends.
Readers can buy ten fiction books and still not be anywhere close to the cost of one of his cheapest priced marketing products.
The big difference between fiction books and educational information products, apart from the price, is that there is a greater pool of people to sell to.
That is one of the reasons fiction is cheaper than educational books.
200 people may happily buy a £295 information product making £59,000 in sales
But bestselling books can be bought by tens of thousands… hundreds of thousands… and even millions of people.
Just ask JK Rowling and James Patterson.
To make £59,000 selling a £5 fiction book you would need 11,800 customers.
That’s 11,600 more customers needed than the £295 information product… but a fiction book could still be selling for many years making far more money in the long run, just like the books by Roald Dhal and RL Stine.
To be making seven figures a year, you will be making over £83,333 per month.
You need to be selling a lot of books to do that… but as we know, people love to read and they love to buy books.
Mike has books that are still earning him over £500 a month each which are eight or ten years old that he is no longer marketing.
At the time of writing them, he was making thousands from those books each month.
Yet all these years later, they are still earning him money.
Had he stopped writing five years ago, he would still be earning a passive income each month that paid more than what most working people earn working 160 hours.
He sells his books on as many platforms as possible including his own where he can make more profit.
Mike has around 70 or 80 books online, I believe.
Now, if that sounds like a lot of hard work, you can always create information eBooks that you can sell from your own website for prices between £47 and £197.
You don’t need to make or sell so many to make a decent monthly income.
We have several books that have fewer than 20 pages that sell for £97.
You only need to sell a few of those each month to be making an amount of money that is going to take the sting out of the current increases to living costs.
Ten sales of eBooks priced at £97 would give you a rather decent £997 a month, would you say no to that?
To be honest… just one sale at £97 would be a nice bonus for most people.
It is quite easy to create a short information product that you can charge £97 for.
You can have a complete fully automated passive income system up and running within 30 days…
Once you have one set up… make another… and another.
The more you have (you shouldn’t need 70 or 80 like Mike’s fiction books) the more money you can make.
If you have ten eBooks all priced at £97 and you sell just one copy of each book each month… that is a rather decent £997 in passive income each month.
Discover more here:
The 30 Day To £30K Challenge
Kind regards.
John Harrison.
PS… You can create and publish your own eBook within 30 days and have a passive income asset online for many years.
There is no number to how many eBooks you can publish.
Here’s that link again: